Gender Matters

Catalog description

This course examines the impact of gender as a category of analysis, focusing upon its varied repercussions on the study of history, with Italian history serving as one field of focus. Participants interested in other geographical, chronological, and disciplinary areas will have ample time to purse their interests. The study of gender has profoundly shaped the practice of history in the last half century, and the course outlines its impact and its transformations. The course places in conversation diverse but overlapping historical developments: the impact of the study of gender on history; influences from beyond history that have shared or shaped historians’ approach to gender and sexuality; the particular inflections of the study of gender in the case of Italy (1400-1800); the impact of the turn to the study of sexuality and queer studies. The course explores and critiques the limits of our gender constructs (theoretical, methodological, and modern) for explaining the culture of people in the premodern world and beyond the western hemisphere, fields of scholarship where the universality of contemporary notions of gender have been challenged. In English.