Megan Little's Instructor Page

To take something as representative of a culture--that is a problem we're very familiar with. We are told to be wary of "stereotyping" groups, especially from flimsy evidence and two-dimensional caricatures in popular culture. But, when someone really wants to speak on behalf of a group, or tries to paint an account of certain experiences, why can't they "represent" a group?

Among other areas of literature and ethnography (recall Rosaldo), women's literature and feminist experimental forms of ethnography have made a point to play with traditional genres and forms of representing cultures. In this unit, we'll spend most of our time on Zora Neale Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, which, just like Mules and Men, received plenty of criticism in terms of its representation of African Americans. As we learned last unit, Hurston was both a trained anthropologist and someone committed to challenging the male-dominated traditions of her day. Let's read this novel together and decide what we think about it.

Next we move onto more contemporary ethnographic work, including selections from Ruth Behar's well-known The Vulnerable Observer and a very recent experiment with ethnography, Katie Stewart's Ordinary Affects. We'll also take a look at the film The Hours, loosely based around the life and work of Virginia Woolf.

If critiques of observation and representation have revealed the problems within these acts, what do we make of these attempts to find different ways to represent women's experiences?

Reading and Assignment Schedule

Paper prompt