GWSS 4690/5690, "An Introduction to Black Feminism" will be taught spring 2010 by Dr. Zenzele Isoke on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 12:45 - 2:00 p.m. in Room 56 Rapson Hall.
GWSS 4690/5690
An Introduction to Black Feminism
T-Th 12:45-2:00pm
Rapson Hall, Room 56
Instructor: Dr. Zenzele Isoke
Spring 2010
This interdisciplinary course will explore how black women in North America and the Caribbean have theorized self, community, and politics. We will consider how black women have challenged the simultaneous effects on racism, sexism, colonialism, homophobia, media exploitation, and other forms of social violence through a complex interplay of storytelling, autoethnography, poetry, spiritualized feminism, other forms intersectional praxis. We will consider how black feminists have resisted rage, alienation, and despair through community-building, humor, and the cultivation of self-love, effectively reframing scholarly discussions of subjectivity, inter-subjectivity, and political agency in the Late 20th and Early 21st Century. Finally, we will explore the emancipatory potential of black feminism, with special attention paid to how black feminism urges us to decolonize the politics of knowledge in the academy by "worrying the lines" between teaching and learning, power and marginality, past and present, fatalism and futurity, and "the real" and the unreal.
For more information please contact:
Zenzele Isoke
Assistant Professor
Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies
University of Minnesota--Twin Cities Campus
224 Church Street, 437 Ford Hall
Minneapolis, MN 55455
612-626-8954