Your Philosophy Syllabus
california state university, los angeles. winter 2016.
Dr. Tanya Rawal | tanya.rawal@calstatela.edu
Building| Office Hours: Thursday 4–6 or by appointment
Course Rules: Don’t cheat. Don’t plagiarize. Be nice. Respect your classmates. Come to class. Read the readings. Do your assignments. Contribute to discussion (sharing is caring). Be an active college student.
Course Description
What is the relationship between our bodies and how we produce knowledge? How do our bodies construct our realities and shape our everyday lives? How can our bodies and the perception of each other’s bodies govern society’s understanding of justice? What is the relationship between your body and your identity? In this course we will address these questions and more by applying philosophical texts to our understanding of gender and culture.
Assignments
20% Pop Quizzes You will have several pop-quizzes throughout the quarter! If you come to class and do the reading this will not be a problem for you.
30% Peer Review Each student will be assigned to a peer review group (2–3 students per group). Before submitting the final drafts of your Medium articles you will be required to share your work with your group. Every student will edit and provide feedback for each of their group members. (You should give your group 3 days to edit. And group members should give each writer 1–2 days to make changes to their articles.) Each group will be required to provide evidence of their communication, editing processes, and organization
50% Medium.com You will upload 5 articles at https://medium.com/your-philosophy-class. You will need to create a medium.com account. Each article should include hyperlinks, images, etc. BE CREATIVE and THOUGHTFUL! I advise each of you to look through medium.com. Do your research before you post. Each post should address at least one of the readings or texts from our course. 600–800 words (4 entries, 10% each) Upload Medium.com articles on or before the following dates: Jan 19, Feb 2, Feb 16, Mar 1, and Mar 17.
Read the texts assigned for each day prior to class. And review it after!
All readings will be available online.
January 5: How Does It Feel To Be A Problem?
W.E.B. DuBois The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
January 7: Truth, Equality, and “Arbitrary Assignments”
Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense”
“Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things” — Nietzsche
January 12: The Myth of a General Equivalent.
Genevieve Vaughan, For-Giving: A Feminist Criticism of Exchange, Chapter 5. ‘The Concept of Man’
January 14: The Economics of Gender.
Karl Marx, Capital, Chapter 2. ‘Exchange’
January 19: The Body of the Condemned
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (pgs. 3–31)
ARTICLE 1 DUE ON MEDIUM
January 21: Docile Bodies
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (pgs. 135–169)
January 26: Who Matters and How?
Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (Introduction and pgs. 21–50)
January 28: #BlackLivesMatter #sayhername
selections from Angela Davis’ Women, Race, Class (1981)
February 2: Kinship, Antigone’s Claim, and Tamir Rice’s Sister
Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim (pgs. 1–40)
ARTICLE 2 DUE ON MEDIUM
February 4: Kinship, Antigone’s Claim, and Tamir Rice’s Sister
Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim (pgs. 41–82)
February 9: Activists and the Protesting Body
February 11: Protesting Evil, Ressentiment, and the Question of Morality
Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morality (read the second essay, starts pg. 35)
February 16: Intersectionality
Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping The Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color” (1993)
Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Why Intersectionality Can’t Wait” (2015)
Patricia Hill Collins, “Intersecting Oppressions”
ARTICLE 3 DUE ON MEDIUM
February 18: A Critique of Intersectionality
February 23: Violence
bell hooks, “Ending Violence,” from Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (pgs.61–67)
February 25: Don’t “Murder Pussies.” Please. And thank you… #likewhaaat
March 1: Hip Hop, White Supremacy, and Gender
March 8: COMPLETE GROUP ESSAY. Send Draft to Professor by 10 PM.
March 10: M.I.A., Brown Girls, and Terrorism + Thoughts on Ben Shapiro
Medium 4 Due (extended deadline from March 2)
Jasbir K. Puar and Amit S. Rai, Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriot
Peer Review Docs due via email
