Feminism and the Culture of Intimacy

ENG 6077 (Issues in Theory) Weds. Periods 6-8 TUR 2341

sponsored by Professor S.A. Smith

office hours: tues 8:30-10:30 (and by appointment) in 4321 TURith

email: ssmith@english.ufl.edu

The course is designed both as a historical investigation into the critical theory and the socio-political activisim that sparked and then sustained materialist and materialist feminist debate during the Vietnam war years in the United States, as well as an inquiry into this legacy for continued contemporary ideological formations and issues arising from that debate, such as the influence of the civil rights momement and identity politics, queer theory, and the rise of cultural studies--debates that affect our lives.

we tend to view the term "intimacy" as something we all understand; the term often indicates sexual relations--and yet, of course, it has wider, more comprehensive denotation and connotation, from simple friendship to legal definitions of life. indeed, you might even call a class such as this one a form of public intimacy; in other words, intimacy is a shifting dimension of meaning, said to constitute who we are in the most private forms of it, yet irrevocably marked by public and communal forms that pre-exist us (anthropology) and by which we understand ourselves, even as to how understand the term "self"(psychoanalysis) and how we behave (sociology).

most centrally, then, this course is going to be guided by the question ofcritical thinking has changed, and continues to change, our understanding and enactment of the concept of intimacy. Since the 1970's, when so-called Second Wave feminism erupted on the public scene, more often than not intimacy has been what we are all told that we need but do not have; or that women have it but men don't; or that we have it, but it is either in short supply, or, worse, we do not understand how to use it well or properly. further, we are often told that our survival and our solace depends upon achieving this "intimacy" and yet it is presented as the unachievable horizon, that which our "society" prevents.

the secondary focus of the class will be how the critical thinking that gave rise to feminism as a public and often legal debate has changed and continues to reshape traditional approaches within other forms of study, such as literature, philosophy, anthropology, political science, film, video. indeed, we shall be interested in the concept of "technology" itself, and thus will use multi-media wherever--and whenever--possible in our inquiry.

reading list

There will be selections from handbooks about intimacy from the 1970's and 80's, as well as essays from the following theorists: Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Fredric Jameson, Gayatri Spivak, Judith Butler, Tom Laquer, Raymond Williams, and Roland Barthes, Slavoj Zizek, Michael Warner, Lee Edelman and Joan Copjec

Books will include:

Adorno, T., The Jargon of Authenticity

ed. Rosemary Hennessy and Chrys Ingraham, Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference and Women's Lives

Davis, Angela, Women, Race and Class

Lacan, J., Feminine Sexuality

Nicholson, Linda, The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory

Rose, J., Sexuality in the Field of Vision

Silverman, Kaja, The Subject of Semiotics

Willis, S., A Primer for DailyLife

Young-Bruehl, E. Freud on Women


Requirements: response papers, project proposals, and a final, seminar paper.