Women’s & Gender Studies

The goal of this course is to popularize women's health and health care knowledge to non-medical students in school, so that students can master the basic knowledge of common obstetrics and gynecology diseases in women and how to prevent health care, and to strengthen the popularization of some common emergencies in obstetrics and gynecology among students. The understanding of abdominal diseases enables students to grasp the significance of timely medical treatment based on disease assessment. Lay a good foundation for further strengthening awareness of prevention and health care.

The teaching of this course should enable students to master the basic theories and basic knowledge of common diseases in obstetrics and gynecology, with special emphasis on cultivating students' ability to analyze and solve practical problems, so that students can grasp the significance of timely medical treatment based on disease assessment. Lay a good foundation for further strengthening awareness of prevention and health care. This course will also mobilize the enthusiasm of all types of students through various learning activities and evaluation methods, so that students can generate and maintain curiosity and critical thinking about scientific issues, and improve students' self-control ability, learning ability, expression ability, and critical thinking ability. , cooperation skills and other comprehensive training, so that they will be brave and able to contribute to the promotion of human health in the future.

This course examines the social scientific study of gender, sexuality, and family in Japan from the postwar to the contemporary period from a comparative perspective. 

This course examines Hong Kong’s history through the narratives of women, a group often made invisible in history writing, as social actors in the fabric of (post-)colonial Hong Kong. From elites’ households to squatter huts, from brothels, textile factories to convents and schools, from public housing estates, government offices to LegCo Chamber, women of different generations and ethnicities have been caregivers, breadwinners, and pioneers, contesting the prescribed gender role and identity in a patriarchal society. By examining their private lives and public voices informed by their (marginalized) positions interweaved in different social and historical contexts, this course seeks to not only explore how they lived, or how their lives are shaped and reshaped by their own unyielding efforts, but also how their stories can make their ways into narratives and representations in the history of Hong Kong. 

This course examines major concepts in gender studies, including: biological determinism, cultural essentialism, social constructionism, power and inequalities, sexuality, and queering categories of difference. Using a variety of case studies from social media, politics, sport, fashion, film, and music, the course will analyze how sex, gender, age, ethnicity, race, class, politics and social movements intersect to influence our understanding of sex, gender, and culture.

This course examines key issues in the history of sex, gender, power and identity. It will examine the challenges faced by women (and people of other minoritized genders and sexualities) in gaining legal and political recognition. Attention will be given both to structural inequalities and changing assumptions about masculinity and femininity, gender relations, sex roles and sexual practices. 

 

This course introduces the topic of gender by using basic concepts like biological sex, nature, nurture, roles, norms and culture. The meaning of gender categories is examined in relation to difference, exchange, reproduction, knowledge and social change. Although the main perspective is ethnographic, this course is intended to be an exercise in interdisciplinary thinking. Understanding gender provides a foundation to analyze social structures (power and inequality), social institutions (family, kinship, education, economy, the state, health) and cultural issues (science, food, emotions, popular culture).

This course takes as a starting point the expansive understanding of feminism as a value system rather than a style or movement to elucidate and make meaning of contemporary Nordic art within a global context. The course underscores feminism’s historical, theoretical, and activist facets, focusing on a transnational, situated, and intersectional approach to understand feminist practices in and around contemporary Nordic art. Understood in the broadest sense to include other normative-critical approaches such as postcolonialism, in this course feminism is deployed as an emancipatory modality to deconstruct and contextualize the most important issues concerning contemporary art today, including migration, sexuality, race, ecology, and the move towards the digital—and how the Nordic cases interact with, correspond to, and challenge wider global patterns. The course nevertheless provides a solid historical overview of feminism within the realm of art from 1970 onwards and develops an understanding of foundational and more recent feminist theory, as well as the ability to recognize and apply an activist approach to contemporary art. Nordic examples make up the core of the course to provide a nuanced knowledge of the immediate art environment (including visits to local museums, art institutions, and practitioners). With its intersectional and reflexive approach, the course conveys the intergenerational, gender-fluid, heterogeneous, and transnational nature of feminist practices today by contextualizing them within a global framework. to convey the intergenerational, gender-fluid, heterogeneous, and transnational nature of feminist practices today by contextualizing them within a global framework.

Throughout this course, the class reflects on individuals and cultures that have at one time been considered (and are sometimes happy to be considered) aberrant, not “normal”. The course balances questions of identity (who we are, who we think we are, who others think we are) with questions of desire and sexual aim (who – or what – we are attracted to, if anything). This course asks students to focus on one question throughout: should we understand ourselves, and be understood in turn, as sexual and gendered identities; “straight”, “queer”, “female”, “heterosexual”, etc., or by our attachments; who we love, who we desire?

Emphasis is be placed on works from Britain or from the British post-colonial diaspora and students examine mediums including literature, art, and film.

This course encourages new readings of American literature through the lens of theories that have developed in the field of gender and women’s studies over the last decades. It introduces a wide array of critical perspectives, ranging from early advocates of gynocriticism and theoreticians of “women’s writing,” to champions of intersectionality, queer studies, masculinity studies, and ecofeminism. The course pays special attention to the development of Black and Chicana feminist discourse and to their contribution to gender politics. It uses key concepts such as revision, mestizaje, silence, queering, performance, empowerment, resistance, embodiment, margin, and center to foster a revaluation of certain canonical or lesser-known texts and, sometimes, to uncover hidden layers of meaning beneath more conventional readings. The literary texts included are drawn from different periods and from a variety of genres (novel, short fiction, poetry) and include extracts from works by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Alice Walker, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Toni Morrison, Carmen Tafolla, Paula Gunn Allen, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.