Syllabus
Objectives
1. To initiate considerations about relations between race and gender in all contemporary societies
2. To develop a critical appreciation of theories of race and studies of whiteness and its historical legacies
3. To enable students to use ‘race’ as an analytical category
4. To critically reflect on invisibilities and normativities of whiteness
5. To familiarise students with a range of methodological approaches to research and represent gender and race without refying them A full course sylabus with updated readings will be distributed in the first week of term! Dagmar Lorenz-Meyer
Annotation
This course introduces students to critical studies of race, racism and racial politics, their rich genealogies in feminist theory and activism, and their continued urgency, particularly in Europe. What exactly does it mean to say that race is ‘socially constructed’ or that it needs to be ‘re-ontologised’? Is race 'fluid'? How do race and gender inevitably intersect in historically specific ways? What are apparatuses (including research methodologies) through which race gets reiteratively produced and made absent? And how are ‘we’ implicated in such racial productions?
Through engaging case studies and feminist debates, the course examines the ruptures and continuities of racial formations, antisemitism, post/colonialisms, and racialized embodiments. The aim is to develop critical thinking, reading and research strategies for addressing processes of racialisation in a geopolitical context where the importance of race is routinely denied. We will also look at feminist and anti- racist organising, utopias, and debates about the limits of multiculturalism, and bio- and necropolitics.