Gender & Representation: Field Study Workshop

Catalog description

For centuries, Paris and France have had the reputation of being a progressive place of free gender expression and sexual liberation. After all, this was where the bikini was invented, and where Nabokov's Lolita was first published. But France was also one of the last countries in Europe to extend voting rights to women (1944), and today French women still earn only 75 cents to every man's euro. This course will examine the current state of sex and gender in Paris today, to explore how Paris's reputation fits with the reality on the ground, and to learn what gender relations in Paris can tell us about sex and gender more generally. The course is grounded in a literature drawn predominantly from research in psychology and gender studies. Students will have to opportunity to see first-hand how sex and gender plays out in Paris by visits to museums, theaters, bars, and department stores, and will report on their experiences in assignments and class discussion. Students will relate these experiences back to theories they learn to help understand the current state of academic knowledge on sex and gender. This course is open to all students but will NOT count towards the Psychology major or minor.