Mini-skirts and Headscarves: Gender, Nationality, and Migration in Modern Europe

Catalog description

Since 1945, European cultures have experienced waves of migration and population transfers: “guest workers” drawn from the Mediterranean to work in Northern Europe; former colonial subjects who have migrated from Asia or Africa; people relocating between nations within the European Union; and people from Eastern Europe moving west after the collapse of the Soviet Union. This course uses films, novels, and readings from history and political science that incorporate postcolonial theory and draw on feminist transnational studies to examine the ways in which migration and social change have “unsettled” older notions of gender, sexuality, and nationality, resulting in contested understandings about what it means to be "English" or "French," for example. We will explore the shifting intersections of gender and nationality and race as they occur in relationship to European integration, national migration policies, decolonization, the end of the Cold War, and recurring nationalisms. We will also consider how European discourses of race and gender differ from those of the United States.