Spring 2007

E 370W • Law, Culture, and Gender

Course Description

The nature of this course--an examination of the relations among law and culture and gender--requires you to be proactive, rather than reactive, to the subject. Each term accounts for a multitude of phenomena, abstract conceptions, and representations. Each one of you will define the relationship and the individual components of that relationship in your own way because each one of you experiences law, culture and gender in response to a set of specific circumstances. Race, ethnicity, class, religion, sexual preference, historical circumstance are but a few of the characteristics that affect the way you experience the intersection of these three terms.

We will be employing literary texts, movies, critical essays, court cases and legal commentary to examine the way in which certain privileged ideas about what law is, how it should function, and who determines its scope constructs normative representations of gender and culture. One of the aims of the course, then, is to make you more aware of the way in which you "read" (as in interpret) these interrelated narratives of law, culture and gender.

Grading Policy

Position papers (6x1p) 30%
Critical papers (2x3pp) 30%
Research paper (6-8pp) 40%

Texts

Morrison, Beloved
Nabokov, Lolita
Woolf, Orlando
Boys Don't Cry
Paris Burning
Packet with essays, commentary and legal cases

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