Women’s & Gender Studies

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.

This course introduces students to nineteenth- and twentieth-century French history through the lens of the Woman Question. Gender profoundly shaped the most urgent political controversies of this period, from the question of citizenship to the increasing liberalization of the way of life. Drawing upon recent scholarly debates concerning gender, this course demonstrates the continuing significance of women's participation in diverse aspects of social and economic life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each unit sheds light on women's place in the socio-political sphere by focusing on the actions of influential figures such as Olympe de Gouges or Louise Michel. By studying historical documents and using interactive media, the course examines the relationship between the history of France and the history of its women.

This course examines basic concepts, theories and research findings of romantic love and intimate relationship from the perspective of psychology of gender. It covers different stages in the development of love; interpersonal processes within romantic relationships (such as conversation, conflict, etc.); the role of sexuality in love; gender differences in romantic feelings and behaviors; and break-ups and divorce.

This course provides a study of the family, main social problems caused by gender inequality, and social policies aimed at addressing equality. Topics are divided into the following sections: women, men and family in social theory; feminist theory; the contemporary family; gender violence; state, family, and gender; the place of women and family in other parts of the world.

This interdisciplinary course practices a critical way of examining contemporary cultural practices. In these practices of production, dissemination, and reception, masculinity and femininity are permanently (re)constructed, just as are concepts of class, race, ethnicity, and geopolitical location. Students study cultural practices manifest through popular culture as well as examine the cultural logic underlying art practice and visual ethnographic research. In all, old and new identities are contested and reconstructed; the interaction between text and image is the main focus.

This course gives students an overview of the major issues surrounding gender and sexuality in Russian society: social constructions of masculinities and femininities, sexual and gender variance, family, reproduction, women's agency, and women's movements. The course takes an interdisciplinary approach to the subject employing historic and social analysis and exploring different media, which engage and articulate gender and sexuality in Russian culture. The course follows a chronological order with emphasis on the following time-periods: Russia's Middle Ages, the Petrine reforms, the post-Petrine, “modern” phase of Russian history, the state socialism, and post-socialist Russia. Readings comprise texts written by historians and social scientists, as well as literary fiction, memoirs, autobiographies, and visual texts. Artistic works serve not as illustrations of some historic truths, but as ways to contest and complicate the understanding of gender and sexuality constructs under the changing regimes of power.

The course covers major artistic periods - Antiquity, Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Baroque - from the point of view of women's presence as artists, patrons, and subjects of the art of Rome. It takes advantage of the richness of monuments and works of art in the Eternal City, and uses them for direct analysis and discussions in the light of women's studies. Special importance is given to the reading of primary sources as well as to feminist art historical scholarship, with related discussions in class. The last part of the course is a monographic study of the Roman born Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi. In recent decades, art historical scholarship has re-discovered and re-evaluated this woman artist. For some scholars, her biographical experience and her career as a painter have become emblematic of women's presence in the visual arts. The course considers not only the life and career of this woman artist in its historical context, but also the impulse the study of her experience has given to women's studies in the field of art history.