515B NATION AND THE POLITICS OF FERTILITY AND SEXUALITY (2 or 4 hrs)

Professor Laura Bellows Office: 391 Davenport Hall; PH: 244-7459

lbellows@uiuc.edu

This course explores the impact of feminist scholarship on studies of nationalism in Asia, the result of which has been an efflorescence of work that attends to gender within nationalist ideologies, discourses and agendas.  This course takes the gendered nature of nationalist discourse as a point of departure to explore general issues around the construction of nations through control of subjects' bodies and fertilities and the specificity of these processes globally.

We will examine the particular attention states and state-like groups pay to sexuality within projects designed to shape nations through control of subjects' fertilities, such as in pro-natalist movements or family-planning campaigns.  This focus on sexuality and fertility entails considerable scholarly attention to the impact on women's reproductivity of particular nationalist projects.  In this course, we expand our view of what counts as sexuality to include an examination of how explicit rejections of conjugality play into nationalist debates, specifically monastic vows of celibacy, rejections of marriage, and preservation of virginity.

This course situates these conceptions of nation and nationalism within the context of scholarship devoted to colonial genealogies of race and nation and their deployment, expressed through the policing of gendered ethnic relations and modes of sexuality.  In addition to working through the multiple ways sexuality and fertility are implicated in the construction and delineation of nation in these discourses, this course takes a critical look at the place in these debates of erotic desire.  Following Anne Stoler's exploration of how particular desires are created through forecasts of the consequences of certain kinds of couplings and sexual behaviors, we will attend to the question of desire for the potential it has to augment our appreciation of post-colonial states' and religious groups' efforts to create nations and maintain control of subjects, but more than that, to determine who counts as a subject and how subjects will be (re)produced.

Over the course of the semester, students will be required to turn in a critical paper (1-2 pages) each week based on the readings.  At the end of the term, each student will complete a research paper (20-25 pages) on an approved topic of the students choosing.  Students may be asked to work in small groups to do an in-class presentation on one book from the recommended reading list and to collaborate on a one page overview to be handed out to the class during the presentation and used to prompt discussion.  Students may engage in short fieldwork projects under the rubric of the Ethnography of the University Project, results from which will contribute to their research papers.