PHGA 6203 French Feminism
Professor Ann Murphy
Spring 2008
Monday, 4:30–6:30 PM

Course Description: 

This course will be a survey of continental feminist theory, focused especially around the body of work known as French feminism. “French feminism” is a designation used in the Anglophone academic world to designate the work done by several philosophers in France, despite the fact many of the most renowned figures in French feminism, including Irigaray, Kristeva, and Cixous, are not French themselves.  The way in which French Feminism has been appropriated in the Anglophone academic world will be one issue under consideration in this course, and so our list of readings will include not only the seminal authors in French feminism, but several renowned Anglo-American critics as well.  As such, the course aspires to give participants an acquaintance with French feminism, but also an understanding of how French feminism relates to feminist theory more broadly construed.  Consequently, the course will consider not only French feminism’s foundational texts, but also the responses and criticisms of French feminism that have been offered by American philosophers, including Judith Butler, Iris Marion Young, and Drucilla Cornell.  Several themes under consideration will be:  the importance of sexed embodiment for our understanding of both morality and politics, the relationship between sex and gender, the problem of sexual difference and sexual essentialism, and the thematization of sexuality in both French feminism and certain criticisms of it.

The course will be historical in its trajectory, beginning with a substantial reading of the philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir, and continuing to examine the criticisms of her position that emerge in the work of Luce Irigaray, Michèle Le Doeuff, and Judith Butler, among others.  

Course Requirements:
Students will be required to prepare one in-class presentation and to participate in discussion. A 20-page research paper will be due at semester’s end.

Required Texts:
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference
Michèle Le Doeuff, The Philosophical Imaginary
*Articles in a course reader by Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler, Iris Marion Young, Kelly Oliver, Drucilla Cornell, Tina Chanter, Toril Moi, and others.