According to the Dublin descriptors, students, at the
end of the course, will demonstrate:
1) Knowledge and understanding
The objective of the course is the acquisition of the
knowledge and comprehension of the theories that have transformed the notion of
gender in relation to other notions such as sex and sexuality, difference, the
body, subjectivity and identity.
2) Applying knowledge and understanding
The Course intends to enhance new theoretical and critical abilities by
drawing on feminist epistemology and gender studies. The notion of gender will be
used as a tool to analyse both material social relations and aspects of the cultural
imagination.
3) Making judgements
Students will learn to recognise, by exercising their
autonomy of judgement, issues and conceptual categories concerning gender-based social relations.
4) Communication skills
Students will be able to describe social phenomena and
artistic and literary representations from the point of view of gender, using
the vocabulary and the concepts developed by philosophical and political
theories in the field of Gender Studies.
5) Learning skills
The
objective of developing and refining the students’ learning capacity with
regard to gender theories and gender analysis of social and cultural phenomena
will be achieved through workshop activities and the active participation of
students in the classroom.The course will offer a survey of the different
political theories concerning gender, sex and sexuality, elaborated in the 20th
century in the West, both in the context of movements and in academia. The
historical context and the trajectory of movements that have politicised gender
and sexuality will be examined; the various theoretical orientations related to
the sex/gender system will be explored and compared: the “thought of sexual
difference”; the perspective of social constructivism advanced by Francophone
materialist feminism (born in the 1970s around the journal Questions féministes directed by Simone De
Beauvoir); the currents of cultural constructivism (queer theory and the theory
of the performativity of gender, elaborated by Judith Butler in the 1990s). The
following issues will be analysed in depth:
Gender and sex
Gender as a social power relationship
Patriarchy
The domestic labour debate: Marxist and materialist
feminists
Relationship between biological differences and social
inequalities
Imbrication between gender and other social relations
of power ('race', ethnicity, class, etc.)
Otherness - Who are “the others”?
Symbolic and cultural construction of difference
Androcentrism and false neutrality of the universal
The constructed body
Sexual “orientation” and identity
The multiple forms of gender violence
Emancipation / liberation
Feminist political struggles in a historical
perspective
Lgbt+ and queer movements in a historical perspective
- The
Combahee River Collective Statement, Yale University
website, pp. 1-11:
http://americanstudies.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Keyword%20Coalition_Readings.pdf
- de Beauvoir, S.,
‘Introduction’ to The Second Sex, Vintage, 1989,
University of Berkeley website, pp. xix-xxxvi:
http://burawoy.berkeley.edu/Reader.102/Beauvoir.I.pdf
- de Beauvoir, S., “Preface
– Simone de Beauvoir’s Remarks”, in Crimes
Against Women: Proceedings of the International Tribunal (1976), ed.
D. Russell and N. Van de Ven, Russell Publications 1990, pp. 5-6
- Delphy, C., ‘Patriarchy,
Feminism, and Their Intellectuals’, in Close
to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women’s Oppression, Verso Books,
2016, pp. 138-153
- Delphy, C., “Rethinking
Sex and Gender”, Women’s Studies Int. Forum,
16, 1, 1993, pp. 1-9.
- Federici, S., ‘Wages
against Housework’, Power of Women Collective and Falling Wall Press, 1975, pp.
1-8:
https://monoskop.org/File:Federici_Silvia_Wages_Against_Housework_1975.pdf
- Guillaumin, C., ‘The Constructed Body’ in Reading the Social Body, eds. C.
Burroughs, J.D. Ehrenreich, University of Iowa Press, 1993, pp. 40-60
- Irigaray, L., “A personal note. Equal or different?”
in Je, tu, nous. Towards
a Culture of Difference
(1990), Routledge, 1993, pp. 9-14.
- Mieli, M., “Preface”;
“Homosexual Desire is Universal”, in Towards
a Gay Communism. Elements of Homosexual
Critique (1977), Pluto Press, 2018, pp. xxxvi-viii 18; pp. 1-11
- Radicalesbians, The Woman Identified Woman, Know, Inc., 1970, pp. 1-4, Duke
University Digital Library:
https://repository.duke.edu/dc/wlmpc/wlmms01011
- Redstockings, ‘Manifesto’, privately
printed, N.Y., 1969, n.p.:
https://www.redstockings.org/index.php/rs-manifesto
- ‘Rivolta femminile - Manifesto’, in Italian
Feminist Thought, ed. P. Bono and S. Kemp, Blackwell, 1991, pp.
36-40
- Smith, B., “Racism
and Women’s Studies”, in G.T. Hull et al., eds, But Some of Us Are Brave. Black Women’s Studies, The
Feminist Press 1982, pp. 48-51
- Wittig, M., ‘One is not
born a woman’, Feminist Issues 1:2, 1981, pp.
47-54:
https://medium.com/@thinobiafalx/monique-wittig-one-is-not-born-a-woman-74ed2fce4165
- Woolf, V., Una stanza tutta per sé/A Room of One’s Own (English and
Italian text), Einaudi 1995, pp. 53-75; 95-99; 167-73.
Out-of-print material will
be made available through the platform Studium UniCT.
Please remember that in compliance with art 171
L22.04.1941, n. 633 and its amendments, it is illegal to copy entire books or
journals, only 15% of their content can be copied.
For further information on sanctions and regulations concerning
photocopying please refer to the regulations on copyright (Linee Guida sulla
Gestione dei Diritti d’Autore) provided by AIDRO - Associazione Italiana per i
Diritti di Riproduzione delle opere dell’ingegno (the Italian Association on
Copyright).
Some of the
books listed above can be consulted in the Library. 