AFR 329
Marxist Feminisms: Race, Performance, and Labor Spring 2023
Division II Writing Skills Difference, Power, and Equity
Cross-listed AFR 329 / AMST 402 / WGSS 402 / THEA 402
This is not the current course catalog

This seminar provides an overview of queer, women of color feminist, decolonial, and critical ethnic studies critiques of orthodox Marxism. Beginning with core texts from the tradition, we will examine a range of forms of labor and social positions that complicate Marx’s emphasis on the white male industrial factory worker. In the first part of the seminar, we will study seminal texts that center reproduction, racial slavery, care and domestic work, indentured servitude, sex work, and migrant labor, and in the second half, we will turn to an array of practices that respond to and offer strategies to survive under racial capitalism. This seminar will equip students with critical understandings of the ways racial capitalism has centrally relied on the mass elimination, capture, and recruitment of different racialized and gendered bodies in and beyond the U.S. and how, through performance, the capitalist system of value and life under these conditions can be undone and reimagined.