Semester:
Offered:
Instructor: Kiran Lam-Saili
Meeting time: Monday, 12:45-2:45 pm
The history of U.S. women of color feminist politics and expressive cultures is one filled with Black, Indigenous, Chicana, and Asian American thinkers who have demanded that we take seriously how categories such as race, sex, gender, sexuality, class, and ability shape our world and our relation to it. With attention to the historical and political conditions from which our creative texts arise, this course will take three main, loosely chronological, turns. First, we will examine the emergence and implications of the term “women of color” in the late 1970s. Second, we will consider key developments in specific women of color feminisms during the 1980s and 1990s, from critiques of settler colonialism in Indigenous and Chicana thought, to challenges to imperialism’s afterlives in the Asian American context. Finally, we will turn to the 21st century to engage contemporary women/queer of color thought on issues like media representation, reproductive justice, migrant carework, abolition, and disability justice. Primary sources will include fiction, poetry, visual art, and films, as well as protest performances, interviews, government/intergovernmental documents, political speeches/essays/pamphlets/manifestos, and magazine articles. We will read/watch, for example, fiction by Audre Lorde, mixed-memoir by Gloria Anzaldúa, poetry by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Chrystos, and films like Red Canary Song’s Fly in Power.