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Journal of Women's History 15.3 (2003) 118-123



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In the Classroom
Gender, Genre, and Political Transformation—An Interdisciplinary Graduate Research Seminar

Mary Jo Maynes


Introduction: Teaching Feminisms, Feminist Teaching

One of the most exciting developments to grow out of women's history has been scholarship that uses a gender perspective to reinterpret political history. Within this growing field, analyses of gender and political ideology, women's forms of political participation, and the transformation of gender relations during moments of political upheaval have been especially provocative. Gender relations in the age of transatlantic revolutions, for example, have been the subject of rich interdisciplinary and comparative research. Historians have used literature, art, and public iconography, as well as more traditional historical sources, as windows into the ways in which republican ideology and movements utilized gender symbols and metaphors in Europe and the Americas. Questions of gender and citizenship that had their roots in this first modern age of revolutions have remained central to political developments in Europe and the Americas to the present day.

Feminist scholarship has also transformed the social-scientific study of social movements and revolutions. Moments of political transformation are points at which underlying structures and assumptions in a society are made particularly visible, including the routine operations of gender. The intersections of gender with class and race define coalitional opportunities for social movements, provoke controversies within dissident groups, and spur widening critiques of the social order at large. Attention to gender has also prompted greater awareness of how the boundary between public and private is negotiated and shifting, and also of the changing definition of "the political."

Moreover, questions of historical and contemporary feminist politics are of keen interest in feminist literary critical analysis of writings by women, where the focus is on the often indirect ways in which socially critical texts by women—particularly before the twentieth century—present their critiques. Literary analysis underscores the operation of gender in the various genres of political and socially critical writing. Aspects of women's writing reveal tensions between public and private that have a particularly strong impact on the expression of political claims and on forms of involvement of women in political action. [End Page 118]

These three disciplinary perspectives on gender and politics—women's/gender history, political sociology, and literary analysis—were the basis of an interesting and productive experiment in interdisciplinary graduate pedagogy. In spring 2002, sixteen students and four faculty members from two universities participated in a research seminar entitled "Gender, Genre, and Political Transformation in Germany and the Transatlantic World, 1789 to 1989." The seminar's focus was on women's history, women's political organizations, and women's writing during key moments of political upheaval in the transatlantic realm between the French Revolution and the "Wende" of 1989. The seminar was sponsored by the joint University of Minnesota/University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for German and European Studies.

The faculty included Ruth-Ellen Joeres, a literary scholar in Minnesota's Department of German, Scandinavian and Dutch; Myra Marx Ferree, of Wisconsin's Department of Sociology; myself (I am in Minnesota's History Department) and, for part of the semester, Ute Gerhard, a legal theorist and sociologist at the University of Frankfurt who was at the time a visiting professor at Wisconsin. The faculty members are all scholars who study German history, literature, or society, and the course content reflected that focus. With support from the Center, we were able to commission translations of key works of German women's history, records of feminist political organizations, and women's writing in various genres. This meant that we could invite a broad range of students to participate without restricting ourselves to readers of German and still use the German case as our starting point for comparative discussions.

The students, as the faculty had hoped and anticipated, were drawn from a wide range of disciplines, even beyond those represented among the faculty. The group included historians, sociologists, and literary scholars in roughly equal numbers, but also, students of public policy and political science. Serendipitously, the...

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