August 6, 2019

RESISTING INJUSTICE

Professors Carol Gilligan and David Richards

3-credit seminar, A-paper credit (2 credits if no A-paper)
Fall semester, 2019 (2 hours)
New York University School of Law

Course Outline and Readings

(fall semester)

Why do people resist injustice? Why does resistance succeed or fail? A

developmental psychologist (Gilligan) and constitutional lawyer (Richards) join forces to
discuss and explore with students the roots of ethical resistance in constitutional law and
human psychology. In doing so, we will consider the coincidence of the freeing of love
and ethical protest in the 1960’s, focusing on the civil rights and anti-war movements,
second wave feminism, and gay rights in the U.S., and their resonance in the
presidencies of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. We will consider as well the role of
laws that restrict love and resistance to these Love Laws in the U.S. and in Britain. The
seminar includes in its pedagogy experiments in freeing creative voice through writing
and theater exercises with other students, as well as a close study of history, life-history,
the rise of patriarchy, psychoanalysis, and selected novels and plays.

The subject matter, structure, and expectations for this seminar differ from the
norm; the seminar requires multiple short papers, working with other students in writing
and staging plays, regular attendance, and a long research A-paper for students receiving
A-paper credit or a 10-page final paper for other students. Students receiving A-paper
credit must submit a detailed outline of their final paper to the instructors by the middle
of the semester.

Class 1: The psychology and politics of ethical resistance

1. Carol Gilligan and David A.J. Richards, Darkness Now Visible: Patriarchy’s
Resurgence, and Feminist Resistance (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2018).

Optional background readings:

1. Carol Gilligan and David A.J. Richards, The Deepening Darkness:

Patriarchy, Resistance, and Democracy’s Future (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009)
2. The Crisis of Connection: Roots Consequences, and Solutions, edited by
Niobe Way, Alisha Ali, Carol Gilligan, and Pedro Noguera (NewYork:
New York University Press, 2018).

1
 Class 2: Patriarchy hiding in democracy:

1. Aeschylus, Oresteia, edited and translated by David R. Slavitt, Aeschylus, 1:

The Oresteia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998)
2. Short play written, staged, and played by instructors, “The Oresteia, an
interpretation of Clytemnestra (Gilligan), Agamemnon and Aegisthus
(Richards).
3. Mary Beard, Women & Power: a Manifesto (New York: Liveright
Publishing Corporation, 2017).

Class 3: Moral Injury

1. Carol Gilligan and Naomi Snider, Why Does Patriarchy Persist? (Cambridge,
U.K.: Polity, 2018).
2. Carol Gilligan, “Moral Injury and the Ethic of Care: Reframing the
Conversation about Differences,” Journal of Social Philosophy, Vol. 45,
Spring 2014, pp. 89-106 78 (on NYU My classes)

Optional background reading:

1. Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of
Character (New York: Scribner, 1994).

Class 4: Shame and violence:

1. James Gilligan, Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic (New York:

Vintage Books, Random House, 1997)

Class 5: Speaking in a different voice: resistance to war

1. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas annotated by Jane Marcus (Orlando: a Harvest

Book, 2006).
2. Virginia Woolf, “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid.” from Virginia Woolf,
Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid (London: Penguin, 2009), pp. 1-7 (on NYU
MyClasses)
3. Pat Barker, Regeneration (New York: Plume, 1991), pp. 3-27, 149-166 (on
NYU MyClasses)

Class 6: The evolutionary roots of empathy and cooperation, as the basis of ethics
and human development

1. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of

Mutual Understanding (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
2009) (Chapters 1, 6-9)

2
 2. Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan, Meeting at the Crossroads:
Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1992 (on NYUMyClasses)

Class 7: How patriarchy masks human relationality

1. Judy Chu, When Boys Become “Boys” (New York: N.Y.U. Press,
2013). (Gilligan foreword and chapter 5)
2. Niobe Way, Deep Secrets (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 2111)
3. Movie, “Moonlight” (2016) (available on Netflix)

Class 8: Resistance

1. Carol Gilligan, The Birth of Pleasure (New York: Vintage, 2003).

2. Samuel Beckett, Endgame (New York; Grove Press, 1958).
3. Student play, “Endgame, the end of patriarchy”

Class 9: Creative voice and resistance to the Love Laws: George Eliot, John
Stuart Mill, Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, Christopher Isherwood, Wystan
Auden, Bayard Rustin, James Baldwin, Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Mead, and
Ruth Benedict

1. David Richards, Why Love Leads to Justice: Love Across the Boundaries
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Suggested background reading:

Arundhati Roy; The God of Small Things (New York: HarperPerennial, 1997).

Class 10: Transgressive Voice in American Theater

1. Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire (New York: New

Directions Book, 1947).
2. Play to be written and staged by students, “A Streetcar Named Desire at
the millennium”

3. Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes

(New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2013).

Class 11: “Suddenly all the truth was coming out,” the 1960s

3
 1. Movie, Pete Seeger: The Power of Song (2007) (available on Netflix).
2. Movie, Sir, No Sir. (available on Netflix)
3. Robert Coles, ”Pioneer Youth: John Washington” from Robert Coles
Children of Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown, 2003), pp. 48-68, (on NYU MyClasses)
4. Betty Friedan, “The Problem that Has No Name,” from Betty Friedan, The
Feminine Mystique (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), pp. 57-78 (on NYU My
classes)
5. Daphne Merkin, “Sister Act (Betty Friedan),” from The Fame Lunches : On
Wounded Icons, Money, Sex, the Brontes, and the Importance of Handbags (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), pp. 322-332 (on NYU MyClasses)
6. Toni Morrison, “Recitatif” (on NYU My classess).

Class 12: The legacy of the 60s: Memory and Resistance

1. Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father (New York: Three Rivers

Press, 2004), also available as CD, audiobook, read by Obama.
2. August Wilson, Jitney (New York: Samuel French, 2002).

Class 13: Trauma and Manhood:

1.David A.J. Richards, Boys’ Secrets and Men’s Loves: a Memoir

(Xlibris: Bloomington, In., 2019).

Class 14: Audacious Love

1. Movie, Phantom Thread (2017) (available on Netflix);

2. Carol Gilligan, “In a Different Voice: Act II” (On NYU MyClasses)

3. Student play, “The Oresteia 2019”

Additional Suggested films:

First Reformed (2018)

BlacKkKlansman (2018)

4
5