WMST488X

Why can't we all just get along? This seminar will offer an opportunity to delve into the history, and the present, of conflict and disagreement within feminist movements including the ongoing legacy of the 1980s clashes over porn and BDSM known as the sex wars, women of color and trans critiques of white cis feminist exclusion, and responses to abuse within social justice movements. Rather than seeing conflict as a failure to achieve goals of unity and progress, we will take feminisms fractures a nd disputes as opportunities to study how power and difference operate in struggles for social transformation. We will also ask what it might mean for conflict itself to be feminist. How can we apply feminist principles of justice and care in the most fraught situations, without eliding the structural issues that lead conflicts to develop?