Culture and Identity:

WOMEN, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY STUDIES 3051

This course examines the critical work of Indigenous, Aboriginal, First Nation, and Palestinian feminists, women, queer, and trans writers toward mapping out a response to settler colonialism that troubles its normativity and centers land and care. Here, Indigeneity is theorized as an integrated feminism: a feminism that includes but goes beyond gender and sexuality-a worldview and an ethic that is inseparable from the meaning of land-based belonging. Approaching Indigeneity globally and comparatively, this course asks: what critical roles do Indigenous feminisms play in resisting settler colonialism? Asserting bodily autonomy and self-determination? Forming the self and the nation and preserving land-based ways of being? What alternative worlds and freedoms do Indigenous feminisms model? Beside these theoretical concerns, the course examines the strength of Indigenous feminist and queer solidarities with racial, colonial, and environmental struggles in both local and global contexts. The readings include critical scholarship, memoirs, and poetry. Students are expected to study these works but also adapt their own ethic and commitment to feminist and queer relationality as they reflect on the material and craft their own feminist worldview. Class assignments include a personal journal, a midterm essay that reflects on an external Indigenous feminist text, and a comparative final project (in paper or creative form) where students put an Indigenous feminism in conversation with another feminist tradition, relate them to one another, and showcase the role Indigenous feminisms play in expanding the field and our theory of the world.
Course Attributes: EN H; BU Hum; BU BA; AS HUM; FA HUM; AR HUM; FA CPSC

Section 01

Culture and Identity: Indigenous Feminisms - 01
INSTRUCTOR: Ghanayem
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