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Identity and Difference >> Content Detail

Study Materials

Readings

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This section features the course's main texts and a more specific list of readings by session. All readings were required. Please see related resources for a supplementary list of relevant news stories.

Required Books

Goffman, Erving. Stigma. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963. (Available as: Goffman, Erving. Stigma. Reissue ed. New York, NY: Touchstone, 1986. ISBN: 9780671622442.)

Lazarre, Jane. Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997. ISBN: 9780822320449.

Rhodes, Lorna A. Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004. ISBN: 9780520240766.

Readings by Session

Course readings.
SES #	TOPICS	READINGS
I. Theoretical perspectives
1	Introduction	Bentham, Jeremy. "Of the Principle of Utility." In The Principles of Morals and Legislation [1789]. Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1988. ISBN: 9780879754341. Jefferson, Thomas. The Declaration of Independence, 1776.
2	Essentialist theories	Davis, Natalie Zemon. "Boundaries and the Sense of Self in Sixteenth-Century France." In Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought. Edited by Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna, and David E. Wellbery. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987, pp. 53-63. ISBN: 9780804712910. Kramer, Heinrich, and James Sprenger. The Malleus Maleficarum [1486]. Translated and edited by Montague Summers. New York, NY: Dover Publications, 1971, pp. 41-48, 117-118, and 75-78. ISBN: 9780486228020. The e-text is also available. Stolke, Verena. "Invaded Women." In Women, "Race" and Writing in the Early Modern Period. Edited by Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker. New York, NY: Routledge, 1993, pp. 272-286. ISBN: 9780415077781. Kapsalis, Terri. "Mastering the Female Pelvis: Race and the Tools of Reproduction." In Public Privates: Performing Gynaecology from Both Ends of the Speculum. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997, pp. 31-59. ISBN: 9780822319214. Geddes, Patrick, and J. Arthur Thompson. The Evolution of Sex. London, UK: Walter Scott, Ltd., 1895, excerpt. (Available as: Geddes, Patrick, and J. Arthur Thompson. The Evolution of Sex. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, LLC, 2006. ISBN: 9781428628267.) Gould, Stephen J. "Measuring Bodies." In The Mismeasure of Man. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co., 1996, pp. 113-145. (Available as the revised, expanded edition, 1996. ISBN: 9780393314250.) Gordon, Linda. "Social Purity and Eugenics." In The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America. New York, NY: Penguin, 1974, pp. 116-135. (Available as The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2002. ISBN: 9780252027642.)
3	Structural theories	Durkheim, Emile. "The Anomic Division of Labor," and "The Forced Division of Labor." In The Division of Labor in Society [1893]. Translated from the French by George Simpson. New York, NY: The Free Press, 1997, pp. 353-388. ISBN: 9780684836386. Merton, Robert. "Social Structure and Anomie." In Deviant Behavior: A Text-Reader in the Sociology of Deviance. 5th ed. Edited by Delos H. Kelly. New York, NY: Worth Publishers, 1995, pp. 117-127. ISBN: 9780312119416. Derné, Steve. "Beyond Institutional and Impulsive Conceptions of Self: Family Structure and the Socially Anchored Real Self." Ethos 20, no. 3 (1992): 259-288. Merry, Sally Engle. "Rethinking Gossip and Scandal." In Toward a General Theory of Social Control. Vol. 1. Edited by Donald Black. Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1984, pp. 271-302. ISBN: 9780121028022.
4	Constructivist theories: Social interaction	Mead, George Herbert. Mind, Self and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist [1934]. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1967, excerpt. ISBN: 9780226516684. Goffman, Erving. Stigma.
5	Constructivist theories: Discourse, performance, and fractured identities	Hall, Stuart. "The Work of Representation." In Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London, UK: Sage Publications, 1997, pp. 15-56. ISBN: 9780761954323. Skim the sections marked "Activity." Skip sections marked "Reading" as well as sections 2.2, 3.1, and 4.4. Kondo, Dorinne. Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990, excerpt. ISBN: 9780226450445. Lei, Joy L. "(Un)Necessary Toughness?: Those 'Loud Black Girls' and Those 'Quiet Asian Boys." Anthropology & Education Quarterly 34, no. 2 (2003): 158-181.
II. Case studies
6	Gender: Conformity and/or deviance	Lorber, Judith. "'Night to his Day': The Social Construction of Gender." Chapter 1 in Paradoxes of Gender. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994. ISBN: 9780300058079. Reused in Seeing Gender: Tools for Change. (PDF)^# Weston, Kath. "Production as Means, Production as Metaphor: Women's Struggle to Enter the Trades." In Uncertain Terms: Negotiating Gender in American Culture. Edited by F. Ginsburg and A. Tsing. Boston: Beacon Press, 1991, pp. 137-151. ISBN: 9780807046128. Lucal, Betsy. "What it Means to Be Gendered Me: Life on the Boundaries of a Dichotomous Gender System." Gender and Society 13, no. 6 (1999): 781-797. And 2 of the following: Bordo, Susan. "Anorexia Nervosa: Psychopathology as the Crystallization of Culture." In Food and Culture: A Reader [1985]. Edited by Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik. New York, NY: Routledge, 1997, pp. 226-250. ISBN: 9780415917100. Tsing, Anna. "Monster Stories: Women Charged with Perinatal Endangerment." In Uncertain Terms: Negotiating Gender in American Culture. Edited by Faye Ginsburg and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1991, pp. 282-299. ISBN: 9780807046128. Kendall, Lori. "'Oh No! I'm a Nerd!': Hegemonic Masculinity on an Online Forum." Gender and Society 14, no. 2 (2000): 256-274. Pyke, Karen D., and Denise L. Johnson. "Asian American Women and Racialized Femininities: 'Doing' Gender Across Cultural Worlds." Gender and Society 17, no. 1 (2003): 33-53. Barrees, Ben A. "Does Gender Matter?" Nature 442 (July 2006): 133-136.
7	Race: From biology to culture and back again	Pascoe, Peggy. "Miscegenation Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies of 'Race' in Twentieth-Century America." In Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women's History. 3rd ed. Edited by Vicki L. Ruiz and Ellen Carol DuBois. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999, pp. 161-182. ISBN: 9780415925174. Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. "Racial Formation." In Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Routledge, 1994, 53-76. ISBN: 9780415908641. Smedley, Audrey. "'Race' and the Construction of Human Identity." American Anthropologist 100, no. 3 (1999): 690-702. Pollock, Mica. "Race Bending: 'Mixed' Youth Practicing Strategic Racialization in California." Anthropology & Education Quarterly 35, no. 1 (2004): 30-52. Rotimi, Charles N. "Genetic Ancestry Tracing and the African Identity: A Double-Edged Sword?" Developing World Bioethics 3, no. 2 (2003): 151-158. View: "Beyond the Middle Passage" episode of the PBS miniseries African-American Lives (February 2006).
8	Race: What we learn from our mothers, and vice versa	Carothers, Suzanne. "Catching Sense: Learning from our Mothers to be Black and Female." In Uncertain Terms: Negotiating Gender in American Culture. Edited by Faye Ginsburg and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1991, pp. 232-247. ISBN: 9780807046128. Lazarre, Jane. Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness.
9	Psychopathology and incarceration	Durkheim, Emile. "The Normal and the Pathological." In Deviant Behavior: A Text-Reader in the Sociology of Deviance . 5th ed. Edited by Delos H. Kelly. Worth Publishers, 1995, pp. 59-63. ISBN: 9780312119416. Conrad, Peter. "The Discovery of Hyperkinesis: Notes on the Medicalization of Deviant Behavior." Social Problems (October 1975): 12-21. (Reprinted in Deviant Behavior: A Text-Reader in the Sociology of Deviance . 5th ed. Edited by Delos H. Kelly. Worth Publishers, 1995, pp. 37-47. ISBN: 9780312119416.) Rhodes, Lorna. Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004, pp. 1-159.
10	Religion	Harding, Susan. "Convicted by the Holy Spirit: The Rhetoric of Fundamental Baptist Conversion." American Ethnologist 14, no. 1 (1987): 167-181. Jacobson, Shari. "Modernity, Conservative Religious Movements and the Female Subject: Newly Ultraorthodox Sephardi Women in Buenos Aires." American Anthropologist 108, no. 2 (2006): 336-346. Boelllstorff, Tom. "Between Religion and Desire: Being Muslim and Gay in Indonesia." American Anthropologist 107, no. 4 (2005): 575-585. Rouse, Carolyn, and Janet Hoskins. "Purity, Soul Food, and Sunni Islam: Explorations at the Intersection of Consumption and Resistance." Cultural Anthropology 19, no. 2 (2004): 226-249. View: Devil's Playground. Directed by Lucy Walker, 2002. (Listen to the NPR Morning Edition report about the film.)
11	Food	Fischler, Claude. "Food, Self and Identity." Social Science Information 27, no. 2 (1988): 275-292. Meigs, Anna. "Food as a Cultural Construction." In Food and Culture: A Reader [1985]. Edited by Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik. New York, NY: Routledge, 1997, pp. 95-106. ISBN: 9780415917100. Counihan, Carole M. "Food Rules in the United States: Individualism, Control, and Hierarchy." In The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning and Power. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999, pp. 113-128. ISBN: 9780415921930. Pollan, Michael. "Our National Eating Disorder." The New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004. Paxson, Heather. "Slow Food in a Fat Society: Satisfying Ethical Appetites." Gastronomica 5, no. 1 (2005): 14-18.
12	Student presentations	(no readings)

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