VIEW ALL COURSES

Readings

When you click the Amazon logo to the left of any citation and purchase the book (or other media) from Amazon.com, MIT OpenCourseWare will receive up to 10% of this purchase and any other purchases you make during that visit. This will not increase the cost of your purchase. Links provided are to the US Amazon site, but you can also support OCW through Amazon sites in other regions. Learn more.

This section contains documents that could not be made accessible to screen reader software. A "#" symbol is used to denote such documents.

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)