AMST 329
Marxist Feminisms: Race, Performance, and Labor Fall 2020
Division II Difference, Power, and Equity
Cross-listed THEA 323 / AFR 329 / WGSS 323 / AMST 329
This is not the current course catalog

Who is considered the dominant subject of labor? This course offers an overview of queer, women of color feminist, decolonial, and black and critical ethnic studies critiques of orthodox Marxism. Starting with core texts from the Marxist tradition, we will explore a range of social positions and forms of labor that complicate Marx’s emphasis on the white male industrial worker. Each unit, we will study key scholarship that centers reproduction, slavery, care and domestic work, indentured servitude, sex work, and low wage flexible labor, to name a few, alongside queer and feminist modes of performance that respond to and/or provide strategies to live and survive under racial capitalism. We will discuss seminal works by theorists, including Karl Marx, Luce Irigaray, Cedric Robinson, Jennifer Morgan, Hortense Spillers, Lisa Lowe, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Dorothy Roberts, Angela Davis, José Esteban Muñoz, and Leo Bersani, in tandem with performances, such as paintings, performance art, poetry, protests, photography, prints, music, and sculptures. This course will equip students with a critical understanding of the ways racial capitalism has centrally relied upon the mass capture and recruitment of racialized and gendered labor in and beyond the U.S. and how, through performance, life under these conditions have been reimagined.