Women’s & Gender Studies

This course operates from the premise that there is nothing natural about gender differences. It explores the theoretical underpinnings of this premise and its implications for how scholars, students, and practitioners can think about sustainable development centered around commoning and care. This overview course has a distinct approach to understanding how gender and ecological conditions are interrelated. Grounded in social theory, it is inherently critical of standard development and gender narratives and instead seeks explanatory power within historical and structural conditions and explores different approaches to this. The course readings are selected as key contributions to broad debates on gender, environment, and development and are rooted in disciplinary fields such as critical geography, political economy, feminist political ecology, and critical social theory. Structured around core themes including decoloniality, critiques of capitalism, globalization, performativity, care, and commoning, the course engages in primary readings of feminist and other critical scholars who have been at the forefront of conceptualizing gender and human/environment relations in different ways. It discusses how gender and ecological conditions are interrelated; the dynamics behind the widespread “dual oppression" of particular humans and the environment as well as the policy responses designed to redress these; critical perspectives on buzzwords like “sustainability,” "sustainable development,” and "gender” that circulate in policy and project documents, global “development goals,” and social movements; and a range of conceptual and analytical tools to both explain today’s realities and instigate change toward new future trajectories. The course offers students of environment and development, geography, global development, environmental science, food science, natural resources governance, or similar fields the opportunity to learn how to understand and analyze the relations between gender, environment, and sustainable development, and to engage in debates about different approaches to these issues. It combines close reading and discussion of texts with case studies, documentaries, and interactions with activists and social movements. It provides an opportunity to build skills to formulate critical questions and clear methodologies around the entanglements between issues of gender and the environment and the challenges these pose to sustainable development to understand and engage in diverse gender and environment conflicts and debates across diverse topics, scales, and contexts.

Ireland’s symbolic and gendered construction as a musical nation offers a starting point for discussions of music, gender, and Ireland. Following that, the course surveys a range of genres, performers, and performance platforms from the 19th century onwards to explore the relationship between gender and music in the Irish context. Particular emphasis is given to traditional and popular music examples. 

Berlin is called the most sexually open capital of Europe today. In clubs, bars, workshops and festivals, a broad range and mix of sexual orientations are created in different and also crossing scenes and sex-positive spaces. Homosexual, transgender, tantric, polyamory, sex-positive and BDSM-oriented persons meet and celebrate and create new sexual techniques and lifestyles in so-called sex-positive spaces. The government of Berlin has already recognized the economic dimension of the liberal sexual culture. What does liberal sexual culture exactly mean? What kind of historical roots are important to analyze, e.g. the anonymity of the big city, the homosexual movement and the golden twenties? What was and is avant-garde and when does it turn into commerce? Four sub-items will structure the seminar: Sex-positive spaces, LGBTQI+ and Gender-Fluidity, Kink and Tantra, alternative porn films and literature. Excursions and interviews with experts will be part of the seminar. We will work with texts and films, and students will develop their own research question and project.

The time separating the Declaration of Sentiments (1848) from the nineteenth amendment that granted American women the right of vote (1920) marked a turning point in the history of women in the US. Although a number of women rose to prominence in the male-dominated literary world of the second half of the nineteenth century, most of them have long been forgotten. The recovery work to which feminist criticism gave an impulse in the 1970s and is still ongoing today has drawn attention to the pivotal role played by some of these writers in the redefinition of women's place in American society. This course initiates a reflection on the way in which these women dealt with such issues as slavery, domesticity, industrialization, and the rise of a visual culture in the fast-developing society of their times. Due attention is paid to the Gothic genre that allowed them to express their most intimate concerns and anxieties under the cover of supernatural fiction, as well as to the regional sketch, a supposedly minor genre that some of them turned into an instrument of resistance to the dominant patriarchal ideology.

This course examines the challenges women filmmakers have faced, as well as the unique and innovative contributions they have made to film aesthetics and narrative form. It introduces students to some of the central debates within feminism from the 1970s onwards, in particular feminism's influence on women's independent film production, and with a focus on questions of female authorship. What kind of aesthetic and narrative strategies have women filmmakers used to create alternative fictions and documentations of gender conventions, female pleasure, everyday life and social experience? Analyzing the work of female filmmakers who have broken with or resist institutional and aesthetic conventions, and who work primarily on the margins of mainstream industries, this course will address the relationship between film form and ideology. 

This course covers gender issues such as employment discrimination, sexual harassment, and reproductive rights. The course explores how feminist legal theory has questioned the way the law is constructed and applied according to certain stereotypical views of sexual identity and the roles of women. The seminar also investigates how queer theory has influenced the legal field by rejecting traditional gender identities which do not fully encompass the issues that concern the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, transsexual population. Students use a comparative perspective to consider what can be learned from these different legal standpoints as we encounter changes in family law and employment law, how queer theory influences gender law, and what might be new ways to consider legal concepts such as consent, personal autonomy, and discrimination.

This is a foundation course in the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. In this course, the general frameworks, basic concepts, and historical backgrounds of gender studies are examined. The course describes and discusses gender research and analyses in various disciplines in order for students to obtain the basic analytical power in dealing with gender analysis in interdisciplinary fields. The course enhances students' understanding of how GSS develops in a respective field, what the current issues are, and what the future development might be, and helps them grasp the importance of the perspectives of gender, which is interdisciplinary. The course gives students an important tool to think deeply about the way the new "knowledge" opened up by the GSS should be and encourages them to transform the "knowledge" into actions, or activism in a broad sense.

This course offers a study of the works of Margaret Atwood. The first part of the course focuses on speculative elements, feminist themes, and the role of the narrator in Atwood's work, and examines how her novels' form contributes to their meaning. This part of the course discusses the claustrophobic first person narrative in THE HANDMAID'S TALE, the unreliable patchwork narrative of ALIAS GRACE, and the mythopoeic style of the PENELOPIAD. The course utilizes samples from TV adaptations, and a selection of essays by and about Atwood to provide a broad spectrum of perspectives and a basis for in-class discussion. The second part of the course builds on the theoretical context and literary analyses from the first part of the course. Students review essays and further context material on topics related to Atwood's novels such as the history and development of dystopian fiction in Anglophone literature, feminist literary theory, and the role of gender in classical mythology and modern adaptations. The second part of the course also offers exercises and room for discussion with regards to academic writing and working with secondary texts. Regular attendance is required. Students participate in class discussions, complete written assignments, and give an oral presentation.

The course analyzes the complex relationship between media and gender, focusing on gender equality, women’s rights, and unbiased gender views. It draws on the theories, topics, and qualitative methods of western feminist critical communication research, revealing that the global media organization and power system rely on the operation of political economy and ideology, and construct the relationship between audience goods and class, gender, race and science and technology to create surplus value.

This course explores the 18th century's fascination with the body and constructions of the self by considering literary representations of the body. Ideals of beauty are examined, as well as anxieties surrounding sexuality and the roles of both men and women, as masculinities and femininities are debated with regards to cultural production. The course also investigates material considerations, reflecting on clothing and disguise, as well as considering the body in relation to discourses of travel and the military. Slavery, incarceration, and the body in pain are particular concerns in writing from this period, and theories engaging with class and race inform our analysis of various relationships and power structures. Students also investigate how authors consider the physical and emotional response of their readers in achieving their aims, and engage with disability studies in considering these authors and their characters in terms of 18th-century concepts of defectiveness. This course explores the 18th-century body across a range of genres, engaging with novels, poetry, and a play, as well as discussing examples of life writing, including letters and biography.