Gender: A Global History, 1200-1850

Catalog description

The gendered ideas and practices of our world are products of their historical circumstances. This course will examine primary sources - including memoirs, travelogues, literature and art - to ask how gender connected to the emergence and development of global capitalism and imperialism. Why did Chinese women bind their feet while Mongolian women rode horses, and why was foot binding most prominent among the wealthy? What informed ideas of manhood, and how did they change in colonial contexts? Throughout the course, we will aim to think about gender historically. This means we must recognize that the categories we use to think about gender today - such as "heterosexuality," "homosexuality," or "lesbian" - do not neatly map onto the worlds of historical actors. It is a methodological error to simply import such identities into our analyses of the past. We will therefore collectively discuss how to make sense of gendered practices that seem familiar to us at first glance without imposing our categories on the lives of historical actors.