GNDR-G 104 INTO THE WILD: THE INTERSECTION OF GENDER AND NATURE
Summer Session II.
The course counts as an arts and humanities and is suitable for any undergraduate.
The instructor has provided this description:
Gender is more than just a label we use to categorize people. It often goes unnoticed that the language of gender is applied to a number of other concepts as well, such as nature. The first part of this course will interrogate how and why nature has been conceptualized as female or feminine, specifically within the contexts of Western science and nation building/colonization. We will examine not only the process of gendering nature but also some of the consequences of this conceptualization. The second part of this course will focus on women's nature writing, ecofeminism, and the environmental justice movement (with particular attention paid to the ways in which these practices can make visible submerged discourses of race, class, location, and embodiment that are also embedded in Western conceptualizations of nature), as examples of the ways in which women and feminists have appropriated, revalued, and deconstructed the metaphorical conflation of woman and nature. We will also examine ecoterrorism and connections between masculinity and nature.
Course work will consist of short reading responses or quizzes and short writing assignments addressing either in class texts or popular culture such as advertisements, newspaper articles, etc.
