(WGSS 0089) Feminism in Twentieth-Century US Literature and Culture – Ronna Johnson

This course examines how the postwar U.S. women’s movement for equality, born of the mid-twentieth century antiwar and civil rights movements, made civic, legal and ethical changes that are expressed in representations of women in literature and film, in mass and high cultures, and in women’s experiences across lines of race, class, ethnic, and sexuality. We will study novels, poetry, and essays, as well as films, to explore the impact of second wave feminism on discourses of gender and women’s equality. The course will cover critiques made by feminist writers with a view to understanding a central insight of feminism, that forms of knowing are not universal but culturally constructed, contextual, mutable; gendered; and that gender identity is intersectional, a simultaneity of class, race, sexuality and ethnicity. Our study questions feminism as postmodern and speculates how postmodernism is in part a feminist production; how the emergence of the postmodern fits with recognitions about gender and sexual liberations in the postwar U.S. women’s movement. We will read Riot Grrrl manifestos and zines to discern a next stage – possibly a third wave – of feminism’s challenge to assumptions about women’s places in patriarchy. Readings will include: Kate Millett, Sexual Politics ; Gloria Steinem, "I Was A Playboy Bunny”; Toni Morrison, Sula ; Valerie Solanas, The SCUM Manifesto; Rita Mae Brown, Rubyfruit Jungle; Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays ; Chuang Hua, Crossings . This course fulfills the post-1860 English Major requirement.