The Ride
I'm still annoyed with this school but I can hardly contain my excitement for classes to start. I hope to take care of the incomplete tomorrow. It's so bad that I keep re-reading the class descriptions. I'm going to include them here for you just because that's the kind of person I am:
Fundamentals of Sociology of Culture Critically analyzing the ways in which the term "culture" is used by social scientists and other scholars, we consider a broad range of activities and objects, ranging from the rarified to the ordinary, the prestigious to the everyday. My favorite sentence: We consider culture in relation to power and authority of certain groups in constructing and maintaining, or contesting and transforming the symbols and legitimacy of art, science, popular cultural forms, and the shared meanings of life. Second favorite: Among the forms we examine are social status, gender, race, and other social identities. The theoretical orientations on which we draw derive from Weber, Durkheim, Marx, Bourdieu, R. Williams, Geertz, Goffman, the Frankfurt School, and the American Production of Culture.
Gender, Politics and History This course approaches the history of women from the vantage point of feminist scholarship and theories about gender. We will examine the social, economic, and political positions of women (and men) in the 19th and 20th centuries in order to explore and evaluate structures of inequality, racial categories, and debates about the nature and role of women in the United States. Great sentence: The construction of gender is shaped by concrete historical, social and cultural factors, and the goal of the course will be to integrate history and theory in order to more fully understand the social construction of knowledge and "truth" as well as the categories that govern our understanding of gender.
Feminist Political Theory: Contemporary Contestations This course explores major tendencies in contemporary feminist thought: liberal, radical, democratic, socially conservative, post-structuralist, and materialist, to name a few. Readings will include works by Susan Okin, Martha Nussbaum, Carol Gilligan, Joan Tronto, Drucilla Cornell, Patricia Williams, Judith Butler, bell hooks, Iris Marion Young, Chandra Mohanty, and Valentine Moghadam. How do these writers interrogate and define human nature, gender, sex, women, feminism, family and citizenship? How do they strive to (re)imagine a just society? What do they accept and reject from recent political theories of justice? How do they attempt to extend their assumptions and critiques to a global context? Questions also will be raised regarding problems and possibilities associated with international women's rights and with expectations for forging sollidarity movements across national borders. I haven't added this last class yet. I just decided to take it yesterday.
The class I need to drop is a sociological methods course that sounded interesting but since I'm no longer doing sociology, I don't need it. And I'd rather take the feminism course. I need to be schooled in that theory. It snowed tonight. I was sitting in Starbucks (because I got a gift card) and watched it for three hours. Then I walked out in it. I was so tempted to walk home. But I didn't. I love the snow. I just love it. I've got nothing intelligent to say. I've got no issues about which to wax philosophical (thank goodness). I still haven't put any pictures up. I'm apologize. I'll get to it. I took quite a few. Maybe 40. Maybe fewer. Less? Always hated that rule. Sorry, Oakland.
