Women’s & Gender Studies

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.  

This course addresses gender and sexuality in healthcare contexts. The course provides a basis for understanding health from interdisciplinary social science perspectives, drawing in the ways gender and sexuality play important roles for understanding and shaping healthcare experiences. Issues around gender, sexualities and health are intimately shaped by social, cultural, political and economic forces; they are contemporary issues with ongoing debates around the globe concerning rights, justice, activism, and access to services, all of which can be examined using the lens of sex and gender. The course is delivered by a multi-disciplinary team of experts within the School of Health in Social Science, and introduces students to social scientific approaches to exploring issues around gender, sexualities and health. The course draws on the sociology of health and illness, as well as gender studies, anthropology, policy and politics, law, and history.

This course introduces feminist perspectives into established aesthetics by illuminating the systematic elimination of sex, sexuality, and the body from conceptual frameworks such as beauty, the sublime, pleasure, and reason. At the same time, the course analyzes and critiques artwork and practices from feminist perspectives, examining art produced or performed by women. 

The main concepts of modern aesthetics, such as 'beauty', 'hobbies', 'art', and 'genius', were surprisingly not evenly distributed to everyone. In other words, they were ideological, sometimes very gendered. As a result, there were people who questioned these aesthetic concepts, and these questions provided a place for a new view of new art. In this lecture, starting from the question of the gender ideologies hidden by the basic concepts of aesthetics, we examine the novelty opened up by feminist aesthetics with a focus on contemporary art, and furthermore, we will glimpse the future imagined by feminists' posthuman-centered thinking. 

Topics include body and mind, subject and object, the debate of nude representation, beauty and the sublime, theory of genius and romanticism, gender in modern aesthetics, art as other, woman as other, modernism, rethinking body, abject body, queering body and performativity, anti-human, non-human, and posthuman, and more.