Women’s & Gender Studies

This course offers an in-depth exploration of human sensibilities, tastes, and desires through an interdisciplinary lens, incorporating readings from cultural studies, anthropology, history, literature, journalism, and critical theory. In its earlier iterations, the course focused primarily on the concept of " beauty," not merely as an object but as a site for examining the politics surrounding its definitions and manifestations. In this revised version, the course integrates a critical analysis of new media's role and its profound impact on human conditions and social life. We live in an age saturated with media that function as powerful tools for producing, disseminating, and consuming the information, images, and ideas that shape both the tangible and intangible aspects of culture. The emergence of new media has transformed how we connect with one another, communicate, and interact as members of society. The course begins by delving into a recent viral phenomenon: the intersection of fandom culture and K-democracy, offering a compelling case study on how media reshapes collective identity and social activism. The course is divided into four sections: Section 1 Fandom Culture and K-democracy, Section 2 The Girl and Beauty: Conformity, Recalcitrance, and Negotiation, Section 3 Ethnic Markers and Aesthetic Standards, and Section 4 Back to K-culture and Politics of Beauty.

The course discusses contemporary U.S. American graphic memoirs, exploring how comics serve as a powerful medium for autobiographical storytelling. It examines how artists narrate personal and intimate experiences through the interplay of image and text. Students analyze how image and text work together to visualize trauma, self-representation, memory, and resilience—and learn what makes the comic medium such an affective space for narrating stories of illness, displacement, queerness, race, and coming of age. The exploration focuses on both the form and content of these works, analyzing how issues of gender, class, and race are portrayed within these narratives and how they engage with broader U.S. American cultural, social, and political contexts. Readings include a diverse range of voices and styles, from graphic memoirs like Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, to more recent works by George Takei, Cece Bell, Nora Krug, and Kindra Neely. As part of the course, students have the opportunity to create their own short graphic memoirs, using accessible tools such as Making Comics by Lynda Barry, Canva, or StoryboardThat. This activity is planned to invite students to experiment with visual storytelling and reflect on their own experiences—no artistic background or drawing skills required.

This course examines gender in the global context. It focuses on gender relations as a subject of economic thought and analysis and explores the ways in which contemporary gendered patterns of employment, production, distribution and exchange have been shaped historically and institutionally.

This course examines a range of issues, debates and understandings of human sexuality from a primarily social psychological perspective. 

This course centralizes the use of feminist legal theory as a serious mode of inquiry into analyzing law, legal reasoning, and legal reform. It studies four dominant strands of contemporary feminist legal theory, including liberal feminism, Marxist feminism, critical race feminism, and postmodern feminism in queer theory. While this course focuses on common law-based perspectives of feminism, it uses these diverse terrains of feminist legal thought in order to analyze challenges and various areas in social and public discourse internationally. Thus, while the first part of the course is dedicated to acquiring the useful knowledge and background of strands of feminism, the second part of the course creatively applies these tools in practical areas of sex equality issues in employment, consent, abortion, transgender rights, prostitution, and pornography.

This seminar introduces feminist theories that aim to decentralize the predominantly English-speaking discourse on feminism. It includes texts written in languages other than English or French, with a focus on German-speaking and Latin American feminist works. Decentralization is understood broadly: The course examines feminist perspectives from the peripheries, such as rural areas in contrast to urban centers, and the global south in contrast to the global north. Through these diverse viewpoints, the seminar seeks to expand the understanding of feminism beyond dominant frameworks and critically explore intersections of gender, race, and class.

This course focuses on how gender is socially, economically, and politically constructed in the community/society and how gender matters in addressing development. The course also addresses the kinds of policy and project interventions to achieve sustainable development and gender equalities.

This course examines politics and political science using a feminist analysis and a gendered lens. The course looks at the gendered nature of politics and examines topics including women in politics, gendered institutions, gender power, political leadership through a gendered lens and mechanisms to address the under-representation of women in political life.

Literature is deeply embedded within socio-cultural context. This elect course focuese on the multi-dimensional intersection between literary studies, feminist literary critique, and western social hisotry, to emphasize the impact of literature on social development by way of examining women's relationship to reading and writing in a broad historical spectrum. Methodologies involved include literary and cultural analysis, feminist movments, and critical understanding and discussion on issues of women and family, marriage, motherhood, education, social engagement, intellectual history, and agency.