GenderCare in Mod. US Poetry

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

In this class, we’ll explore modern and contemporary American poetry through the lenses of gender and disability theory, particularly as they center the question of care. We’ll examine the way a range of poets with and without disabilities take up critical questions in their work, including: how do we care for one another from childhood through aging? How are our relationships of care charged with the power dynamics of race, class, immigration status, disability and gender? Does the work of care conflict with or engender creativity in poetry? And how might disability, in the ways it compels us to understand ourselves through our vulnerability and our dependency on others, reframe such core American values as independence and rational individualism as well as key poetic ideals like genius? Since much of the work of care (both familial and non-familial, unpaid and inadequately paid) has been assigned to women and femme-identified people, they will make up the bulk, though not the entirety, of our syllabus. We’ll examine the writing lives of selected 20th and 21st century poets who played significant roles in shaping the literary fields in which they worked, and we’ll think about poetic community as a form of care. We’ll move chronologically and thematically, exploring conceptions of motherhood, (de)institutionalization, queer kinship, and interdependency from Emily Dickinson into Modernism, the post-War era, the Second Wave and Black Feminist movements, HIV/AIDS and queer community, to our immediate moment.