Women’s & Gender Studies

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.

This course critically examines the production of masculinities in the contemporary world, with a historical perspective situated in the West and Latin America; as well as from the individual and collective experiences of each student.

This course analyzes the place of gender in world politics. It introduces theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of gender in international relations, and reviews different fields of research, focusing on security studies, with cutting-edge literature. The course examines how both the practice of international politics and the academic discipline are gendered. It takes its starting point by reflecting on international relations theory to understand why the mainstream of international relations has traditionally had difficulties in engaging with feminist critiques. It looks at the early feminist debates and turns to themes of international relations such as war, conflict, militarism, and security through a gender perspective. It analyzes the role of bodies in international relations and their complex intersecting identities to understand how gender is intertwined with categories such as race, class, and sexuality. The question of how these complex identities give subjects possibility for agency runs throughout the modules. The course emphasizes how gender, security, and politics are discursively constructed through both language and images. To shed light on these discursive constructions, the course conducts several case studies.

This course concerns the status, roles, and representation of women in medieval Irish and Welsh society. The student is introduced to primary material which can inform us about the socio-legal position of women in these societies as contrasted with that of men, including legal tracts, literary texts, historical texts and didactic writings, the originals of which were written in Irish, Welsh, and Latin (but read in English translation). The importance of marriage and other kinds of union in the lives of women is examined, and the impact these unions had on women’s social status will be assessed. Various literary texts are read, with a view to considering how femininities and masculinities are constructed in them, and the characters of prominent literary women are examined and analyzed. The question of women’s agency in society, especially in the area of learning, as well as the factors that wrought change on women’s social position, is also addressed.

This course critically examines the topic of gender violence including historical dimensions, how and why it happens, and the diversity of social and institutional responses that have sought and seek to eradicate it. 

How can we understand the relationship between gender and environment? And what can feminist thinking contribute to debates on the current ecological crisis and the needed sustainability transition? Drawing on feminist and gender scholarship the course introduces students to key theories and debates including ecofeminism and feminist political ecology. Over the course of the seminar we look at early critiques of the women-environment nexus to more recent debates on care politics or posthumanism. Through diverse empirical examples of topics such as agri-food regimes, climate change, natural resources and environmental activism this course addresses the gender dimensions of environmental issues.

This seminar is designed to offer students a first insight into the broad range of writings during the Romantic period. It explores a number of the many authors, genres, and thematic facets of the Romantic period, from responses to the French revolution in essays, poetry, and fiction to programmatic turns towards a new kind of poetry, issues of Romantic nature writing, and the Romantic imagination (also in the visual arts). Travel narratives, the concern with science, and finally the socioeconomic contexts of publishing is also addressed. Thus, the literary versatility and (cultural) politics marking the Romantic period comes to the fore within their broader contexts; almost inevitably, gender as a critical category plays a key role.