Engendering the Modern Subject

by Deepti Chatti, Isabel Ortiz, Aaron Tobey

Engendering the Modern Subject (WGSS 737) is a new graduate seminar taught by Eda Pepi. The course theorizes and historicizes dominant ideas of modern selfhood so as to challenge the self-professed universality of principles such as progress, individualism, freedom, and reason that continue to structure liberal democracy today. We do so by re-inscribing the liberal modern subject with textual and temporal specificity as constituted through “classic” texts of post-Enlightenment Europe by Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Rousseau, and others. By reading these texts alongside their feminist, critical race, and postcolonial critiques, we examine how the white, male, rational European humanist subject that haunts both dominant political formations and efforts to resist them is, in fact, contingent on the construction and othering of alternative subjectivities which it is never fully able to come to terms with through force or intellect. We have discussed the relationship between kinship and the state, traced the origins of the Cartesian subject, and explored the implications of social contract theory for institutions like marriage and employment. In its first semester, Engendering the Modern Subject has drawn an intimate group of graduate students representing a broad range of disciplinary backgrounds including American Studies, Environmental Studies, Architectural Studies, and Anthropology.