Women’s & Gender Studies

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. 

This course examines the history of sexuality from the Ancient world, through the 18th and 19th centuries, ending up in the twentieth century.

This introductory seminar approaches two intertwined questions: 1. What is the study of history? 2. How does gender figure into it? Over the course of the semester, this course explores these questions from several perspectives. This includes introductions to the theories and methods of historical scholarship and gender studies, as well as specific historical events and developments to which the theories and methods can be applied. The topics of investigation covers the United States from the colonial period until the Cold War, focusing on issues of femininity, masculinity, and queerness, as well as concepts such as indigeneity, blackness, and imperialism. The course discusses how to find and analyze scholarly literature and primary sources and how to write the seminar’s final research paper.