PSCI 236
Sex, Gender, and Political Theory Spring 2015
Division II
Cross-listed PSCI 236 / WGSS 236
This is not the current course catalog

This course offers a feminist reading of key concepts in the study of politics: freedom, justice, equality, obligation, representation, alienation, and objectification. Each of these terms will be considered in relation to problems of political exclusion and social stratification that persist in democracies, with particular attention to inequalities based on sex, gender, race, and class. Is welfare a problem for freedom theory? In what way might a pregnancy be experienced as a form of alienation, and how does this pose a challenge for theories of justice? Is it possible to treat another person as an equal and at the same time an object of one’s sexual desire? We will identify the analytical tools and strategies that feminist theorists have employed in order to bring these and other concerns into political science scholarship, reconstructing traditional ideas of politics and public life in the process. Theorists whose work we will read include Susan Moller Okin, Nancy Hirschmann, Martha Nussbaum, Iris Marion Young, Drucilla Cornell, Gayatri Spivak, Dorothy Roberts, Judith Butler, Linda Zerilli and Catherine Mackinnon.