Women and War: Gender, Race and the Politics of Militarism

This course examines scholarship on gender, sexuality, and race within a multitude of feminist disciplines in order to suggest productive interventions in analyses of women and warfare. Refuting essentialized notions of womanhood as passive, peaceful, and submissive, this class encourages students to move beyond thinking about what women do in war, and instead consider how gender is instrumental in, and constituted by, processes of militarism. Personal narratives, documentaries, military policy, and legal cases will serve as case studies to analyze contemporary and historical issues of gender, race and militarism.

In the first half of the course, students will be introduced to transnational, decolonial, and antimilitarist feminist theory, interdisciplinary scholarship exemplifying gendered analyses of war, and investigations of the deployment of nationalisms and humanitarian discourse for militarism. The latter half of the course will put these theories to work by examining contemporary and historical issues surrounding women and war. This course is reading-intensive with a strong emphasis on feminist methodological and theoretical approaches to studying gender, race and militarism. Students should be prepared for active class participation.