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ST FRANCIS XAVIER UNIVERSITY
Women's Studies Program

Gender, Culture and the Politics of Representation
Women's Studies 300
1999‑2000

Professor: Shahnaz Khan
Office: TBA 
Office Hours: TBA 
Class: Tuesday and Thursday 3:45 to 5:00 pm.

This course disrupts the notion of neutral aesthetic culture as fixed and static. Instead the readings examine cultural rituals as mobile, dynamic and fluid practices which reinforce as well as challenge relations of domination and subordination based on gender, race, class, sexuality and other myriad forms that exclusions take. Through this view culture and representation are seen in a symbiotic relationship and cultural events become sites of political practice. The readings not only examine the role of power in cultural representation but also encourage dialogue about resistance strategies and the place of aesthetics in those strategies.

Evaluations
Critical Response               20%
Mid Term Assignment       25%       2 December, 1999
Final Assignment               35%       11 April, 2000 
Participation                       20%   

Late assignments will Incur a penalty

Critical response: You are asked to lead a seminar as well as provide a 5‑page (double spaced) critical response to the readings in which you will incorporate scholarly issues raised in the readings, and personal responses to the readings, and comments from class discussions. (Additional resource material is optional). This could either be an individual or a group project and the date will be determined in consultation with the Professor. The written response is due the date of the seminar presentation.

Mid‑Term and Final Assignments You are asked to participate in a class seminar as well as provide a 7 page (double spaced) critical response to the assigned readings for that week. (See above for details regarding critical response).

Participation Marks: Participation in the class provides the Professor with the tools to assess if students have actually read the material. Personal comments are welcome but only if they serve to illuminate the topic of discussion in the class.

Texts

Required

Whitney Chadwick, Women Art and Society, Thames & Hudson, 1996.

N. Mirzoeff, (ed.) Visual Culture Reader, Routledge, 1998.

Richard Dyer, White, London: Routledge, 1997

Beth Fowkes, Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth Century British Palntings  Duke University Press, 1999,

Carol Tator, Frances Henry, & Winston Mathis, Challenging,.Racism in the Arts University of Toronto, 1998.

Course Packet

FIRST TERM
9 September, 1999
Introduction

14 September, 1999 Seminar 16 September, 1999 Lecture on Whitney Chadwick, Women Art and Society Introduction: Art History and the Woman Artist Chapter One: The Middle Ages Chapter Two: Renaissance Florence and the Woman Artist Chapter Three: The Other Renaissance Pages 15‑103

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21 September, 1999 Seminar
23 September, 1999 Lecture
on
Whitney Chadwick, Women Art and Society
Chapter 1~‑our: Gender and Domestic Genre in Northern Europe
Chapter  Five: Amateurs and Academics: A New Ideology of Femininity in France and
England
Chapter Six: Sex, Class, and Power in Victorian England
Chapter Seven: Toward Utopia: Moral Reform and American Art in the Nineteenth
Century
Pages 104‑209

28 September, 1999 Seminar 30 September, 1999 Lecture oil Whitney Chadwick, Women Art and Society Chapter Eight: Separate but Unequal: Woman's Sphere and the New Art Chapter Nine: Modernism, Abstraction, and the New Woman Chapter Ten: The Independents Pages 210‑296

5 October, 1999Seininar
7 October, 1999 Lecture
on
N. Mirzoeff, (ed.) Visual Culture Reader
Introduclions4'rovocalions
N.Mirzoeff, "What is Visual Culture"
Irit Rogoff, "Studying Visual Culture"
E. Shohat and R. Stam "Narrativising Visual Culture: Towards a Polycentric Aesthetics"

12 October, 1999 Seminar
14 October, 1999 Lecture
on
N.Mirzoeff, (ed.) Visual Culture Reader
1"art One: A Genealogy of Visual Culture: From Art to Culture
R.Descartes, "Optics",
M. Jay, "Scopic Regimes of Modernity"
R. Barthes, "Rhetoric of the Image"
G. Pollock, "Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity"

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C. Duncan, "The Modem Art Museum",
J. Clifford "On Collecting Art and Culture"
P. Virilio "A Topograhical Amnesia"

19 October, 1999 Seminar
21 October, 1999 Lecture
oil
N. Mirzoeff, (ed.) Visual Culture Reader
Part Two: Visual Culture and Everyday Life
M. McLuhan, "Woman in a Mirror"
A.Rcynolds, "Visual Stories"
Michel de Certeau "From the Practice of Everyday Life"
John Fiske, "Videotech"
M.Sturken, "The Wall, the Screen and the Image: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial",

26 October, 1999 Seminar
28 October, 1999 Lecture
on
N.Mirzoeff, (ed.) Visual Culture Reader
Part Three: Virtuality: Virtual Bodies, Virtual Spaces
(a) The virtual body
D.Haraway, "The Persistence of Vision"
L.Cartwright, "Science and the Cinema"
S.Bordo, "Reading the Slender Body"
A.Balsamo, "On the Cutting Edge; Cosmetic Surgery and the Technological Production
of the Gendered Body"

2 November, 1999 Seminar
4 November, 1999 Lecture
on
N. Mirzoeff, (ed.) Visual Culture Reader
Part Three: Virtuality: Virtual Bodies, Virtual Spaces
(b) Virtual Spaces
M.Foucault, "Of Other Spaces"
J.Crary, "The Camera Obscura and its Subject"
A.Friedberg, "The mobilized and Virtual Gaze in Modernity
M‑L Pratt, " From the Victoria Nyanza to the Sheraton San Salvador'
G.Batchen, "Spectres of Cyberspace"

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5

9 November, 1999 Lecture

Oil
N. Mirzoeff, (~d.) Visual Culture Reader
Part  Four: Race and Identity in Colonial and Post‑Colonial Culture
(a) Visual Colonialism
T.Mitchell, "Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order
A. McClintock, "Soft‑Soaping Empire: Commodity Racism and Imperial Advertising"
M. Alloula, "From the Colonial Harem"
S. Preston Blier, "Vodum Art, Social History and the Slave Trade"

11 November, 1999
Remembrance Day Holiday

16 November, 1999 Seminar
18 November, 1999 Lecture
oil
N. Mirzoeff, (ed.) Visual Culture Reader
Part Four: Race and Identity in Colonial and Post‑Colonial Culture
(b) Visualizing race and identity
P.Gilroy. "Art of Darkness: Black Art and the Problem of Belonging to England"
b hooks, "Representing Whiteness: Seeing Wings of Desire"
A.Ross, "The Gangsta and the Diva"
(0 Identity and Transculture
A.Piper, "Passing for White, Passing for Black"
C.Fusco, "The Other History of Intercultural Performance"
0. Baddeley, "Engendering New Worlds: Allegories of Rape and Reconciliation"

23 November, 1999,5enlinar
25November, 1999 Lecture
on
N. Mirzoeff, (ed.) Visual Culture Reader
Part Five: Gender and Sexuality
(a) The gaze and sexuality
A.Callen, "Ideal Masculinities: An Anatomy of Power"
T.Garb, "The Forbidden Gaze: Women Artists and the Male Nude in Late Nineteenth
Century France"
J. Butler, "Prohibition, Psychoanalysis and the Heterosexual Matrix"

30 November, 1999 Lecture
on
N. Mirzoeff, (ed.) Visual Culture Reader
Part Five: Gender and Sexuality
(b) Queering the Visual
T. Waugh, "The Third Body: Patterns in the Construction of the Subject in Gay Male
Narrative Film"
J. Butler, "Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion"
R.Lewis, "Looking Good: The Lesbian Gaze and Fashion Imagery"

2 December, 1999 Class Seminar
N. Mirzoeff, (ed.) Visual Culture Reader
Part Six: Pornography
L.Nead, "From the Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality"
S.Buckley, "Penguin in Bondage: A Graphic Tale of Japanese comic Books:
R.Dyer, "Idol Thoughts: Orgasm and self‑Reflexivity in Gay Pornography"
Mid‑Term Assignment due 2 December, 1999

SECOND TERM

11 January, 2000 Seminar 13 January, 2000 Lecture

on Richard Dyer, "The Matter off Whiteness", (Chapter 1)

18 January, 2000 Seminar
20 January, 2000 Lecture

Oil
Richard Dyer, "Coloured white, not coloured" (Chapter 2)

25 January, 2000 Lecture 27 January, 2000 Lecture on Richard Dyer, "The light of the World" (Chapter 3) and "The white man's muscles" (Chapter 4)

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I February, 2000 Lecture
3 ) February, 2000 Lecture
on
Richard Dyer, "There is nothing I can do!, Nothing!" (Chapter 5)
and "White Death", (Chapter 6)

8 February, 2000 Seminar
10 February, 2000 Lecture
oil
Beth Fowkes, Tobin, Picturing, Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth Century
British Paintings,

15 February, 2000 Seminar
17 February, 2000 Lecture
oil
Beth Fowkes, Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth Century
British Paintings,

22 February, 2000 Seminar
24 February, 2000 Lecture

Oil
Beth Fowkes, Tobin, Picturing imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth Century  British Paintings,

29 February, 2000
Mid‑Term Break

2 March, 2000
Mid‑Term Break

7 March, 2000 Seminar 9 March, 2000 Lecture oil

Carol Tator, Frances Henry, Winston Mathis, Challenging Racism in the Arts Into the Heart ofAfrica  Show Boat

14 March, 2000 Seminar
16 March, 2000 Lecture
on
Carol Tator, Frances Henry, Winston Mathis, Challenging Racism in the Arts
The Barnes Collection

21 March, 2000 Seminar
23 March, 2000 Lecture

oil
Carol Tator, Frances Henry, Winston Mathis, Challenging Racism in the Arts
Miss Saigon

28 March, 2000 Film
Black Is... Black Ain't

30 March, 2000 -Film
I Shall Not be Removed (The Life of Marlon Riggs)

4 April, 2000 Seminar 6 April, 2000 Lecture on Michel Beyers, "Gender/Sexuality/Desire: Subversion of Difference and Construction of Loss in the Adolescent Drama of My So‑Called Life, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Volume 23, Number 3, 1, Spring 1998.711‑734

11 April, 2000 Class Seminar
on
Teresa de Lauretis, "Popular Culture, Public and Private Fantasies: Femininity and
Fetishism in David Cronenberg's A4.13utlerfly Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
Society, Volume 24, 2, 1, Winter 1999, Pages 303‑304.
Final Assignment Due 11 April, 2000

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Reference
for WS 300, Course on Gender Culture and Representation
The Third Eye: Race, Cinema and Ethnographic Spectacle, Duke University Press, 1994.

Nina Felshin But is it Art: The Sprit of Art as Activism, Bay Press, Seattle, 1995.

Grizelda Pollack, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art, Routledge, 1998.