Women’s & Gender Studies

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.

The course covers issues such as citizenship and representation in political institutions, changes in women’s participation in the labor force, sexuality and the social welfare state, masculinity studies as well as gender and social change. Integral to the course is learning to use critical theoretical understandings in analyzing how models of gender equality are affected by social relations such as race/ethnicity, sexual identity, and class. The course is directed towards international exchange students who wish to acquire knowledge of the Swedish/Scandinavian societies from a gender perspective, and it is also open for regular students at Lund University.

This course examines the social, economic, cultural, political, and international dimensions of the history of women and gender relations. It discusses the presence and evolution of patriarchy in different societies, the importance of gender as a factor of inequality, and the theoretical foundations of feminism within western philosophical trends and its contribution to societal evolution.