| Bemerkung |
This seminar focuses on fundamental theoretical concepts and practical problems regarding gender and queer theory. The course aims to introduce students to feminist and gender theories from different regions (from the North to South, Europe to (Latin)America) and disciplines and identify alternative methodological and epistemological approaches. From a historical and conceptual perspective, we will reconstruct the fundamental debates regarding the relationship between sex, gender, sexuality, desire, and knowledge. The purpose is to show how the production of knowledge and the feminist critical approaches reveal or reproduce social mechanisms of structural gender inequalities and violence. A central point of the course is the analysis of relevant concepts such as identity, heteronormativity, patriarchy, performativity, and diversity, that ground the framework for the analysis of contemporary challenges to feminism, e.g., discrimination, violence, inequality, injustice, underrepresentation, political participation, agency, subordination, and domination in concrete cases. The seminar will proceed in four steps (and six topics): first, the analysis and critique of the notion of women and femininity; second, the discussion of the relation between gender and sex; third, the question of the interdependence of sexuality, body, and desire; and finally, the importance of a practical analysis on the intersection between class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and disability as a necessary condition for the deconstruction of binary and hierarchical power relations. |
