STS 348
Women, Men and Other Animals
Last Offered Spring 2019
Division II Difference, Power, and Equity
Cross-listed ENGL 348 / WGSS 348 / ARTH 348
This course is not offered in the current catalog

In this seminar, we will together learn to be “animal critics.” We will explore ways in which human groups and interests, particularly in the United States, have both attached and divorced themselves from other animals, considering such axes as gender, race, ability, and sexuality as key definitional foils for human engagements with animality. What are the “uses” of “animals” for “us,” and precisely who is this “us”? How and when are some willing to see themselves as animal–indeed, under what political conditions do they embrace it? What is the history of unique, often asymmetric, interdependencies between human animals and nonhuman animals? How do actual lives of humans and non-human animals merge and clash with the rhetorics and visualities of human animality? We will examine both “everyday” animality and the forms of animality that stand out only today in retrospect, in their exceptionality, or upon reflecting on structures of privilege. We will build a critical animal studies vocabulary from a range of readings in science, philosophy, art, feminism, indigenous studies, critical race, geography, fiction, film, rhetoric, history, activist movements, disability studies, postcolonial studies, and examine both visual and narrative cultural production.