Thinking Sex/Gender Globally

Catalog description

This interdisciplinary seminar explores how gender and sexuality simultaneously produce and is produced by global, transnational and international visions. For example, the project of identifying affinities between women across cultures and national boundaries has long grounded the work of feminist movements, scholars, journalists, institutions and activists in a variety of locations, both within and outside the Euro-American context. More recently, struggles for the rights of sexual minorities have become increasingly transnational. We explore such efforts to forge enabling alliances and solidarities. We also critically examine how such efforts navigate cultural and national differences, hierarchies within a global world order and complex histories of imperialism, paying attention to the different locations through which such projects intersect with the global. The course highlights the rise of a new post-war international order centered in the UN system, exploring the links between colonial legacies and new global trajectories. How and why are women and girls, gender and sexuality so central to this system? By examining development initiatives that target women and girls, anti-violence and anti-trafficking campaigns, and the rights of sexual minorities, we explore how gender and sexuality become grounds for debating global, transnational and international visions and frameworks that, in turn, shape feminist and queer politics in different locales. Readings include Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women and Imperial Culture, Kumari Jayawardena's Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire by Mrinalini Sinha, Afsaneh Najmabadi's Women with Mustaches and Men Without Beards, Are Women Human? by Catherine MacKinnon, Transnational LGBT Activism: Working for Sexual Rights…