The header image for my Feminist Philosophy syllabus is collaged from two paintings by Mexican painter Diego Rivera. The first, Man at the Crossroads, depicts the creative power of humanity emerging from the history and structure of society. A single person stands at the center, focusing the many spheres of society on their individual ability to understand and transform the world. In the original, the central figure is a light-skinned and blond-haired man who reflects Rivera’s patriarchal and white supremacist worldview, wherein white men pretend to represent humanity. Above, I have replaced this central figure with a different subject from one of Rivera’s portraits: Frida Kahlo, a Mexican painter and feminist thinker who challenged traditional gender roles and blazed an imaginative path of her own. Placing Frida at the center of the mural complicates the title Rivera ultimately gave to the painting Man, Controller of the Universe. Frida was an icon of freedom, exemplifying humanity’s creative power to go beyond controlling the world towards re-inventing it. And the ease with which Frida wears the clothes of creation suggests that we all may and must assume the same responsibility, bearing the weight of the past as we create the future. What worlds will we and Frida create with this power? What new ways of being human and living gender will those worlds empower? And what made us into who we are today, standing at the crossroads of history?
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The Course Description and Learning Philosophy sections of the syllabus expand on these ideas and explain my teaching pedagogy. The course schedule of readings includes a brief description of the motivating questions and key ideas for each week, summarizing the trajectory of the content in the course. In these accompanying notes, I want to make a few framing remarks and describe how we approached the course material in the classroom.
Course Overview
I had the honor of teaching this course in the Fall 2023 and Spring 2024 semesters at Hunter College of the City University of New York (CUNY) during my Ph.D. candidacy at Stanford. Hunter is a public institution that brings together students from across the five boroughs of New York City and beyond. We are blessed with brilliant and engaged students who draw on a wealth of diverse life experiences. At the same time, as a public university, many of our students must balance academics with work and personal responsibilities. Within this community, I designed my course to challenge students intellectually and empower them to shine by grounding the course topics in the history of gender.
I am pleased to report that the course was a success in both semesters. Qualitatively, every class was full of critical discussion, my students and I both grew intellectually and personally, and the final papers I received were the most creative and sophisticated of any course I have taught (several becoming a part of students’ honors thesis work). Quantitatively, thirty total student evaluations over two semesters rated the overall quality of the course as 9.4/10. I believe our ability to successfully engage with such intellectually and personally challenging material was greatly facilitated by a multimodal classroom structure.
Classroom Structure
Most of each class was structured as full class seminar. We usually began with a journaling prompt asking us to connect a historical shape of gender with our present-day experiences. We would then share a selection of these responses and reflect on them as a class. This process resulted in an approach to each week’s material that remained grounded in the students’ ideas. For example, in response to a journaling prompt concerning the Greeks’ one-sex model of gender described by Thomas Lacqueur (week 4), one class connected the political and ontological Greek exclusion of women and the erasure of lesbianism to contemporary sex education and broader medical practices. They argued that these also erase the specificity of female, gender non-conforming, queer, and racialized bodies by pretending as if cis-heterosexual-white-male-bodied experiences were the only variety of sexuality or biology.
I would encourage these conversations towards the central questions of the philosophical texts for the day. For each text, I chose specific selections that presented a core dimension of the author’s argument. This allowed us to unpack the author’s ideas in relation to a shared picture of gender and empowered my students to build the author’s theory up collectively, rather than receiving it ready-made. For example, instead of presenting Carole Pateman’s critique of the sexual contract by itself (week 7), we also explored Indigenous practices of democracy and compared them to the European-settler model (week 8), developing our own critique of the social contract and drawing on Pateman to sharpen and deepen these ideas.
This method enabled the students to see the major thinkers of feminist philosophy as interlocutors in a dialogue about problems that mattered for their own relation to gender, rather than as interesting or famous theories to be passively received. It also highlighted students’ disagreements with the thinkers, providing them with a basis to critically evaluate the feminist canon. For example, our careful attention to Catholic gender practices enabled my students to both appreciate the power of and suggest the limits to Silva Federici’s economic explanation of modern misogyny (week 6). One group called our attention to the spiritual rather than economic roots of witch hunts, highlighting the cultural as well as economic dynamics in modern-day witch hunts against women, trans people, Black men, and immigrants.
In addition, each week included media selections (usually from film), which I screened as a basis for our in-class discussion. I believe that the concreteness of media really empowered my students to relate to and engage with material that may have otherwise seemed distant or overly theoretical. Some media selections displayed the historical time period under question, as the clips from Harriet displayed the complexity of Black American womanhood (week 10). Others embodied or expressed philosophical concepts. The class on modernity and psychoanalysis (week 12) included both. First, I played a clip from Kinsey that illustrated the rise of sexual sciences to contextualize Foucault’s historical story. I then began the second half of class with a pairing of clips from two of the Wachowski sisters’ Matrix films which exemplified the juridical and productive models of power. These clips enabled my students to understand Foucault’s complex and abstract arguments through concrete visual examples, providing them with a common ground on which to discuss and evaluate his claims about the history of power and the structure of modern gender.
During many of these classes, we engaged in small group discussion exercises which asked the students to develop feminist ideas in closer dialogue with their personal lives and histories. In general, these exercises involved four steps. First, students would write a journal about their own experiences with a topic or concept. Next, they shared and reflected on their experiences to develop a common set of ideas and questions about the topics. Finally, they brought these questions to the text and presented a critical or creative analysis of the author’s position to the class. For our class on debt and feminist internationalism (week 13), I asked students to reflect on the way debt has shaped their lives, compare how these experiences are similar and different across their intersecting identities, and imagine how the feminist-internationalist strategies of refusal and democratic assembly that Verónica Gago presents might be adapted and applied to their own communities.
Final Note
Finally, I would like to note one limitation of the course. While we dedicated significant time to critical perspectives on Western history, including multiple weeks dedicated to Black and Indigenous theories and histories, the overall narrative was centered on the gender and philosophical histories of Europe and North America. The absence of non-Western gender histories risks suggesting that Western gender developed autochthonous and autonomously from the rest of the world. This would be a serious error, hiding a history of global dialogue and interconnection. If I teach the course again, I’m not sure exactly how I would overcome this limitation while preserving a manageable selection of content. But stay tuned for my “Global Feminist Philosophy of World Gender History” year-long dream course to come.
I hope that these remarks are helpful and that you find my syllabus inspiring. You are welcome to reach out to me via the email on the syllabus for directions to any of the course materials or if you would like to discuss the class structure or course ideas.
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P.B. Hope
P.B. Hope (they/them) is a PhD Candidate at Stanford University. They teach classes in Feminist Philosophy, Critical Race Theory, and Women & Gender Studies. Their research works to sharpen our understanding of what social structures are, what it means for them to be unjust, and how we ought to respond to structural injustice. They specialize in critical theoretical approaches to gendered, racialized, and economic social structures and injustices.
