A Barnard Canon

Quintessential works from a graduating senior. 

By Cecilia Zuniga 

Illustration by Ines Alto

Why do you think there are no men enrolled in this class? It is a Thursday at 10:10 a.m., and my professor splays this question across on the board as our weekly writing prompt. The class, titled Crime, Race, Sex, and the Politics of Purity, is a graduate level seminar in Barnard’s American Studies department. My classmates trickle into the room, each one pausing in the doorway to read the board; some giggle, and others look cautiously around the table, as if confronting the lack of men for the first time. We sit down and scribble furiously. 

There is an obvious answer, in that this is a Barnard course. We are at a historically women’s college, and therefore it could make sense that there are no men in this class (although I’ve had plenty with co-ed rosters). But our assigned reading of Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner’s “Sex in Public” takes the conversation elsewhere, towards the historical construction of the sexual sphere, tactfully derided as “irrelevant or merely personal.” American culture has detached sexuality from the public discourse and rendered our intimate lives as undeserving of political weight. Within our classroom, I cannot help but wonder if the lack of men speaks to a wider deprioritization of feminist scholarship and thought—suspended in a gendered ‘private’ sphere and continuously pushed off as too subjective, too personal. 

I’ve been thinking about endings recently. As I approach graduation in May, I am preemptively mourning spaces where intersectionality is an urgent and necessary analytic rather than an afterthought. The lineages of Black, Indigenous, and Third World feminism have most deeply anchored the stakes of my work at Barnard, defining my trajectory as both an American Studies student and a person. Yet even throughout my time here, I have found myself repeatedly disappointed by courses that cram feminist and queer interventions into a single week of discussion, often relegating Black radical feminism to the very end of the syllabus. What would’ve been a useful and liberatory tool in the beginning of the semester gets lost in the frantic dash to the end. This dynamic is magnified across the street, where it feels as though the mere presence of Barnard as a historically women’s college somehow absolves Columbia classrooms from centering intersectionality beyond a quick mention. But feminism is not a Barnard thing; it is not an outlier, nor an end-note. It is and must be the starting point.

At Barnard we do not have the Core. While most students read common works like Passing or “The Husband Stitch” in First Year Writing, we do not share a centralized curriculum throughout our four years here. I would argue, though, that an unofficial Barnard canon exists; in poems and essays that we routinely encounter; in films that are assigned and revered by many; in books that are cyclically referenced across humanities or WGSS courses. Craving reflection, I wanted to materialize these standout works into a list for myself, for underclassmen seeking some groundwork, and for seniors looking to bookmark anything they’ve missed. So, I have compiled below a non-exhaustive syllabus that would constitute my Barnard canon. It begins with the Combahee River Collective Statement, which declares that, “Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and work.” The list loosely follows this structure, starting inward with the self and radiating outwards towards community. As an American Studies major, I recognize that this list is both incomplete and highly subjective, with some works I’d label quintessential to the institutional experience of this College, and others as quintessential to me. But lately I've been thinking about endings, and how I wish all of us could start here.

The Combahee River Collective Statement 

Frances Beal, “Black Women’s Manifesto, Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female”

Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider, especially “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” and “The Uses of the Erotic”

June Jordan, “Poem about My Rights”

Gloria Anzaldúa, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”

Jamaica Kincaid, “Girl” 

Carmen Maria Machado, “The Husband Stich” 

Nzotnge Shange, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf

Nella Larsen, Passing 

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye & Sula 

Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” 

Joan Didion, “Why I Write”

Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues 

Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa ed., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color 

Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” 

Minna Salami, Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone 

bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectatorship”

Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”

But I’m a Cheerleader (1999)

Watermelon Woman (1996)

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)

Born in Flames (1983)

Paris is Burning (1990)

Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book (1987)”

Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography

Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts” & “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labor” 

Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World scale: Women in the International Division of Labour

Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag & “Globalisation and US Prison Growth: From Military Keynesianism to Post Keynesian Militarism” 

Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? & Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday

Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion

Johanna Fernandez, The Young Lords: A Radical History

Nadia Kim, Refusing Death

Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy

Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Sex in Public” 

Tithi Bhattacharya, “How Not To Skip Class: Social Reproduction of Labor and the Global Working Class”

Harsha Walia, Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism

Chandra Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity

Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower

Lauro Harjo, Spiral to the Stars: Mvskoke Tools of Futurity