PHIL 272

PHIL 272: Feminist Philosophy
Instructor: Chloë Taylor

Course Description

This course will introduce students to 21st-century feminist philosophy, with a focus on three broad areas:

  1. Feminist subjectivity – from identity, difference, and intersectionality to affect, experience, sex and the body;
  2. Feminist texts – from language, writing, reading, and genre to poetics, archive and critique; and
  3. Feminism and the world – from the environment and planetary crisis to power, technology, migration, community, and the future.

Through texts and conversations on these and related topics, students will be introduced to central topics in contemporary feminist thought, and to feminist scholarship as it intersects with critical race theory, decolonial theory, Marxism, queer and critical trans theory, critical disability studies, and posthumanism. Students will be exposed to a variety of approaches to feminist philosophy, and to feminist interventions in a number of philosophical traditions, including existentialism, phenomenology, poststructuralism, deconstructionism, historical materialism, and new materialisms. 

This course will be taught in conjunction with WGS 332: Contemporary Feminist Theory.

Course Format:

This course will be delivered remotely and asynchronously. Each week students will be assigned to read three chapters from the textbook, and to watch or listen to a combination of three lectures and/or podcasts. These online teaching materials are being produced with the assistance of artists with skills in film, animation, and sound production as well as backgrounds in feminist theory. The podcasts will consist of interviews and conversations with the authors of the texts we are reading and/or with feminist philosophers working on the assigned and related topics. Although students will not have to attend lectures or tutorials or listen to podcasts at any pre-designated times in the day or week, they will be expected to keep up with assigned materials on a week-by-week basis, as evidenced by participation in weekly discussion forums, and essays submitted at three intervals throughout the semester. 

Textbook:

All readings for this course will be from The Bloomsbury Handbook of 21st-Century Feminist Theory (2021). This book is available as an eBook through the University of Alberta library. It is not necessary to purchase any textbooks for this course.

Course Requirements:

Students will write three essays of 5-6 pages over the course of the semester, each worth 25% of their final grade. One essay will be on a choice of topic related to feminist subjectivity, another essay will be on a choice of topic related to feminist texts, and a third essay will be on a choice of topic related to feminism and the world. The remaining 25% of students’ grades will be based on participation in weekly discussion forums.