World Literatures 276 - #MeToo: Sex, Gender and Power Across Cultures

When it comes to sex and gender, how do power dynamics promote or thwart freedom, belonging and love? As #MeToo and other movements challenge cultures of oppression, how do such struggles relate to the ecological, capitalist, and humanitarian crises that threaten life as we know it? Learning from feminisms and post-colonial theories, this course questions persistent structural binaries: mind/body, human/animal, man/woman, culture/nature. Drawing on art, literature, philosophy and journalism, we examine how social constructions of gender, class, race, and disability coalesce with material bodies, spaces, and conditions to form habits of subjectivity and patterns of life.