GWSS 290A: Special Topics in Women Studies: Black Foodways
Course description: While there is scholarly work that focuses on food justice issues, this course
attends to those materials that are specifically engaging with discourses of race, gender and sexuality—that center the experiences of Black women and queer people, and that frame their work using Black feminist theories and methods. What Black feminist strategies re-organize the food geographies of our environment? How can the tools and frameworks of Black feminism help us interact with food differently? With restaurants? With grocery stores? With the land? How can mapping Black foodways change our experiences of the city we reside in? This course will examine the origins and practices of Black foodways in the United States using texts through academic and nonacademic writers. We will critically interrogate food as a sociocultural medium and a signifier of personal identity while exploring the often overlooked contributions of Black people to the current American culinary landscape.
Instructor: Keila Taylor
I&S
M/W 1:30-3:20
GWSS 390B: Intermediate Topics: Black Feminist Thought
Course description: In order to understand the growing body of scholarship that is Black feminist theory, we will analyze the development of US Black women's feminist consciousness from the mid-19th century to the present through essays, speeches, and creative work that has named the complex systems of power which affect the lives of Black women on the primary intersections of race, gender and class. We will examine closely the important contributions of Black feminist thought to the fields of African American and Africana studies and women's and gender studies through concepts developed by Black feminist scholars such as intersectionality.
Instructor: Bettina Judd
I&S, DIV
T/Th 10:30-12:20
GWSS 390C: Intermediate Topics: Feminist Social Reproduction Theory and Radical Politics of Care
Course description: Social reproduction theory works to excavate forms of unwaged labor that are required to sustain waged labor. This course works to trace the ways in forms of labor have been conceptualized by reading major works of theorists such as Silvia Federici, paying close attention to the ways in which social reproduction is in conversation with critiques of neocolonialism, globalization, and the “crisis of care.” The course will then turn to radical queer thinkers who are conceptualizing the current production of “essential workers” by the state as emerging alongside ever-growing mutual aid projects and the reconceptualizing of care work.
Instructor: Jey Saung
I&S,DIV
T/Th 2:30-4:20