What the Course is About
In this course, we will examine fiction and non-fiction narratives from a range of societies -- from South Asia to Africa to our own backyards -- in search of answers about how cultures understand and construct gender expectations for men and women.
Using the summer reading, Nicholas Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn’s Half the Sky, as our springboard, we'll consider three major questions:
1. What is true about men's and women's bodies?
2. When is your body not your own?
3. What causes women's bodies to become battlegrounds?
In each of those units, we will study literary texts such as memoirs, short stories, articles or plays, but also podcasts, editorials and film.
Ultimately, it will be your job to respond to the problems that we read about both creatively and analytically: by creating a literary or artistic representation of a feminist utopia or dystopia, and by analyzing solutions that governments, NGOs and individual activists around the world have produced to address these problems. As a class, we will also consider what role we might play in responding through action in the real world such as service, fundraising or both.
This course is offered at Hawken School in the fall of 2010.
Using the summer reading, Nicholas Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn’s Half the Sky, as our springboard, we'll consider three major questions:
1. What is true about men's and women's bodies?
2. When is your body not your own?
3. What causes women's bodies to become battlegrounds?
In each of those units, we will study literary texts such as memoirs, short stories, articles or plays, but also podcasts, editorials and film.
Ultimately, it will be your job to respond to the problems that we read about both creatively and analytically: by creating a literary or artistic representation of a feminist utopia or dystopia, and by analyzing solutions that governments, NGOs and individual activists around the world have produced to address these problems. As a class, we will also consider what role we might play in responding through action in the real world such as service, fundraising or both.
This course is offered at Hawken School in the fall of 2010.
