ANTH 2771 - GENDER AND THE STATE

Minimum Credits: 3
Maximum Credits: 3
This course will critically engage with scholarship that theorizes the relationship between gender and the state. We will discuss such topics as pronatalism as a form of governance, low birth society, the governmental regulation of sexuality, alternative economic practices, women's role in maintaining various forms of the commons, women's systemic mobilization to various genres of reproductive labor, and the reproductive justice movement. The course inquires whether we could think of declining fertility rates in the advanced capitalist world as both an effect and an expression of an enduring crisis in familial productivism, the social factory, and the prevalent system of wage labor, which no longer serves as fair mechanism of redistribution. We will examine governmental responses to these developments and feminist strategies to intervene in them. We will discuss how invisible labor is increasingly integrated into formal processes of capitalist accumulation through harnessing the unremunerated labor of communication and sociality especially in the service industries or through extracting surplus value from "the labor of love" in the context of reproduction. We will explore what forms of feminist activism and feminist politics emerge in the wake of chronic care deficit and women's growing unwillingness to assume the responsibility for filling in the void created by the neoliberal dismantling of the welfare state and, more recently, failures in the delivery of public services and breakdowns in global supply chains due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Academic Career: Graduate
Course Component: Seminar
Grade Component: Grad LG/SNC Basis

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