210111 VO M8: Social Theory for Politics: Class, Gender, Sexuality and Race (2024W)

LANGUAGE: English

Social categories are necessary to make sense of politics. Categories such as class, race, gender, and sexuality, however, are not fixed, and are themselves the objects and subject of extensive theorizing, debate, and political action.

This seminar will focus on exceptional social theorists and social philosophers, each of whom lies outside narrow disciplinary boundaries, and whose ideas have profoundly influenced political theory, and actually-existing politics.

To that end, the goal of this course is to read and critically reflect on primary texts of figures like Karl Marx, Franz Fanon, Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu, and more contemporary work by scholars on gender and sexuality, such as Judith Butler, Patricia Hill Collins, Maria Lugones, and Akwugo Emujulu, whose ideas lie in critical dialogue with earlier foundational thinkers. A strong focus of the course will be on questions of human universal essence, versus anti-metaphysical accounts of the human; and relatedly, on the deeply complex question of embodiment (the sexed body, the racialized body), which have become ever-more prominent in contemporary politics.

The course expects students to read these thinkers' work directly, rather than only confront them in their simplified form through a university lecture. There are no secondary texts assigned, only primary texts by the thinkers themselves.