Contextualizing Gender

Overview

Gender permeates all aspects of the social world and is analyzed in numerous ways, including as an institution, ideology, and process that organizes everyday life. This course aims to introduce students to an interdisciplinary framework that allows them to explore and theorize the intersectional nature of gender and culture. Through various essays and philosophers, the course will stimulate a nuanced discussion on gender inequality, sexuality, masculinity, and the interaction of gendered social processes. The students will get the opportunity to examine new ways of looking at gender possibilities, like contextualizing the plurality of bodies at the intersection of science and technology. The current development of Artificial Intelligence and cyborg technologies formulate a new form of scientific biopower, which can envision concepts such as post-human and post-woman under a transhumanist discourse. A variety of theoretical approaches pertaining to contemporary Gender Studies will generate engaging discussions on the conception of gender in a digital and post-industrial society.INTENDED AUDIENCE : Interested Students

Syllabus

Week 1: Intersecting Gender and Feminism; Feminist Consciousness and Gendered Experiences in Simone de Beauvoir.Week 2: Gender and Race: Black Feminism and Intersectionality.Week 3: Gender Blurring and Unmasking Heterosexual Assumptions: Toni Morrison, Nancy Chodorow and Teresa de Lauretis.Week 4: Introducing Queer Theory: Eve Sedgwick and Gayle Rubin.Week 5: Gender Performativity and the Heterosexual Matrix: Judith Butler.Week 6: Gender, Speech and Subjectivity: Judith Butler.Week 7: Precarity, Assembly and Gender Politics: Judith Butler.Week 8: Gender and Nonconformity: Queer Literature and Global Social Movements.Week 9: Contextualizing Contemporary Masculinities and Approaches to Men's Studies.Week 10: Cyborg Women and Technologies of the Gendered Body: Anne Balsamo.Week 11: Biopolitics of the Gendered Body: Jemima Repo, Emily Cox-Palmer-White and Donna Haraway.Week 12: Post-Human and Post-Woman: Nomadic Subjectivities and the Futures of Gender: Rosi Braidotti and Francesca Ferrando.