ETS/WSP 192 Gender Performance, Activist Performance:
The Cultural Politics of Literature and Activism
Fall, 1999 MWF 11:45-12:40
Instructor: Beth Berila
Office: 400 Hall of Languages, 443-1199
E-Mail: esberila@mailbox.syr.edu
Office Hours: M 10:45-11:45, W 12:45-1:45 and by appointment
"The collective remembering of a specific culture can often appear similar to the memory of an individual--it provides cultural identity and gives a sense of the importance of the past. Yet the process of cultural memory is bound up in complex political stakes and meanings. It both defines a culture and is the means by which its divisions and conflicting agendas are revealed. To define memory as cultural is, in effect, to enter into a debate about what that memory means. This process does not efface the individual but rather involves the interaction of individuals in the creation of cultural meaning. Cultural memory is a field of cultural negotiation through which different stories vie for a place in history."
--Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering.
"The strategy of taking elements of an established or imposed culture and throwing them back with a different set of meanings is not only key to guerrilla warfare; the tactics of reversal, recycling and subversive montage are aesthetics that form the basis of many twentieth-century avant-gardes....As we try to grasp at crucial parallels and tease new stories out of them, new alternative chronicles surface; these are the latest examples of how collective memories, those storehouse of identity, once activated, become power sites of cultural resistance."
--Coco Fusco, English Is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas.
In this course, we will read several texts that deal with cultural constructions of gender to explore how we understand gender, how it gets performed, and what’s at stake in those performances. Because gender is a category that is at the center of important contemporary debates, we will also look at examples of activism and literature that interrogate our understandings and our performances of gender. The course will explore texts that pose complex relationships between literature, activism, gender, and politics--issues that will intersect and develop throughout the course. We will begin with the premise that gender is a culturally-constructed category that gets performed and represented in complex and diverse ways, so we will explore what those differences mean and where they come from.
It is no accident that much contemporary literature and activism take up gender, so this course will also ask why that is, how it’s represented, and what possibilities those representations offer. In fact, the second premise on which the course is based is that art and politics are not far removed from everyday life, so we will look at the cultural politics of the literature and the activism discussed in the course. In doing so, we might begin with the following questions: How is gender defined and where do those ideas come from? How is it performed? What do the novels we will read tell us about the varieties and consequences of gender performance? Why is gender so often a subject of activism, and how is it talked about? Why does so much activism use art to enact social criticism? What connections might exist between gender performance and activist performance? Between literature, activism, and gender?
"[Poetry] is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought."
--Audre Lorde, "Poetry Is Not a Luxury."