Political Science: Gender and Political Theory

Intermediate courses on topics in political theory beyond the scope of existing departmental offerings. May be repeated for credit with different content. Topics vary by offering; periodic offering at intervals that may exceed four years. Prerequisite: POLS 1012 or POLS 1200.

Prerequisites: POLS 1200 or POLS 1012; three hours of Political Science at the 2000 level. Minimum sophomore standing. PACE students with permission and override.

This course offers a broad survey of feminist political theory, tracing its key contributions to political theory scholarship from the Enlightenment to the present. The course is structured around the following modules: (1) Women in the Republic explores how figures such as Mary Wollstonecraft critiqued the logical contradictions of their male contemporaries, who excluded women from the Enlightenment ideals of self-government. (2) On the Distinction of Public and Private examines various early feminist arguments [liberal and Marxist] that women’s liberty and equality require challenging the presumed separation between the personal and the political. (3) Critiquing Reason and Independence analyzes feminist reconstructions of reason, highlighting alternative frameworks that emphasize the affective, interdependent, and embodied dimensions of agency and selfhood. (4) Radical Feminism introduces radical feminist critiques of heteronormativity, pornography, sexual violence, and abortion, and explains how these critiques frame the patriarchal control of female sexuality as the most fundamental form of structural oppression. (5) Questioning the Category of “Woman” presents intersectional, postcolonial and postmodern perspectives on gender and sexuality, challenging the possibility and desirability of defining “women” as a unified category in light of their differences across race, culture, nationality, and sexuality. (6) Building Feminist Solidarity in Difference examines ways of conceptualizing a theoretical framework that is accountable to the disparate voices discussed throughout the semester and aims to achieve global feminist solidarity in difference.