Sex & Gender in International Politics

Catalog description

What’s a student of political science, International Relations (IR), or another social science field to do about feminism? This is a question that has troubled IR for decades. While feminist debates engaged people in spaces outside the disciplines of political science and particularly IR, IR scholars did their best not to see the relevance of feminism for their own debates. That did not stop some feminists from rethinking key IR concepts like power, race and the state, but such contributions were largely ignored by IR scholars until very recently. It was only in the last decades, when feminist questions pushed their way onto the IR agenda through books, journals, and conferences, that feminism suddenly seemed attractive to IR scholars. Designed as an interdisciplinary course with a strong reference to Global and International Politics, this course will provide a basic introduction to some of the major global questions as seen through a feminist lens.