ANTH515: SEX, LOVE AND GLOBALIZATION 

Tuesdays 3 to 5:50  
Martin Manalanson

“What’s love got to do with it (I mean globalization)?” 

Escalating global flows of people, ideas and technology unravel banal notions such as sex and love as these movements defy the paradoxical juxtaposition of the “intimate and the proximate.” To think sex and love in the 21 st century demands an understanding of globalization. 

In this course, we will examine how discourses on love and sex travel. That is, how they encounter, confront and negotiate the logics of the capitalist market, the discrepant narratives of modernity, and the gripping reality of desire. We will be concerned with the various ways the cultural artifacts of intimacy are rendered, fetishized and reified in various geographical and virtual sites. Utilizing multiple genres – including theoretical works from Plato to Kipnis and recent ethnographies, we will navigate the treacherous relationship between sex and emotions –specifically love, and their articulations in global realities such as emerging internet cultures, sex work, development programs, migration, political/social movements, pornography, and debates around marriage.

Course requirements: weekly reading notes, 15-20 page research paper, seminar participation and presentation.

  

Tentative reading list: 

• Anthony Giddens. The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies. 
• Denise Brennan. What’s Love got to do with it? Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic.
• Elizabeth Bernstein and Lauri Schaffner. Regulating Sex: The Politics of Intimacy and Identity. 
• L.A. Rebhun. The Heart is Unknown Country: Love in the Changing Economy of Northeast Brazil. 
•  Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper and Francesca Polletta. Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements 
•  Ara Wilson. The Intimate Economies of Bangkok: Tomboys, Tycoons and Avon Ladies in the Global City 
• Laura Ahearn. Invitations to Love: Literacy, Love Letters, and Social Change in Nepal 
•  Nicole Constable. Romance on a Global Stage: Pen Pals, Virtual Ethnography, and “Mail Order” Marriages. 
• Mark D. Jordan. Blessing Same-Sex Unions: The Perils of Queer Romance and the Confusions of Christian Marriage. 
•  C.D.C. Reeve. Love’s Confusions. 
• Laura Kipnis. Against Love: A Polemic 
•  Arlie Hochschild. The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work
• Ulrick Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim. The Normal Chaos of Love.

 

 

ANTH515P: THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF RACE, THE RACE OF ANTHROPOLOGY (4HRS)

Professor Marc Perry Office: 393 Davenport Hall PH: 244-6491 

mdp@uiuc.edu   

The goals of this graduate seminar are two-fold. The first pertains to a critical examination of the ways in which “race” has been historically theorized in anthropological discourse. Here the work of Franz Boas and his followers among others will be explored with regard to the relational configurings of “race” and “culture” so foundational to the discipline of anthropology. Secondly, this seminar will examine the limitations and problematics of such framings as well those of later formulations predicated on a “race/culture” tension such as more recent “culture of poverty” theses, “color-blind” discourses, and anthropologically-sanctioned “no-race” postures. This seminar will then both critically excavate anthropological conceptualizations of race and provide race-centered critiques of the discipline of anthropology. In recognizing how these discussions transcend the disciplinary boundaries of anthropology, we will explore how these issues resonate within broader fields public discourse.

 

 

ANTH550: Anthropology of Gender

Karen Kelsky

This semester's class will focus on post-Butlerian gender theory and queer theory with ethnographic examples. (More information might be coming soon.) 

 

 

COMM590 Section A: International Communications

Professor Angharad N. Valdivia

This seminar engages the literature on international communications dating back to the post World War II period. We begin with looking at Rostow, Lerner, and Schramm as canonical contributors to the literature. We continue by exploring challenges to the dominant modernization paradigm, especially those from Latin America—what is now known as “Dependency” approach-- and subsequent theories such as cultural imperialism. We proceed through many of the pivotal moments in international communications literature, such as “Dallas” as a signifier of both a return to the mainstream and the incorporation of the audience in a global setting. The course also takes us through the global trends of liberalization and privatization and theories of globalization, postcoloniality, and transnationalism. Throughout the semester the material will be examined with attention to issues of gender, ethnicity, and class as they relate to issues of international communications. 

 

 

CWL 561: Memory and Landscape

Thursday 1-3:50
Professor Brett Kaplan, bakaplan@uiuc.edu

What is the relationship between memory and landscape? How do landscapes exercise an influence on us? What are the limits of landscapes when the word now applies to urban landscapes, media landscapes, political landscapes, and more? Are there still sacred landscapes? Can landscapes be said to be gendered? This course will address these and other questions by studying landscapes in their different forms. Moving through seminars on power, memory, photography and fiction, landscape architecture, symbolism, gender, painting, urbanity, sacred space, and cemeteries, this course will explore the complex intersections of memory and landscape. I hope that students from diverse departments will participate in the seminar and I welcome suggestions for material/media to look at together; if you are thinking about taking the course, please email me your ideas. 

 

 

ENGL537: Victorian Internationalism

Lauren Goodlad  

Victorianists (among others) have begun to recognize literary texts and other nineteenth-century cultural materials as sites of transnational encounter. Scholars of the period have moved beyond the limitations of a strictly “British” framework to consider the various border-crossing dynamics of empire, trade, immigration, and diaspora. Such innovative critical projects must, however, be attentive to Victorian conceptions of nationalism, internationalism and cosmopolitanism as well as to the historical relation between nineteenth-century liberal imperialism and the globalized modernity of our own day. This seminar will approach these topics from the vantage of four key border-crossing imaginaries: tropicalization, inter-nationalism, imperial encounter, and cosmopolitanism. We will read six groundbreaking Victorian novels: Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Villette, Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White and The Moonstone, Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds, and George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda. The accompanying critical readings, drawn from various disciplines, aim to exemplify how the work of literary and cultural historicization bears on current understandings nationalism, internationalism, sovereignty, transnationalism, post-nationalism, post-coloniality, and alternative modernities. Key readings include selections from Amanda Anderson, Benedict Anderson, Arjun Appadurai, Srinivas Aravamudan, Tim Brennan, Jim Buzard, Paul Gilroy, Catherine Hall, Neil Lazarus, Sharon Marcus, and Bruce Robbins. Robbins, who will be visiting our campus as a Mellon Distinguished Fellow in Spring 2006, will be a guest participant at one or two of our meetings. 

Book Order:

• Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre ( Oxford: 0192839659)
• Charlotte Bronte, Villette ( Oxford: 0192839640)
• Wilkie Collins, Woman in White ( Oxford: 0192834290)
• Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (Penguin: 0140434089)
• Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds ( Oxford: 0192834665)
• George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (Penguin: 0140434275)

 

 

GWS 590 EM: Topics in Gender and Women’s Studies

Topic: The History of 20th Century Black Women’s Activism
Same as HIST 572

McDuffie CRN 41599 W 2-4:50

This is a readings class in the history of twentieth century African American women’s activism and their involvement in social movements. We are concerned with appreciating their critical roles in building, sustaining, and leading all-Black organizations such as the Women’s Auxiliary of the National Baptist Convention, National Association of Colored Women, Universal Negro Improvement Association, Black Panther Party, National Black Feminist Organization, and Combahee River Collective as well as interracial organizations like the Communist Party, USA and Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. This class will be grounded in social movement and Black feminist theory. We will analyze how Black women activists formulated Black feminist, transnational, diasporic frameworks to understand the global nature of racism, economic inequalities, sexism, and in some cases homophobia. We will examine how gender, race, class, sexuality, femininity, masculinity, age, and culture have structured social movements and positioned black women and men within them. In addition, we will focus on how black women’s activists have grappled with black nationalist discourses, which have often narrowly defined the struggle for black liberation in masculinist terms. We will also examine the transformative effects of activism on Black women’s subjectivities. Interdisciplinary in approach, we will use the latest scholarship from the fields of History, Women’s Studies, Sociology, and Political Science as well as memoir and fiction to explore these issues. Students will be required to write an interpretative essay as their final project. If successful, this class should be very useful for students interested in researching and teaching in the fields of Black Women’s Studies, African American History, and African Diaspora Studies.

 

 

HIST502A: PROB IN COMPARATIVE HISTORY (Millward)

Topic: Gender and Slavery 

This course introduces graduate students to the historiography of African chattel slavery in the New World. With a critical eye to studies on women and gender, we will draw from readings on slavery in the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States. We will focus on both classic and more recent trends in the study of slavery. Topics to be explored include: accommodation and resistance, cultural retention and adaptability, health and healing, the slave market, slavery and the law, sexual exploitation and violence, as well as the formation of family and kinship networks. Students with a research interest in African American history, the American South and Gender and Women’s studies are encouraged to enroll. 

 

 

HIST503A: PROB IN COMPARATIVE WOMEN’S HIST ( Burton, A.)

Same as GWS 501

This course provides a thematic overview of the intellectual questions, methodological challenges and historiographical innovations that arise when gender as a category of historical analysis is brought to bear on colonialism as a world-historical phenomenon. Among the subjects under consideration are the civilizing mission; the subaltern subject; conjugality; the materialities of culture; newly imagined geographies of sex and race; the fate of the nation/state; and the limits of the discipline of History itself.

 

 

HIST504A: SEMINAR IN HISTORY OF SCIENCE (Micale)

Topic: Science, Medicine and Gender in Europe and America

In the old and new worlds alike, scientific and medical intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were massively preoccupied with the nature of masculinity and femininity. Their richlyvaried attempts to describe, classify, and theorize gender took place in one area of disciplinary inquiry after another, including sociology, clinical psychiatry, evolutionary biology, crowd psychology, criminology anthropology, sexology, forensic medicine, reproductive physiology, and psychoanalysis.
This course investigates a series of the "new sciences" of gender from the fin-de-siecle and aube-de-siecle generations. Authors include Darwin, Ellis, Freud, Krafft-Ebing, Lombroso, Nordau, LeBon, Steinach, and Weininger, as well as a selection of the best historical scholarship on science, medicine, and gender 

 

 

HIST591: Theorizing History, Historicizing Theory 

Thursdays 1-3 
David Prochaska 

     Any good work of history arguably raises the question of what history is all about: what is it that historians do when they “do” history? We can agree that after reading and researching, historians write up their results, they present their results in a narrative format, that is, they construct a narrative. But where do these narrative constructs come from? In this course we will plot a cognitive map of history and interpretive communities; together we will construct a genealogy of historical studies today by successively inquiring into the intellectual and political fields in which historians practice their craft. Topics include Marxism in theory and practice, Weber in theory and practice, the now old ‘new’ social history and the French Annales school, Geertz and interpretive anthropology, the now middle-aged ‘new’ cultural history, Foucault and poststructuralism, women and gender, history after the ‘linguistic turn,’ postcolonial studies, and history and postmodernism. 

 

 

PHIL 441: Existential Philosophy

William Schroeder

We will look at some of the founding texts and thinkers in the existentialist tradition: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre. The central theme of the course will be authenticity: its nature, value, and the best means of achieving it. The major figures have very different conceptions of this central ideal, and we will examine these differences, think them through, and try to resolve them. We will also look at some recent theorists that provide perspective on the topic and examine its current importance. We will try to determine whether we should regard authenticity as a viable ideal today. 

Texts: Kierkegaard, The Present Age; Nietzsche: Untimely Meditations; Heidegger, Being and Time; Sartre, Being and Nothingness and Notebooks for an Ethic; Guignon, On Authenticity; Bergmann, On Being Free; Taylor, Ethics of Authenticity. 

Course requirements: midterm, final, and term paper. 

 

 

PHIL 444: Human Reality Reconsidered: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and "Philosophical Anthropology"

R. Schacht

Nietzsche argued that, in the aftermath of what he called "the death of God" and the demise of metaphysics, and in view of the limitations of the sciences, it was not only necessary but also of great importance to undertake a radical de-deifying, post-metaphysical and supra-scientific philosophical reinterpretation of human reality. Heidegger strongly agreed, and set about to do likewise, in a way that gave rise to what came to be known as "Existenz-philosophy," or the philosophy of (human) "existing." But so also did a group of thinkers who took a quite different tack than Heidegger did in Being and Time, and who embraced and promoted the idea of a "philosophical anthropology." In this course we will consider Heidegger's existential-phenomenological analysis of human reality, the treatments of human reality by the leading figures associated with the "philosophical-anthropological" alternative to it (Arnold Gehlen and Helmuth Plessner in particular), and the relation of Nietzsche's thinking on the matter to both. We will begin with Nietzsche. We then will spend the rest of the first half of the course on Heidegger's Being and Time, with a concluding glance at his later "Letter on Humanism." In the second half of the course we will look briefly at Max Scheler's Man's Place in Nature, then will spend most of the rest of the semester (roughly equally) on Gehlen's and Plessner's contrasting versions of a philosophical anthropology, and will conclude by looking at Ernst Cassirer's An Essay on Man. 

Texts: Nietzsche: Selections (Prentice Hall), Heidegger's Being and Time (HarperSanFrancisco version preferred), and a course pack. 

Requirements: several short papers, a longer paper, and a final (essay) examination. Prerequisites: some previous courses in philosophy, preferably including the history of early modern philosophy (Descartes to Kant), and some acquaintance with the history of modern philosophy after Kant. 

 

 

SOC596-API: New Perspectives in science and technology studies 

instructor: andrew pickering 
 meets: tu th 

We live in a technoscientific world, a world that takes its character from the many sciences and technologies that permeate it. New reproductive technologies, for example, problematise the nature of family relationships in ways that were unimaginable until a few years ago. New media have transformed our habits and patterns of communication—the chatter of cell-phones is everywhere; email has become indispensible. How should we think about this? One way would be to think of science and technology as externalities to the social world—as something given, to which people necessarily have to adapt. But this is misleading and there is a more interesting way to proceed. The field of science and technology studies (STS) explores the intertwining in practice of developments in science, technology and society, and this course surveys some of the most interesting recent empirical and theoretical writings by leading STS scholars. The aim is to offer some conceptual resources for thinking about what is happening today—in the scientific laboratory and in the world at large. 

The course is organised as a seminar, focussed on open-ended discussion of assigned readings and current events, seeking to relate the two. Most of the readings will be individual essays made available over the web, but we will discuss two books in their entirety: Bruno Latour’s Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (2004) and Donna Haraway’s Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (2003). 

Instructor : Andrew Pickering is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and a member of the faculty of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. He is the author of Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics (1984) and The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science (1995), and the editor of an important collection of essays, Science as Practice and Culture (1992). He is currently completing a book on the history of cybernetics, provisionally entitled Ontological Theatre: The Cybernetic Brain in Britain, 1940-2000. Pickering has held major fellowships at MIT, Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He has also been a Guggenheim fellow, and in 2006-7 he will be a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.

 

 

SPCM538: The Rhetorics of Social Justice

Stephen Hartnett 
2:00-5:00, Tuesdays

These are dangerous, heartbreaking days. Terrorists slaughter innocents, storms and government incompetence wash away cities and even regions, imperial invaders level countries in the name of democracy; and lurking beneath these spectacular stories, the most deadly killers of all—dirty water, lack of food, and diseases easily prevented—relentlessly drag millions of innocents to premature deaths. While the U.S. government prosecutes its bungled war on terrorism abroad, the drug war—budgeted at over $20 billion this year—rolls on at home, leading to over-crowded prisons, the militarization of police forces, and the undermining of democratic checks-and-balances. The president chirps about economic justice in the form of foreign aid, yet U.S. agricultural tariffs alone produce profits roughly six times the amount the U.S. gives to developing countries in aid each year. Terrorism, war, imperialism, economic colonialism, health catastrophes, natural disasters, environmental degradation—on and on it goes in a terrible catalogue of suffering. . . and where are the academics? How many articles in leading academic journals tackle these topics? Isn’t our collective silence on the most pressing issues of the day embarrassing, even shameful? Isn’t it time for all of us to rethink what we do, how we do it, who we do it for, and why we do it? 

To see how some of our colleagues have answered these questions, this course will examine works by scholars and activists responding to imperialism, terrorism, disasters, the drug war, monopolistic media, and other topics as chosen by students. Each week we’ll read a seminal historical or theoretical text on a chosen topic; this text will be accompanied by an essay that provides rhetorical analysis the problem, speeches that address it, and examples of how activists have tackled it. Given student interest, we may also supplement our readings by viewing films, listening to music, and considering other art forms. We will therefore construct a constellation of the available means of persuasion, hoping to map the contemporary rhetorics of social justice. 

Here is an example of how we’ll proceed each week (in this case in week 2): to think about the ways concepts of agency, action, and responsibility have been complicated by recent cultural and economic transformations, we’ll read parts of Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism; to think about agency in a postmodern rhetorical frame, we’ll read Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s “Agency: Promiscuous and Protean” [from Communication and Critical Cultural Studies 2:1 (March 2005): 1-19]; to study how questions of agency are understood by the architects of neoliberal capitalism, we’ll read speeches by representatives of the World Bank and IMF; to watch how activists have responded, we’ll study documents from and events led by 50 Years is Enough, MoveOn, and Global Exchange. We’ll thus approach the question of agency from theoretical, rhetorical, economic, and activist perspectives. 

Some of the books we’ll rely upon this semester include: Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978); Micah Sifry and Christopher Cerf, eds., The Iraq War Reader (NYC: Simon and Schuster, 2003); Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon, 1969); Kathy Kelly, Other Lands Have Dreams: From Baghdad to Pekin Prison (Chicago: AK, 2005); Robert Jensen, Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (New York: Peter Lang, 2001); and Guy DeBord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone, 1994).