Women’s & Gender 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.

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.