Women’s & Gender Studies

This course explores the career paths of many excellent female scientists, including how they have persevered through a variety of challenges. It examines many classic and contemporary female role models in science, such as Mary Curie (Mrs. Curie), Academician Wu Jianxiong, Dr. Inez Fung, Dr. Susan Solomon, Dr. Joanne Simpson, Academician Wang Yu, Academician Peng Wang Jiakang, Academician Meng Huaiying, and more.

Students analyze how gender, ethnicity, race, class, and sexual orientation are shaped by cultural and societal influences. The focus is on the comparisons of European and U.S. gender regimes and diversity differences, interpretation and evaluation of social actions by religious, gender, ethnic, racial, class, sexual orientation groups affecting equality and social justice in Europe and the U.S. Discussions within this framework include Communist concepts of gender equality, post-socialist transformation, and globalization as well as of current cultural gender representations, beauty myths, and advertising. Documentaries, other visual materials, field trips, and a guest speaker lecture are a part of this course.

This course applies a gender perspective to different sociological objects and illustrates how this perspective can enrich our analysis of society. The course covers how sociology has integrated gender (or not) in the analysis of the family, education, labor markets, or politics. This is a general sociology course that addresses some of the key questions that interest sociologists while systematically applying a gender perspective to these questions. It also studies gender as a social category, discusses how it is produced and reproduced in society, and how it relates to social inequalities. This course provides a new perspective on some of the topics covered in introductory sociology classes, and it covers also some additional ones. Some previous background in sociology is recommended, but not required to follow the course.

This course focuses on the centrality of gender as a factor structuring, ultimately, all social relations. The course explores relationships between men and women, men and men, women and women, as personal and sexual relations, within the household, the labor market, and the state; how gender relations and practices are performed in different cultures; the role of gender in processes of social transformation and the impact of industrialization and migration on gender relations.