This course will draw on interdisciplinary scholarship to examine childhood from a feminist perspective. We will examine how the meanings, definition, and value associated with childhood have changed over time, as well as the contentious political valences surrounding the figure of the child and childhood. We will also explore how feminists and queer studies scholars have theorized power, children, and the family, the entanglements of care and coercion in childrearing, and the gendered and sexed socialization of children.

How has motherhood become a highly contested site for racial politics? How are mothers pitted against each other in ways that undermine struggles for reproductive justice? The "mommy wars" were once shorthand for a mostly media-fueled catfight between middle class stay-at-home versus working mothers. These old mommy wars have not gone away, but they have been sutured to newly virulent debates focused on racialized discourses regarding tiger mothers, "anchor babies," birthright citizenship and family separations at the border.

There are currently over 2 million people living in prisons and jails across the United States - more incarcerated people per capita than any other country in the world. What is the carceral state and how do particular gendered and racialized bodies get caught up in its logics? How do gender, race, sexuality, and class shape systems of discipline, punishment, surveillance, and control? What is "anti-carceral feminism" and what are some of the abolitionist critiques of the prison industrial complex?

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Various projects. Contact Department.