GS/LT 336 - Gender, Sexuality and Race in Neerlandophone Literature

This literature course introduces students to Dutch literature from the seventeenth century to the present. It offers a wealth of highlights of Dutch literature in relation to women’s writing, gender, race and sexuality, while contextualizing these themes in the society and history of the Low Countries. Women authors have always contributed to Dutch literature, but their position and significance has been systematically occluded. Students will learn to analyze this paradox by reading works of women writers and by studying the mechanisms of (literary) history-writing. They will study, analyze, and discuss gendered readings of Dutch literature, as well as several works in which sexuality is a theme. Primary texts include Raden Adjeng Kartini’s Letters of a Javanese princess (1912), Astrid Roemer’s On a Woman’s Madness (1982), Anja Meulenbelt’s Shame is Over (1976), as well as contemporary work of young women authors.

Students will also be introduced to classic theories and concepts for the critical analysis of gender patterns, such as Binary Oppositions, Performativity, Intersectionality, and Ecofeminism. Although these theories have been developed in Literary Studies, they can and will be used accordingly for the analysis of visual art, film, the new media, and culture at large. We promise that this course will offer students a compelling new perspective on their lives in relation to that of other people in the Netherlands, the US, and the world.

Students will have the opportunity of studying in Amsterdam, the literary center of the Low Countries from the seventeenth century to the present, and will thus come to appreciate the environment in which the works examined were composed. Two guest lecturers, a specialist of the 17th century and a children’s book author, will share their expertise with the students. In addition to seminar lectures and discussions, students will visit museums and Amsterdam’s literary sites, such as the Wereldmuseum and Atria, Institute on Gender Equality and Women's History.