***The readings for this class are only partially completed. The readings will be completed based on a survey students’ interests and areas of study.***
The primary goal of this course is to provide students with a theoretical framework and methodology centered on two distinct, yet interconnected, areas of inquiry: power and subjectivity. The two aforementioned categories are central to many intellectual disciplines, and many of the areas of concentration our department focuses on (cultural studies, literary studies, HAP, rhetoric and composition). As such, we will analyze power and subjectivity across the disciplines of literary studies, cultural studies, political theory, psychoanalysis, social reproduction theory, rhetoric, gender and queer theory, media studies, indigenous theory, and race studies. This class will begin with an examination of social reproduction theory in relation to the gender studies before moving to an examination of the function of ideology constitution of society. From there, class will turn to biopolitics – the politics of and over life – and then examine how biopolitics has been mobilized across various disciplines. The course will then move to a discussion of indigenous theory and African American studies before segueing into a discussion of rhetoric and affect theory. Please see the readings below for more details.
The assignments for this class will be shaped in accordance to the interests of the class. We will practice delivering papers in preparation for attending conferences. The class will also focus on aspects of professional development such as writing abstracts for conferences, and locating and responding to relevant call for papers.
This class is an excellent choice for those in all areas of studies in our MA and PhD programs as discussions of power and subjectivity are present in all of them. Students will gain a powerful hermeneutic and methodology relevant across disciplines. Students interested gender, indigenous studies, race, and rhetoric will find this class especially important.
Althusser’s “Ideology and the State Apparatuses” (social reproduction theory)
Stephanie Teves’s Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance [excerpts] (indigenous theory, social reproduction theory
Federici’s Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (social reproduction theory and gender studies)
Foucault’s lectures on power, subjectivity and biopolitics (biopolitics)
Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Barelife (biopolitics)
Excerpts from the Micropolitics of Sexism (biopolitics and gender studies)
Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics and Black Feminist theories of the Human (assemblage theory, biopolitics, and race studies)
Ernesto Laclau’s The Rhetorical Foundation Society [excerpts] (politics and rhetoric)
Bernard Steigler Symbolic Misery: The Hyperindustrial Epoch (politics, affect theory)