Women’s & Gender Studies

This course offers an overview of the foundations of contemporary theoretical-critical thinking and motivations behind the latest trends in literary theory. Topics include: feminist theory and literary criticism; from feminist theory to gender studies; the debate on reading.

This Italian-taught course focuses on Italian literature. At the end of the course the student is expected to have a deep knowledge on diachronical aspects of the Italian literary tradition, knows the critical discussion on the keys issues about texts and authors, and is able to use the main tools of the methodological analysis of texts and contexts. The focus of the course changes each term, review the specific term’s course details page in the University of Bologna online course catalog for information on your specific term’s topic. The spring 2023 course focuses on feminine power, from the demonic to the divine.

This course examines gender and its critical intersections with power in contemporary social and political life. It reflects on key definitions, ideas, debates, and controversies in gender studies, using an interdisciplinary set of readings in history, sociology, anthropology, international relations, political science, literary studies, and critical theory. Some questions that considered include: How are gender and sex being explained as natural and social phenomena? In what ways is gender interacting with other social identities e.g. sexuality, ethnicity, class, and nationality? How is gender shaping individual identity and popular culture?

After an introduction to the theory, three major themes in international law–human rights, international criminal law, and migration/refugee law–are explored from a gender perspective. Gender bias is a multi-layered phenomenon. It is quite common to distinguish three forms of bias in law: first at the level of legal provisions itself, secondly regarding the effects of law in practice due to differences in position of men and women, and thirdly at an institutional or systematic level: invisible obstacles for an impartial application of the law such as sex-stereotypes and dominant gender ideology.

This seminar offers a survey of the intellectual tradition that takes for its object the interrogation and theorization of systems of power whereby inequality is associated with gender, sex, and sexuality. A range of key work are explored, mainly from western authors, that exemplify the intellectual history of feminist and queer theory. Through works of philosophy, political, and psychoanalytic theory about gender and sexuality, the course traces the foundations and development of some major strands of recent and contemporary thought about gender and sexuality including: liberal feminism, with its emphasis on sameness and equality; cultural, separatist, and lesbian feminisms with their focus on difference; radical, Marxist, socialist, and anarchist feminisms with their political and material analysis of gender; intersectional feminisms with their questioning of such identity categories as woman; postcolonial and transnational theories of gender and sexuality; queer theory and its mobilization of deconstructive modes of thought; and trans theory with its shift of emphasis back to embodiment and identity.

In the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer famously makes his Wife of Bath protest at the unfair ways women are represented by men. In this course students look at how women were actively involved in literary production in the medieval period, whether as patrons and audiences whose stated or perceived needs shaped particular compositions, or as themselves the authors of texts. The course begins with the female-voiced poems in the 10th-century Exeter Book and extend through the 15th century, covering texts in Latin, French, and English.