• Gender Stable & Unstable: Case Studies in the Changing Meaning of Gender
Professor Ann Snitow, Committee on Gender Studies and Feminist Theory, The New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College

The equality-difference debates that are so central to feminist thought often turn on questions of fixed or unfixed identity. The politics of equality can make differences (for example, of gender or race) invisible while a politics that emphasizes difference can obscure important similarities, a dynamic that has played out in divergent ways and with very varied political effects. This course will survey a number of cases of what legal theorist Martha Minow has called “the dilemma of difference.” All politics configures an imagined constituency - but how? Examples will include: post-1989 East and Central Europe, where gender has been actively, aggressively renegotiated by a number of different actors; queer theory and debates about transsexual identity, in which some have claimed the right to fix a new identity as an essential freedom; legal discourses, past and present, in which states, international bodies (the United Nations, the European Union, or the World Bank), and social movements have all struggled to define what a progressive position on the meaning of gender would be and have often disagreed about how to shape a just and liberating gender-sensitive politics. We will look at a range of answers to the question of just how flexible and changeable gender is - or should be. Theoretical and practical discussions of gender stability and instability are rich, varied, agonistic, and suggestive for anyone interested in social change.

• Memory, Trauma, Genocide, Evil
Professors Carol L. Bernstein, English and Comparative Literature, Bryn Mawr College; Richard J. Bernstein, Philosophy, The New School for Social Research

In the second half of the twentieth century and the first years of the current century, philosophers and social scientists, psychologists and literary scholars, as well as journalists and poets, have encountered traumatic historical events and pursued new ways of thinking about them. Some of these new modes of thought, and the discourses they have engendered, will be the subject of this interdisciplinary course. We will pursue a line of inquiry about historical traumas and their relation to cultural/collective memory, their role in our understanding of genocide, and their relation to ideas/ theories of evil. The reading and discussion sessions will focus upon issue that are relevant to historical traumas in general, including but not limited to the Holocaust , the genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, and Darfur, and the decades of terror and military rule in Latin America. Thus when we examine cultural memory, we will explore the “wars” between memory and history as well as the role of individual testimony in constructing histories. The introduction of the term “genocide” as well as responses in the community of nations to actual genocides will be part of our discussions. We will explore theories of evil – and examine forms of resistance to terror, genocide and evil. The texts will include the work of philosophers (Arendt, Améry), psychoanalytic practitioners (Laub) and theorists (Caruth), historians (Friedländer, Assmann), journalists (Powers, Emcke), poets (Milosz) and other writers, sociologists and anthropologists. The texts will be supplemented with videos/DVDs.

• Political Culture, Then and Now
Professor Jeffrey Goldfarb, Department of Sociology, The New School for Social Research

In this course, the relationship between knowledge and power, politics and truth will be investigated. The starting point of the inquiry will be a close reading of two crucial texts, Hannah Arendt’s “Truth and Politics,” and Michel Foucault’s “Truth and Power.” These texts will be used to engage in a comparative historical inquiry into the problems of political culture. The comparative study will be between East Central Europe and the United States, as political culture has been defined in 1968, 1989 and 2001. Special consideration will be given to the constitution of political generations, and the problematics of transmission of political experience from one generation to the next. Each week of the course will be structured around what preceded the events of the year analyzed, and what followed, and the challenging connections between past and future.

The course has its roots in the history of TCDS, the East Central Europe Program and the Democracy Seminar. When these New School activities were first developed, our project was to cross the geopolitical divide in exploring the promise and problems of democracy. A theoretical and practical dialogue developed that was mutually respectful, in which the insights of those with experience in opposition to totalitarianism informed and were informed by those with theoretical insights drawn from experience in more open societies. This new course will continue these discussions, now between those who were informed by different key political moments in the recent past from a variety of different places. Now, as it was in the earlier moments of our work in the region, the dialogue between East Central Europe and North America will be used to explore an understanding of democracy and its problems in both regions and beyond (including specifically Western Europe and the Middle East).