Women’s & Gender Studies

This is a graduate level course that is part of the Laurea Magistrale program. The course is intended for advanced level students only. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. The course focuses on women's popular culture with specific reference to travel literature and critical utopias, within a gender perspective. This course explores the multi-layered meanings that utopia as a literary genre and utopianism as a form of thought acquire for women’s access to writing and to the public and contemporary debates. Starting from the analysis of some emblematic texts written by male authors, for example UTOPIA (1516) by Thomas More and NEW ATLANTIS (1628) by Francis Bacon, the course investigates the way in which this hybrid genre initiates a dialogue with classical utopianism and the great tradition as well as intertwining it with other contemporary emergent literary genres (travel writing, romance, novel, closet drama, theater and scientific treatises). The course then explores female forms of utopia from the 17th century to the 20th century and examines the ways in which female writers read the utopian paradigm and interpret it as a possible space for female agency and empowerment. The course also questions how women used the utopian paradigm to discuss the obstacles and possibilities in women’s private and public life and to propose social and political changes.

This course is part of the LM degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by consent of the instructor. The course is graded on a P/NP basis. The course introduces students to the Italian literary culture of the 16th and 20th century. It provides a wide historical background on the issue, together with the basic tools for reading, analyzing, and contextualizing Italian works of the Renaissance, and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Course topics vary each term. For the most up to date version of the course topics, access the University of Bologna Online Course Catalog. The fall 2023 lectures are organized in four modules, and focus on a diverse range of literary topics. Module one focuses on women, female characters, and gender between Renaissance and post-unification Italy. Module two focuses on Women’s Education in Early Modern Italy: Theory and Actuality. Module three is on Women and society in the Italian peninsula (c. XIX). Module four introduces topic Of Ladies, of Passions and of Wars: Representation of Women in the Italian Resistance.

Gender, as an institution and a social structure, influences the way we define ourselves, behave and speak and further determines our place within the family, at school, in workplaces, and in the broader society. We will use this course to explore how gender shapes our identities, opportunities, and everyday life. The course includes seven themes: (1) conceptual tool kits; (2) gender, space, and place; (3) gendering work; (4) gender and family; (5) transgender; (6) intersectionality; (7) gender in the global context. Theme One ‘Conceptual Tool Kits’ introduces main theories and key literature on gender. Theme Two discusses the relationship between gender and space by reading literature on feminist geography. Theme Three focuses on gender in labor markets, organizations, and everyday workplaces. Theme Four ‘Gender and Family,’ looks at gender relations between couples and family members. The course then briefly explores the multi-faceted connections between gender, sex, sexuality, and other social characteristics, such as class and race, in Themes Five and Six. Theme Seven looks at the differences and similarities in gender relations in various cultural and social contexts in the globalized world.  

The course provides students with a map of contemporary feminist approaches to issues of gender, ethnicity, and religious practices in a European context. Each session deals with a different set of interpretations, theories, topics, and case studies analyzed from social, political, historical, and cultural perspectives. Feminist theory and intersectional theory are used to unpack the entanglement of the operations of race, gender, class, religion, and sexuality in contemporary societies. These approaches are in critical dialogue with each other, as well as with several other overlapping scholarly fields such as postcolonial theory and cultural studies. Special attention is given to the debates about multiculturalism, Islam, and migration.

This course offers a study of the history of gender equality in the contemporary age. Topics include: liberal feminism and suffragism; socialism and feminism; totalitarianism and the role of women; the sixties and feminist struggles; feminist antinuclear movements in the eighties; feminism today; feminism in Spain.

The course is comprised of a research-based curriculum designed to introduce the latest academic research achievements of women's studies, gender studies, and women's history. The course focuses on the theoretical framework and research methods and encourages an understanding of the relationship between knowledge production and historical and cultural background.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. The course focuses on gender studies (theories and methodologies) in diverse cultural contexts. Notions of identity and otherness, difference and diversity are analyzed with specific reference to the politics of the body. The course intends to favor the capability to deconstruct these notions in diverse texts (theoretical, literary, visual). 

This course covers literary texts, with specific reference to speculative fiction, and discusses diverse politics of the body in black feminist, postcolonial, decolonial, posthuman, and trans* studies. In particular, the course tackles the historical and discursive construction and "framing" (J. Butler) of the non-human: how it has been culturally appropriated; but investigates also different forms of resistance as well as transversal and transcultural (and trans-species) forms of alliances, questioning the possibility of imagining an episteme that expands the very category of the human, not only to those subjectivities that have never had complete access to it (R. Braidotti), but also to a series of new "bodies" that have never been associated with the idea of human, and therefore of life.

This course provides an overview over the literature in economics on topics related to gender, work, and the family. The course covers topics such as female and male labor force participation, the gender wage gap, marriage and divorce, fertility, domestic violence, women’s empowerment within the household and societies. 

Based on the most recent research, this class retraces the modern history of homosexuality in European and American societies since the late eighteenth century, not only as an individual and collective experience, but also as a medical and theoretical concept, and a social battlefield. The progression is roughly chronological but also focuses on specific issues such as the legal situation of homosexuals, the medical and psychological discourses on homosexuality, the common ground and differences between the history of male and female homosexuality, the role of art, literature, and urban life in shaping homosexual identity and subculture. The course considers how and why Western countries shifted from condemnation to acceptation, though past prejudice and stigma still interfere with the present.

This course explores contemporary issues in gender-based violence (GBV) through discussion of the causes and effects of such violence. It analyzes the policy responses addressing GBV from states, civil society, and international actors and assesses the extent to which they are effective. This course focuses on the intersectionality of gender, race, class, and sexuality.