Gender

Catalog description

What is gender? What has it meant to be male, female, or non-binary across time and space? How have these meanings shaped the lived experiences and power relations of people in different parts of the world down the ages? How can thinking about gender inform the analysis of texts, societies, and politics? This class will explore these questions by drawing on a wide range of sources from religion, science, formal and customary law, psychoanalysis, philosophy, art, history, and literature, that may span the Americas, Africa, Europe, South and East Asia, and the Middle East. Using these sources, we will explore gender through the prisms of cross-cultural encounters, empire, revolutions, social movements, work, marriage and family lives, and media, public and popular cultures. In the process, we will reflect on how gender is constructed and contested in relation to race, class, morality, social justice, and other norms of social behavior in different contexts.