Critical Race Theory Research Papers (original) (raw)

This course takes eco-feminist and critical race studies approaches to the anthropology of gender and sexuality, taking “eco-feminism” as an identity, an object of analysis, and as a methodological approach. While “Feminism” in practice need not be (though often is) gender-specific, as a political and academic practice it often carries racialized inflections towards its objects of its inquiry as well as its activism. The term, “eco”, from the Greek “oikos,” means “dwelling,” “household,” “home,” or “family”, laying the foundation for examining the roles that gender and sexuality play in changing forms of kinship, citizenship, and (environmental) politics beyond and within the concept of the human. These different meanings of the “eco” in eco-nomy and eco-logy shape scholarly analyses as well as the lived experiences for those do not feel “at home” in a white hetero-normative structure. In investigating the intersections and interconnections of gender and sexuality with race, ethnicity, and class, we will consider “eco’s” various forms and how humans come to think about the concept of “home.” An overarching question for this course revolves around whether, if, or when, one should separate environmental justice from social justice – and what the possibilities and limits are to fusing naturecultures (Haraway). The readings will cover classic anthropological approaches, current critical theory and philosophy, as well as less-often-read scholars whose voices often fall between the lines – or at the margins of – mainstream academic discourse. This is an attempt both to decolonize the syllabus as well as show how thoughts and bodies, as well as body politics become colonized. What does it mean to decolonize bodies through words? How can language create and maintain (earth) body politics? How has the concept of “home” – the “eco” continued to structure ideas about who and what bodies may chose to, or be let, to live? How do notions of “home” and what is “normal” gain their gendered, sexualized, racialized texture? What does it mean to “be at home in one’s own body?” When it comes to people’s choices about their bodies, it is crucial to understand how certain human and nonhuman bodies and lives matter, and how others do not. The fundamental anthropological divisions of “nature” and “culture” frame how we think about what it means to be human as well as what it means “to be free to choose” what we do with our bodies. Authors include Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Gloria Anzaldúa, along with Andrea Smith, and Winona LaDuke. We will read these authors along with Marilyn Strathern, Donna Haraway, Gayle Rubin, Judith Butler, Friedrich Engels, and the Gender Nihilists, to name a few.