Dr Mai Taha (STC.S.206)

This course is available on the MSc in Human Rights and MSc in Human Rights and Politics. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

This course has a limited number of places (it is controlled access). Places are allocated based on a written statement. Priority will be given to students who have this course listed in their programme regulations. This may mean that not all students who apply will be able to get a place on this course.

How do we approach law, rights, work, care, and the home from an embodied perspective? How can studying patriarchy in society help us look at the social world differently? What can we learn from various movements of feminist resistance: from anti-colonial and anti-capitalist feminist movements to the queer liberation movement, human rights activism, and the feminist strike? This course engages with these questions by approaching patriarchy as historically co-constitutive of other forms of oppression and exploitation that affect the way we understand and experience the world today. Through this course, students are introduced to feminist legal thought, queer theory, critical race feminism, and Marxist feminism. Borrowing from law, sociology, history, literature, and film, Patriarchy and Society is interdisciplinary in substance and method. The course uses fiction and cinema in parallel with the assigned readings to think through issues of gender and sexuality, housework and social reproduction, racial justice, and class society. It engages with various themes that initially developed from outside of the academy, cohering feminist and queer liberation movements as spaces of knowledge-production. As such, the course explores some of the forms of violence embedded in spatio-temporal regimes: from labour-time in the slave plantation to labour-time in the factory and at home. Through this course, students will be able to reflect on the tension between structures of the patriarchy and its relationship with racism and capitalism, on the one hand, and the different forms of queer and feminist resistance, including ideas around friendship and solidarity to reimagine emancipatory futures, on the other.

30 hours of seminars in the WT.

Students on this course will have a reading week in Week 6, in line with departmental policy.

Students will be expected to produce 1 piece of coursework in the WT.

Reflection paper on a choice of one text from the course materials (1500 words)

• Octavia Butler, Kindred (1979).
• Guadalupe Nettel, Stillborn (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2022).
• Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Rehearsals for Living (Haymarket Books, 2022).
• Gail Lewis, “Birthing Racial Difference: conversations with my mother and others” (2009) Studies in the Maternal 1(1), 1-21.
• Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2019).
• Himani Bannerji, “Building from Marx: Reflections on Race, Gender and Class” (2011) in Sharzad Mojab (eds.) Educating from Marx. Marxism and Education (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
• Jules Joanne Gleeson nad Elle O’Rourke, Transgender Marxism (Pluto Press, 2021).
• bell hooks, “Home place (as a Site of Resistance) in Yearning: Race, gender, and cultural politics (South End Press, 1990).
• Sophie Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against the Family (Verso, 2019).
• Tithi Battacharrya (ed.), Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentring Oppression (Pluto Press, 2017).
• Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (AK Press, 2004).

Essay (50%, 2000 words) and essay (50%, 2000 words) in the ST.

Further details: 

A Portfolio of the following:

• Photo essay (50%) 2000 words (including citations)

The photo essay would be in conversation with a selection of readings from the course materials. The photos could be curated from existing images and/or taken by the student. 

• Review essay (50%) 2000 words (including citations)

The review essay would be on a choice of two readings from the course materials or Novel Review or Film Review.

An electronic copy of both assessments, to be uploaded to Moodle, no later than 4.00pm on the second Wednesday of Spring Term.