Women’s & Gender Studies

This course develops a critical framework for thinking about gender and sexuality, with special attention to issues of class, race, and ethnicity under different societies. The course is based on a participatory, active learning approach, with an emphasis on critical reflection and peer-to-peer learning. Participants do the required readings, weekly assignments, participate in group discussions and final group oral presentation.

This course is divided into three parts. Part one offers a history and introduction to literary theory that made possible the emergence of post-structuralism. Part two discusses Jacques Derrida, his foundational texts, and the theory of deconstruction. The final part of the course examines feminist theories in literature.

This course focuses on the role of women in five of the world’s major religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It examines the traditional theological principles and the practical laws that have directly impacted, for better or for worse, upon the lives of women within these religious traditions. It also explores historical and contemporary challenges to doctrines and practices that are seen to undermine women’s equality and freedom. Rather than study each religion in serial fashion, the course adopts a comparative, thematic methodology, tracing key themes across the religions concerned. Those themes include femininity and divinity, historical founders’ attitudes to women, key scriptural texts and their interpretation, life-cycle rituals, marriage and divorce, sex and procreation, clothing and social freedom, worship and purity, and leadership and authority.

Course goals

This course introduces students to the study of gender in its intersection with other important topics such as race, sex and sexuality, religion. Students will thus become familiar with a selection of important concepts and theories from Gender Studies within the context of the Humanities. Furthermore, they will be able to apply these concepts and frameworks in the analysis of concrete social and cultural phenomena (i.e. media objects, artistic representations). 

    
Learning objectives:
Students will be able to:
 - identify and explain how gender, in its intersection with other categories of difference play a role in societal power imbalances;
- develop a critical vocabulary to engage in gender analysis on the basis of key theoretical debates in the field;
- work in a team, collectively develop critical arguments and identify concrete examples and case studies that illustrate/support/challenge said theories;
- engage in a nuanced analysis of complex social, media, arts and cultural events;
- improve their critical thinking skills, academic writing skills, as well as communication skills;

Content

This interdisciplinary course teaches you how gender (also: sexual difference), ethnicity, class and sexuality affect identities and subjectivities, and play a role in the production, consumption and interpretation of cultural artifacts. Learning to look through the lenses of 'gender',  'ethnicity' and ‘sexuality’, you will experience how cultural and social scientific approaches have to be combined in critical analysis (‘intersectionality’). You will be trained in how to use various interdisciplinary approaches when it comes to the gender, ethnicity/race and sexuality sensitive analysis of different cultural artifacts, genres and media: literature, history, film and other forms of popular culture, language and the new media.

The anthology 'Doing Gender in Media, Art and Culture A Comprehensive Guide to Gender Studies, 2nd Edition, edited by Rosemarie Buikema, Liedeke Plate and Kathrin Thiele was developed for this course. A red thread running through the book and the course are 'woman warriors': women who struggle for equality and contest and challenge societal norms. Examples range from Simone de Beauvoir to Lara Croft, from Sarah Bartmann to Phoolan Devi. The book can be bought at Savannah Bay (Telingstraat 13, Utrecht). The course is both devoted to different theoretical frameworks, approaches and methodologies such as Gender, Postcolonial and Queer Theory as to particular issues and topics such as the question of representation in terms of gender, race and sexuality, feminist art and aesthetic theory, and secularism and multiculturalism.
 

This course introduces and challenges the ways in which contemporary gender, sexuality, and heteronormativity are interpreted through ethnographic case studies. While many modern Western societies debate openly the concepts of gender, sexuality, and LGBTQIA, a range of non-Western anthropological studies from around the world demonstrate the knowledge and concepts that reshape the notion of queerness and gender fluidity in global societies. With a comparative outlook towards Western societies, the course explores and discusses the change of gender roles in the 21st century, transgenderism and vulnerabilities, post-colonial queer cultures and discrimination, masculinity and femininity, power of beauty and aesthetics, and other critical topics such as LGBTQ sex work, non-conformity, and transgender inmates in prisons, as well as their connection to gender identity formation in contemporary society.

This course is a systematic examination of current scholarly debates about vulnerability and care, using gender as analytic lens. Against the dominant liberal premise of individual autonomy, this course explores the fundamental inter-dependence and eco-dependence character of sociality and individuality. Gender is approached from different perspectives ranging from feminism to ecofeminism, including post-structuralist and post-humanist thinkers. The aim of the course is to engage in these scholarly debates in connection to concrete case-studies and the ethical dilemmas derived from them.

In an era of technology, health crisis, and transnational thinking, this course covers cutting edge issues such as gender discrimination through algorithms, sexual harassment after #metoo, reproductive rights and strategic litigation, and how feminist legal theory questions the way the law is constructed and applied according to stereotypical views of identity and systemic discrimination. The course investigates how queer theory influences the legal field by rejecting a binary view of identity and encompassing issues challenging LGBTQI groups. It explores what is learned from these various legal standpoints while encountering changes in family, criminal, and employment law; whether queer theory influences gender law; and whether there are new ways to consider legal concepts such as consent, personal autonomy, and intersectionality.

The course is part of the Laurea Magistrale program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by consent of the instructor. This course examines the history of women and gender relations in contemporary times. Through lectures and critical reading of original sources, the course develops the emancipation process and construction of female citizenship on both a social and then political level. In particular, the crucial issues of the relationship between historical women's associations and neo-feminisms through the last decades of the twentieth century are addressed, in a framework of national and transnational comparison.

Media and popular culture have long played a key role in shaping and reflecting gendered power relations as well as processes of identification. This course provides an introduction to the representations and constructions of gender in contemporary culture and media. It develops students' understanding of gender, media, and culture in a period of time of rapid globalization and digitization. Through this course, students acquire theoretical and methodological tools to study gender in the media, and across a range of contemporary cultural phenomena. They apply a critical lens to the representations of gender in popular cultural media, focusing on the production, circulation, and reception of media representations of masculinity, femininity, and sexuality. The course also explores the ways in which questions of gender and sexuality might shape and inform identities. It adopts an intersectional approach and analyzes the way gender intersects with race, class, and sexuality.