A survey of several feminist frameworks for thinking about gender, sex, sexuality, race, class, and oppression including a consideration of the ways in which gender has left its mark on literary history and culture. For example: Prof. A. Lyon, American Feminist Theory Feminist theory is fun, funny, even necessary for everyday life, but to own it, you do have to read, write, and discuss it. In this course, focused on the quest for gender justice, we will read feminist theory also a few poems, a short story, a speech or two but mostly we'll read American feminist theory. We will start with key figures in the nineteenth century and work our way through the twentieth century. I will try not to overwhelm you with abstraction, but rather try to give you speculative instruments to help to you see more in a reading, event or pattern than you would see without the lens of feminist theory.