Women’s & Gender Studies

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. 

This course examines the representation and practices of intimate relations focusing on the intersection between intimacy and the constructions of gender. Topics include theories of love and friendship, contemporary cultural representations of love, desire and friendship (especially in film and literature), and the ethics and politics of erotica.

This course explores the various ways that artists—male, female, and genderqueer—have used their work to examine, question, and criticize the relationships between gender and society. The course involves sustained visual analysis, as well as a critical engagement with both primary and secondary texts.

This course starts with a critical assessment of development as a particular, historically grounded and morally colored enterprise. The course assesses how changing ideas about gender roles and relations prevalent in the Global North affected efforts to develop societies in the Global South. Students not only scrutinize how certain populations came to be imagined and targeted as objects of development, but also reflect on how women and men in the Global South have understood and expressed their own ideas about social change and their place in the world. To this end, students reflect on different ideological, instrumental, and critical approaches to development and ask what is at stake when gender is constructed as a development concern around discourses of equality, empowerment, and social justice. In the next part of the course, students closely assess the changes and continuities in gender structures during precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial eras. In this light, the course broadens the scope from Western-initiated development efforts to social change more generally and discusses the diverse impacts of globalization on gendered realities in different parts of the world. Key themes that are addressed: poverty, sexual and reproductive health and rights, education and empowerment, environmental politics, rural and urban change, as well as work and gender relations inside and outside the home. Whereas for long (Western-trained) academics, policy makers and development professionals equated gender with women's issues, it is now widely recognized that masculinity is as much a social construct as femininity and deserves critical attention too. Therefore, this course gives ample attention to men's issues too.

This course examines key concepts of gender, sexuality, and gender presentation, and the social aspects of gender. It covers how gendered identities are shaped by society; how identities are formed by but also resistant to cultural norms of masculinity and femininity; how gender is related to sexual difference; and how gender relations intersect with race, class and sexuality.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by permission of the instructor. Students selecting the Italian subject area must select the course readings in Italian. The course examines gender studies (theories and methodologies) in diverse cultural contexts with specific reference to the analyses of the notions of identity and otherness, difference, and diversity. The course favors the capability to deconstruct these notions in diverse texts (theoretical, literary, and visual). The course presents case studies in which texts (literary and visual) are in dialogue with theories and methodologies of gender and postcolonial studies. The texts elaborate on the issue of gender, identity, difference, race, and politics of the body in the representations, transmissions, and elaborations of traumatic events in literary and visual texts (with specific reference to utopian and dystopian fictions). Lessons make reference to memory and trauma studies, dystopia, and science fiction within a gender and postgender perspective. The course elaborates on debates on the intersectionality of gender(s) and race in theories, and visual and literary texts, and to analyze issues related to utopia/dystopia/science fiction within a postcolonial and posthuman perspective. The main theoretical issues discussed by the course include critical theories and methodologies of gender and women's studies and queer studies; re-reading of the notion of identity, difference, and diversity; gender as a social construction; women’s and postcolonial re-visions of the symbolic and social order; the construction of sexual difference as a deconstructive strategy; re-writings of the body; French Feminism(s) and African American and Postcolonial responses; postcolonial and African American critical debates on the representation and deconstruction of the notion of gender and race. New politics of identity and difference; intersectionality of race and gender(s); and the interconnection of gender, ethnicity, and race in trauma and memory studies.