Instr:                Gwynne Kennedy
Office:              CRT 423,     229-4637
e-mail:              gkennedy@uwm.edu
Office hours:    by appointment.

Course Information:                      MW  9:30-10:45am     CRT 466

Course Description

The course begins with a question: in what ways, if any, does gender affect the value, legitimacy, and modes of expressing anger?  Various societies at different historical moments have answered this question in contradictory ways.  In Renaissance England, for example, women were presumed to become angry more easily and more frequently than men, who were perceived as the more rational, controlled sex.  Some contemporary writers in the U.S. argue instead that women have more difficulty than men do in expressing their anger, because women are socialized to repress negative or hostile feelings.  Others claim that no gender-based difference in the frequency or expression of anger exists.

We will read contemporary discussions of anger and the emotions from philosophy, cultural anthropology, feminist theory, psychology, linguistics, and other disciplines.  The majority of the course will consider literary representations of women's anger in works by Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Fay Weldon, Ann Rule, Jane Smiley, and Alice Walker, among others writers.