Course Meeting Times
Lectures: 2 sessions / week, 1.5 hours / session
Prerequisites
There are no prerequisites for this course.
Course Description
Gender — the meanings that humans attach to male-female differences — is a system that all societies use to organize their life. It is also an integral (though often invisible) component of both domestic and international political relations. Studying this set of meanings and their evolving expressions as well as the struggles over these meanings in the past allows historians to shed a better light in the lives and thoughts of generations that came before us. Using gender as an analytical tool also allows us to better understand the present and decode the world in which we all live. This course is a journey around the world (which always starts at home) with the goal of unpacking gendered logics of life in different times and places. Since “gender difference” never operates alone, we pay attention to its co-constituents such as race, class, abilities, and sexualities. The ways in which bodies are marked as sexed as well as how the states regulate gendered bodies (and their reproduction) constitute a key theme in this course.
2020 is the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage in the U.S. This year has also been marked by enormous upheavals all over the country and the world. We will therefore give particular attention to issues of women’s activism, particularly at the intersections of other social movements. Homework assignments will be geared both toward reading insightful articles and also to learning particular skills of analyzing documents and images, creating arguments and debates, and doing in-depth research on particular topics.
Student Assignments
Each week students will be responsible for supplying one to two questions (in written or short video) for the week’s readings due by midnight the day before class. Alternatively, they will have another assignment based on primary sources, such as preparing for a debate or mock trial, analyzing images or videos, or finding primary materials in contemporary news sources.
Also, over the course of the semester students will each write a research paper on a topic of their choosing. For more details, see the Assignments section.
Grading Policy
| ACTIVITIES | PERCENTAGES |
|---|---|
| Participation | 15% |
| Weekly assignments (questions before class and analysis of primary sources) | 30% |
| Topic proposal and presentation | 15% |
| Research paper | 35% |
| Final presentation | 5% |
For detail on the activities above, see the Assignments section.
Required Text
Ware, Susan. Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote. Belknap Press, 2020. ISBN: 9780674248298. [Preview with Google Books]
For additional readings, see the Readings and Videos section.
