What does it mean to be male or female, gay or straight, transgendered, or bisexual, gender fluid, genderqueer or cisgendered? Where do our ideas of how to live as any of the above come from? What importance does gender assume when it intersects with other identity markers such as class, race, ethnicity, and religion? How do we respond personally to these notions, and how do the different cultural contexts in which we move respond to us based on ideas of femininity and masculinity, and sexual orientation? What does sexuality enter this mix? Answering these questions requires us not only to look at how societies are organized, but also at how—within these organizations—gender is conceptualized, categorized, and represented.
Categories, and the fact that we humans think in categorical systems are, in fact, crucial to how we think about our gendered world. For that reason we will begin with the ideas of categorization to frame our understanding of gender and sexuality. One of our main points of inquiry will be on how ideas and representations of gender relations change as we move across cultures and through history to achieve this historical and global breadth. Uniting different cultures as it does, Franklin University, and our class, will serve as a laboratory of sorts to investigate how notions of gender are produced differently in different societies and different areas of societies. In order to explore these questions, we will be working with a textbook that unites scholarly perspectives in anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, literature, critical theory and history; and we will investigate cultural texts ranging from literary texts over film, videos and the objects that form part of our day-to-day.
We will spend the first part of the course discussing how gender is constructed in society, what sorts of gender identities have evolved over time, and how they intersect with other societal identity markers such as age, race, nationality, and class. We will then move on to studying gender rights, historical gender struggles and in/equalities, ending the semester by devoting our time to a number of different theoretical and methodological approaches to Gender Studies. In other words, to the way gender and sexuality have been categorized in scholarship as a way of knowing the world.
We will spend quite some time writing short pieces (instead of a mid-term or a mid-term paper) throughout the semester (the homeworks) and talking about what it means to develop different kinds of writing voices, to write for different kinds of audiences, and to present different forms of evidence. This also means that you will develop your final research paper bit by bit in the second half of the semester and spend two sessions in what I call writing labs to help you write the best paper possible.
- Teacher: Caroline Wiedmer