Women in Power asks a deceptively simple question: what does it mean for women to have power—and how do literature, film, and popular culture make that power imaginable, desirable, troubling, or contested? Focusing on 20th- and 21st-century Britain (with a small number of carefully chosen exceptions), this course explores women’s authority across a broad spectrum: from institutional leadership and professional expertise to cultural visibility, intimate influence, and the power to shape narratives about oneself and others.
The seminar pursues two guiding perspectives throughout. First, we will examine representation: which figures of female authority circulate in modern culture (the leader, the expert, the celebrity, the “difficult woman,” the antiheroine), and what formal strategies texts use to stage power, e.g. through voice, focalization, genre conventions, or visual framing. Second, we will practice critique: how power operates as discourse and social practice, how it is gendered, and how it becomes entangled with norms, affect, and material environments.
Our theoretical toolkit will introduce key ideas from feminist theory, discourse and power (how institutions and cultural narratives authorize certain voices), affect theory (how feelings such as admiration, envy, fear, or desire structure responses to powerful women), and new materialism (how objects, bodies, spaces, and media technologies participate in producing agency). Primary materials will combine literary texts such as Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other with screen culture such as Todd Field’s film Tár (2022) or Netflix’s The Crown, which we will read alongside British examples to ask how authority is performed, contested, and mediated.
Designed as a first seminar after the introductory course, Women in Power offers structured training in close reading, conceptual work, and academic argumentation. Students will learn how to develop a clear interpretive claim, support it with textual and theoretical evidence, and engage productively in discussion across different media.
- Trainer/in: Susanne Bayerlipp