PHIL 338: Philosophy, Race, and Gender

PHIL 338-001: Philosophy, Race, and Gender
(Spring 2024)

01:30 PM to 02:45 PM MW

Krug Hall 5

Section Information for Spring 2024

On this course, we will explore how key concepts in modern western philosophy both contributed to and were shaped by ideas about sex, gender, and sexuality. We will examine how older ideas about sexual difference were ‘over-coded’ and transformed by the emergence of the modern western concept of race, particularly in the context of what Maria Lugones calls the ‘modern colonial gender system’. We will ask how this system both reflected and informed key conceptual distinctions, such as those between reason and nature, mind and body, human and animal, that continue to shape western ways of thinking today. We will investigate how concepts of race and gender developed in a colonial context informed conceptions of human being and structured western political theory, including the model of the social contract. And we will examine how supposedly universal ideals of reason, knowledge, and objectivity were produced in ways that relied on gendered and racialized patterns of exclusion.

To explore these ideas, we will read texts by some of the most influential thinkers in the modern western tradition, such as Descartes, Locke, and Rousseau, alongside work by feminist philosophers and queer theorists, Black feminist thinkers, and Latinx and anticolonial thinkers. Their work will help us to interrogate modern western conceptions of selves and ‘Others’, sex and gender, minds and bodies, knowledge and objectivity, the public sphere and the body politic, and will provide us with resources for re-conceptualizing human beings and their relations to one another. 

Along the way, we will reflect on the role of situatedness – including our own – in generating knowledge, sustaining ignorance, and producing what is sometimes called epistemic injustice. In the Spring 2024 iteration of the course, we will also pay particular attention to the work of Latinx feminist thinkers including Maria Lugones, Gloria Anzaldua, and Rita Segato. Together, we will explore the ways in which their work opens possibilities for thinking differently about the world(s) we inhabit and the earth we share.

 

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Course Information from the University Catalog

Credits: 3

Examines how concepts of gender, sexual difference, and race structure key philosophical ideas and put such ideas into question. Analyzes the ways in which patriarchal, colonial and racialized structures intersect to produce concepts of the human, the subject, and the ‘Other’. Explores alternative approaches to subjectivity, sexuality, the body, and knowledge drawn from feminist philosophy, queer theory, and philosophies of race and decoloniality. Offered by Philosophy. Limited to three attempts.
Recommended Prerequisite: 3 hours of PHIL or Permission of Instructor.
Schedule Type: Lecture
Grading:
This course is graded on the Undergraduate Regular scale.

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