230005 Theorizing Gender: Caribbean Women Writers, Crossing Borders/Crossing Boundaries (S) (SoSe 2014)

Gender is one of the chief axes along which inequalities of power are organized. As a principle of classifying human beings, gender is a universal, all-pervasive characteristic of society. The concept denotes both the knowledge of sexual difference and the social organization of that difference. This course will approach the variable gender from the perspective of literary studies and scrutinize the ways Caribbean women writers have theorized this axis of power as it emerges in their fictional and theoretical writing.

“In the twentieth-century development of capitalism,” theorist Patricia Mohammed reminds us, “the Caribbean is no longer the site of plantations but the space from which labour can be reappropriated. The Mer des Caraibes is not, nor was it ever, a sea. It is a wide open-mouthed river with currents which run back and forth across the Atlantic, to Africa and Europe, far east to India and China, and now especially northwards to the United States and Canada.” Theorizing gender approaches a range of texts by women writers of different races and ethnicities from the “wide open-mouthed river,” called the Caribbean, to explore the ways they have re-imagined female agency in spite of adverse conditions, engaged the dangers women face when they invest in ‘the national project’, addressed negative representations of womanhood, and responded to personal, national, and global pressures. Finally, the seminar will examine the questions these writers raise about sexuality, masculinity, family, resistance, and agency in a globalized world.

Students taking this course are strongly encouraged to enroll in at least one further course from the cluster ‘theorizing gender’ from a linguistic, literary, or cultural studies perspective.