Minor Crucial Differences
FASoS
Minor Crucial Differences
Introduction
The European Enlightenment of the 18th century was not only a philosophical but also a political movement. The ‘light’ of reason and science should help the people to master the ‘wild’ nature and their ‘anxieties’. It should destroy the power of the churches and liberate the people, as Immanuel Kant wrote: “von selbstverschuldeter Unmündigkeit” and dependence. All human beings should be “equal”, “free” and connected my mutual understanding through a “social contract” and “brotherhood”. But did the Enlightenment really promote freedom and equality? If so among whom? Whose perspectives did the Enlightenment reflect? What were its implications for society? Who were the “Others” of the new produced “free” subject, which was called “neutral” or “human being” but resembled more an idealized version of a white male member of the new hegemonic middle class?
The narrative of ‘heroic manliness’ – as explorer, colonizer, and head of state, warrior, and thinker – belongs to the master narratives of modernity just as much as the hall of mirrors of his ‘monstrous doppelgangers’ (Girard). Sometimes as ‘good and noble’ but more often as ‘barbaric or brutish’, these “savages”, as representatives of ‘asocial’, ‘violent’, and ‘compulsively egotistical’ manliness, pervade both the colonialist power discourse and the philosophical concept of the ‘state of nature’ of humankind.
But how were the “differences” between the sexes, between the “races”, between the upper and the lower classes, between Europe and the Colonies, the “sane” and the “insane” constructed? How, for example, did the Irish come to be seen as a separate and distinctly lower race during their migration to the USA? And how did they later become ‘white’? Why did women have to fight more than 100 years to get the civil right to vote or to become a student? Why were white women appointed as the guardians of racial purity in the colonial empires of the West? Why are gay men sometimes still seen as more feminine than heterosexual men? Why were Jews persecuted as dangerous “Others” in German National Socialism? And how is our one position? Which sets of norms, stereotypes and inner pictures of gender, religion, class, “race” and ethnicity are defining us? In which ways are we ‘different’? From which perspectives can complex life-stories and auto-biographies be written?
These questions are central to the minor ‘Crucial Differences’, which is a full-time, twenty-week program designated for students who want to know more about the dynamics and intersections of difference and the origins of important (in)equalities in western societies. We will study the ways in which differences were constructed and have structured cultural texts and images, individual identities as well as societies from the eighteenth century onwards, most often connected to social, economic and political inequalities. We will focus on the ‘Big Four’: gender, ‘race’, sexuality and class. The program consists of a sequence of three interdisciplinary courses which together provide insight into (1) the making of crucial differences from the Enlightenment onwards to the crises of the model of western thought and culture in the catastrophe of the Shoa, (2) the dynamics and interactions of crucial differences at present and (3) the way in which these differences are represented in narrative, life-writings and ‘lived’ lives.
All three courses are accompanied by analyses of novels, films and biographical or autobiographical writings. The students will also write a life-story of a ‘crucially different’ subject. Consequently, in this minor, students will not only read key-sources and interdisciplinary academic work from the domains of gender studies, social history, ethnic studies, gay studies, and science studies, but also novels and (auto) biographies. Furthermore they will analyze and films which represent reconstruct the ways in which crucial differences were created and lived.
Overview of the program
• 20 weeks, full-time, 30 ECTS
• Offered from September 2011 to January 2012 to students from all faculties and from other universities.
• Course A and B can be followed separately.
• Course A and B are prerequisites for course C.
• Teaching staff: Dr. Ulrike Brunotte (coordinator) and tutors (tba)
Course A: The Making of Crucial Differences
Period: September - October, 2011 (8 weeks)
This course deals with historical configurations of ‘race’, class, gender and sexuality. It looks at the ways in which self and other, black and white, East and West, male and female, hetero- and homosexual, upper, middle and lower class were conceptualised and sometimes newly invented in science, philosophy and social theory. It will look into how these concepts were constructed, ‘lived’ and went through crises in social reality from 1789-1933 (the Holocaust).
Course B: Crucial Differences in the 21st Century
Objectives
The main aims of this course are:
• To acquaint students with contemporary configurations of gender, sexuality race’/ethnicity, and class, and the way in which these ‘crucial differences’ structure contemporary cultural texts and images, as well as social and individual identities and institutions.
• To familiarize students with topical debates, themes and theories in contemporary gender and diversity studies.
• To teach students how multiple identities and experiences of difference and inequality interact, by familiarizing them with intersectional approaches to gender, sexuality, ‘race’/ethnicity, and class.
• To provide students with the analytical skills to unravel the dynamics of the continuous production and reproduction of identity and difference, inclusion and exclusion, equality and inequality.
Course description
This course considers a variety of contemporary perspectives of shifting configurations of gender, sexuality, ‘race’/ethnicity, and class. You will learn to examine the ways in which these ‘crucial differences’ are constituted in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, as well as to analyze the ways in which they function on sociocultural and symbolic levels.
The emergence of the various social movements during the 1960s and 1970s – including the women’s movement, the civil rights movement, the free speech movement, and gay and lesbian liberation – serves as a historical and theoretical starting point of the course. In the first two tasks, we will examine how the contributions of these diverse movements have shaped and reshaped the form and content of the identity of ‘racial’ or ethnic minorities, feminists, and gays and lesbians, on an individual as well as a collective level. Special attention will be directed to the notion of intersectionality, which refers to the interaction between gender, sexuality, ‘race’, and other categories of difference in cultural, social, and individual practices, and the effects of these interactions in terms of power and inequality.
Subsequently, we will take a closer look at the complexity of multiple differences and inequalities, by tracing the entangled workings of gender, sexuality, ‘race’/ethnicity, and class in a variety of topical cases. We will look at the role of social and embodied differences in the late twentieth century ‘ethnic conflicts’ in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia; the status of the human body in technologically advanced societies, zooming in on the role of cosmetic surgery and new reproductive techniques as ‘technologies’ of gender, ‘race’, and class; the complex relations between norms of gender and sexuality in the structuring of contemporary performances of identity; the medicalization of intersexuality; the globalization of sexuality, both in terms of personal identity and in the context of increasing gender discrimination and sexual oppression of women; contemporary constructions of whiteness; and the emergence of sexual nationalisms across Europe today, focusing on the prominent place that women’s sexual liberation and gay rights occupy in contemporary debates on Islam and multicultural citizenship.
Our cases draw on a variety of geographical and cultural locations and contexts. Diversity is also exemplified in the interdisciplinary theoretical approach that characterizes gender and diversity studies as a scholarly field. The texts used in this course draw on theories and methods from disciplines such as philosophy, sociology, history, anthropology, and literary and cultural studies, as well as from the fields of feminist theory, postcolonial theory, and queer studies. Through critical inquiry into concrete cases as well as major texts – including modern classics in the field, such as Judith Butler’s Gender trouble and Joan Scott’s The politics of the veil – this course dynamically re-conceptualizes the intersections between the categories of gender, sexuality, ‘race’/ethnicity, and class, by examining the multiple ways in which processes of identity and difference, inclusion and exclusion, equality and inequality are produced and reproduced in ongoing flows of negotiation and transformation.
Course C: Crucially Different Lives: Lived Realities
Period: January, 2012 (4 weeks)
This course will study biographies and autobiographies of ‘crucially different’ subjects – and in a way everybody is crucially different. We will ask how our lives become stories and how these stories are told.
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Information: frontoffice@maastrichtuniversity.nl
website: http://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/web/Faculties/FASoS/Theme/Education/Minors
Registration: bachelor-fasos@maastrichtuniversity.nl
