WGSS 205 - South Asian Women in the World

Credits: 4

This course is designed to expose students to South Asian social and cultural contexts through identifying the variety of community issues related to the lives of women in and from this part of the world. With onefifth of the world’s population, South Asia plays an increasingly important role in recent global transformations, resulting in fundamental changes within both the subcontinent and the larger world. While entangled in multiple political, economic, and social conflicts, women of these countries struggle within historical, ethnographic, and cultural contexts. They are likewise engaged in multiple struggles for resistance and survival, seeking to transform women’s roles within their traditional societies. This course will examine women’s diverse places and roles in those societies, focusing on their everyday lives, enmeshed in webs of power, and seeking to enrich students’ understandings of women’s lives within particular traditional cultures. We will watch films, read fiction and explore scholarly studies focused on the issues that women are dealing with in their families in South Asia as well as in Western diasporic communities, in an effort to understand broader issues of gender and sexuality. Offered yearly.