Women’s & Gender Studies

This course examines issues of gender and sexuality in either the Greek or the Roman world. Students study contrastive portrayals of women and men, ideals of masculinity and femininity, sexual norms and codes, theories about the male and female body, views on marriage, rape, adultery and prostitution, and the relation between art and ‘real life’: what we may deduce from texts and visual sources about the gender roles men and women were expected to play within family and state.

From the lenses of cultural studies and gender studies, this course examines how fiction throughout various eras has treated, whether directly or indirectly, questions of seduction, femininity, masculinity, and the meaning of virility. It explores the manner in which political and ideological disruptions have modified the figure of the seducer and vamp, and how this is presented in various cultural productions of stories, novels, poems, frescoes, paintings, opera, film, television series, and video games. 

The course examines how gender, and multiple other categories relating to personal and political context, has influenced personal and public effort and experience. It examines a variety of topics to show diversity and continuities across social class, political change, time, and place. Students learn about political, intellectual, and social contexts from the late 18th century to the present. Students analyze both historical and contemporary effort and lives. In so doing, they acquire critical insight into themes of international interest and the opportunity to discuss questions of personal interest. A core object is to reveal the complex extent of connections, continuities,and change in a variety of contexts.

This course introduces the main contemporary debates around human reproduction and discusses their potential impact on society, particularly as regards gender roles and family diversity. The course reflects on issues such as the possibility of diverse families and individuals to have children by using assisted reproductive technologies, the question of whether surrogate motherhood or social egg freezing are liberating or on the contrary oppressive for women, and the social implication of whether parents should be allowed to choose some attributes of their future offspring (such as eye color, height, or IQ) if able to do so. The course explores how current events such as the COVID-19 pandemic or the war in Ukraine have impacted the reproductive rights of various categories of individuals and the regulation of human reproduction in different countries, as well as at international level. The course builds on several disciplines, particularly law, gender studies, sociology, and bioethics. It discusses court cases (especially from the European Court of Human Rights), pieces of legislation, media articles and videos, and sociological and philosophical writings and other sources. Students work on topics related to human reproduction as policy makers, law makers, or gender and LGBT+ human rights specialists.

How can we understand gender in the contemporary world? How is gender constructed in different contexts and what are the material consequences? How can gender analyses empower us to act as agents of personal and social change? This inter-disciplinary course provides an overview of the major issues at stake in the study of gender relations from a broadly social science perspective. It introduces students to gender studies as a theoretical field of investigation, examining key concepts and debates in the field. Students explore issues of power, inequality, intersectionality, change and resistance through contemporary examples of "doing gender" around the world. In doing so, this course equips students - as 21st century graduates - with awareness and understanding of global inequalities based on gender, race, class, and sexuality, as well as basic tools to undertake gender analysis.

Starting from recent debates and problems like new nationalism, misogyny, political homophobia, Islamophobia and antisemitism the course offers a historical inquiry into the construction and development of cultural differences marked through categories like gender, sexuality, class, race, and religion from the eighteenth century until the Holocaust. Through historical case studies, philosophy, and literature it looks at the way in which Western identity-discourse and its colonial subcode have formed dichotomies like self and other, black and white, the Orient and the West, male and female, worker and bourgeois, hetero- and homosexual, and how these differences became social inequalities. The course introduces gender as a category of historical analysis. Through a critical inquiry it reconstructs the paradoxes of a “dialectic of Enlightenment” (Adorno), that means the dark side behind its claim for reason, equality, brotherhood and freedom. The course traces and illustrates the ways in which the Enlightenment has provided a rationale to mark gendered, classed and racialized boundaries in science which, more often than not, resulted in inequalities. These inequalities became embedded in European society in such a way that the active, dominant subject came to be seen as white, male, and middle class. This discourse of dominance helped to carry out European colonialism and the imperial project. With the help of a literary analysis (Joseph Conrad HEART OF DARKNESS), the course introduces into the (critical) role literature can play within the dynamics of social change and cultural discourse. Furthermore, the course introduces into critical theories, like discourse analysis and the history of knowledge, postcolonial and gender/sexuality studies and studies on Orientalism. Thus, it examines the dynamic processes of the “history of sexualities”, their formation and contradictions, which emerged out of these processes. It reconstructs how masculinity and the image of man became a central trope of nationalism and colonialism. Last but not least, it asks how colonial and anti-Semitic discourse, stereotypes of the external Other (in the colonies) and stereotypes of an internal European Other (the Jews etc.) were intertwined and how we can better understand the Holocaust from a historical, multidirectional perspective.

This course examines the social, economic, cultural, political and international dimensions of the history of women and gender relations. It looks at the presence and evolution of patriarchy in different societies, the importance of gender as factor of inequality, and the theoretical foundations of feminism within Western philosophical trends and its contribution to societal evolution. 

This course approaches crucial topics such as migration, conflict, and development from a gender perspective. The course explores gender as a framework for socio-political analysis; presents an overview of different theories and concepts relative to gender-differential impact in policies and practices in development, conflicts, and migration; identifies the relationship between gender and power, and between gender and the social order; analyzes how masculinities and femininities are constructed in times of peace, conflict, and war in access to resources, the implementation of development policies, and in migration policies; and assesses the implications of international policies and initiatives aimed at “mainstreaming gender” in peacekeeping, international development, and migration. The course includes interdisciplinary approaches (law, gender studies, anthropology, politics, economics) and analyzes international legal instruments, tools, and specific cases, as well as their implementation at the regional and national level. It also focuses on practical tools and experiences such as gender-sensitive project planning, use of legal instruments as advocacy tools, claiming women's rights in different areas of development (land, water, food security, food sovereignty, education, health), and migration and conflict studies.

According to conventional wisdom, Chinese women in history were particularly oppressed. It was only in the modern period that the patriarchal system started to break down and gender equality was finally realized. Such a simplistic view of dividing Chinese women’s experiences into two mutually exclusive categories of “traditional” and “modern” is misleading. This course sets out to provide a more complex and nuanced picture of the life of Chinese women over time in China and elsewhere. Topics cover include marriage, women’s education, works and property rights, ideas about the female body and chastity and so on.