ENGL 265 White Women: Constructing Race and Gender in Multiethnic American Literature
This course examines the historical construction of the “white woman” and her non-white counterparts through American literature, visual art, and film. Combining literary analysis with tools from scholars of gender and sexuality, we will trace how notions of womanhood in the US have been formed through social and institutional associations of race and sexuality. We will follow these notions as they develop in a set of linked narratives that depict women’s self-indigenizing within a settler colonial context, southern anxieties over endangered white womanhood, and cross-racial identification as a (haphazard) strategy for solidarity. In our final unit, we will examine works of contemporary writing and film that propose the possibility of a “white girl” who is not necessarily a girl and not necessarily white. The syllabus includes texts by Zitkala-Sa, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, Edith Wharton, Nella Larsen, Flannery O’Connor, Cherrie Moraga, Hilton Als, Sigrid Nunez, and Alexander Chee, along with visual art (Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper) & film (Kill Bill). Major requirement met: Group III or Group IV
Credits
3 hours of class meeting per week, plus 9 hours of reading, research, preparation and writing for week, for a total of 12 hours per week, with a total of 180 total hours of student work.