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Resisting Gender Violence (WGSS 2211)
Total Credits:
3
Lecture Credits:
3
Description:
This course provides an overview of gender violence and the community-building responses to resisting that violence. You will engage historical, theoretical, sociological, and cultural perspectives on gender violence through scholarship and personal narrative. You will learn how gender violence occurs in a social context of power, where women and LGBTQIA persons experience targeted discrimination. You will consider the differential impacts of gender violence on marginalized and disenfranchised communities, such as migrant women, queer and transgender people of color, women of color, older women, adolescents, and poor women. Lastly, you will envision ways to challenge gender violence.
Topical Outline:
1. Gender violence as systemic and as linked to structures of domination
2. Contexts of violence approach, where experiences of gender violence are understood intersectionally (as linked to race, sexuality, class, disability) and according to scales of impact (as related to micro, macro, and global politics)
3. The gender politics of Bias Violence (Sexual Violence, Domestic Violence, Pornography and Sex Trafficking, Racism and Race-Based Hate Crimes, Heterosexism and Homophobic Hate Crimes)
4. The gender politics of Institutional and State Violence (Prisons, Policing, Imperialism, Poverty, Environmental)
5. The gender politics of Symbolic Violence (Language, Media, Representation)
6. The importance of narrative to marginalized communities when responding to gender violence
Learning Outcomes:
1. Analyze narratives of gender violence within the historical, social, and political contexts out of which they are written
2. Consider how narratives of gender violence reveal key differences in the experiences of victim/survivor/resisters that are linked to the social politics of recognition and resourcing.
3. Demonstrate a “contexts of violence” approach to understanding how experiences of violence shift along the intersecting axes of gender, race, class, sexuality, disability, nation, time, and place.
4. Demonstrate how narrative is necessary to naming and transforming the conditions of violence
5. Develop their own responses to the presence of gender violence within their own lives and those in their communities
Prerequisites:
Placement into
READ 0200 or
ESOL 0052 or completion of
READ 0100 or
ESOL 0042
MnTC: