EN270: Transnational Feminisms
2012-2013
Dr. Rashmi Varma
First Assessed Essay Topics
Essays due on the Tuesday of Week 2 of Term 2 by 12 pm.
Late submissions will incur a penalty of 5 marks per day.
Note: Please consult the Department website and/or the Student Handbook for guidance on essay submission and citations. Your essays must be 1.5 or double-spaced, with page numbers clearly marked. They should be properly stapled or the pages pinned together. Please also make note of the Departmental regulations on Plagiarism.
You are not required to do secondary research. For all bibliographic citations, primary and secondary, use the MLA Guidelines, a link to which is provided on the Department webpage for Undergraduate Studies.
Please save an electronic copy of your essay until final results are announced. You might also want to save it for future reference, or if you intend to study beyond the B.A. degree.
Write a 2,500-word essay on any one of the following topics:
1. Explore how Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark represents the relationship of women to the city as one that is structured by race, class and imperialism. You should draw on Anne McClintock’s essay “’Massa’ and Maids” to formulate at least some of your lines of argument.
2. Using the minor figure of Miss Gilby in Rabindranath Tagore’s Home and the World, explore the larger issue of the “white woman’s burden” as articulated by Antoinette Burton in her essay of that name. How did imperialism limit and open up the possibilities of feminist solidarity between white British and native Indian women?
3. Write an essay exploring the discursive overlap of women and nation in Tagore’s Home and the World and at least one other essay by either Partha Chatterjee and/or Kamala Visveswaran.
4. Consider how the theory of gendered labour/work alters when we look at it in a transnational context. Using the arguments and examples from either Mies and/or Mohanty, discuss how women’s work is represented in Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy.
5. Write an essay exploring how the literary form of Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands enables the text to represent the themes its purports to narrate.