12:00 PM to 01:15 PM TR
Innovation Hall 207
Section Information for Fall 2018
Did Plato really suggest there might have been three originary sexes? Or that there could be pregnant men?
Why have some thinkers seen Descartes’ mind/body dualism as a distinctly feminist issue?
And why did Rousseau think it was so dangerous to let women into the public sphere?
On this course, we will explore how concepts of sex, gender, sexuality and sexual difference have structured key ideas in the western philosophical tradition, including conceptions of social and political order, human beings and nature, minds and bodies, public and private, and beauty and morality.
We will read several of the most influential thinkers within the western tradition (including Plato, Descartes, Rousseau, Burke and Kant) and ask to what extent their ideas still inform our thinking today. At the same time, we will use work by contemporary feminist philosophers and queer theorists such as Judith Butler, Iris Marion Young, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick to put these ideas into question and explore other ways of thinking about sex, gender, bodies, selves, nature, the public sphere, and the body politic.
Throughout the course, we will pay close attention to the intersections of race and gender by drawing on the work of black and postcolonial feminist thinkers, such as bell hooks, Uma Narayan, and Sylvia Wynter. Together these thinkers will help us to interrogate concepts of nature and scientific objectivity inherited from Descartes, along with the very image of 'the human' that has informed modern western thought and culture.
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Credits: 3
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