Comprising of two modules, the topic examines the historical emergence and cultural construction of gender. How did we come to view gender in the ways we do? How did we come to constitute gender as the innermost truths of the human individual, the core of personal life, the object of social control and governmental regulation? What are the practical consequences of organising our lives and institutions around the notion of gender & sexuality? How are norms about gender connected to power, in terms of which gender identities are deemed ‘normal’, and which are pathologised and ‘othered’? How does this power to construct norms connect to race, class, disability, and other axes of difference? Across the course, emphasis will fall not on natural ‘truths’ - biological essentialist assumptions about gender and sexuality - but on the social meanings attached to them in different cultural contexts. In the first module we will explore how gender is organised around binary norms and assumptions and in the second we unpack a set of contemporary cases related to gender to consider gender resistance and how gender binaries might be disrupted and challenged.
This topic aims to:
Timetable details for 2021 are no longer published.