Dr Jacob Breslow, PAN.11.01N

This course is compulsory on the MPhil/PhD in Gender, MSc in Gender, MSc in Gender (Research), MSc in Gender (Sexuality), MSc in Gender, Development and Globalisation, MSc in Gender, Media and Culture, MSc in Gender, Peace and Security and MSc in Gender, Policy and Inequalities. This course is available on the MSc in Social Research Methods. This course is available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

The course aims to enable students to: become familiar with the fullest range of gender theories with particular attention to the intersections of gender, sexuality and race; develop a critical appreciation of these different theories of gender; use gender theories to inform their appreciation of existing work in their own disciplines and in an interdisciplinary context; use the analysis of gender as a basis for case study evaluation and research.

It is a half unit course which runs for 15 weeks. It begins with a review of the formative influences on the development of gender theory, including the sex/gender distinction, race and intersectionality, production/reproduction and social structures of gender, theories of power and the relations between the psyche and the social. Building on these foundations it enables students to consider the implications for analysis of a variety of sites and topics including post/coloniality, representation, affect, queer theory, nation, nationalism, and rights. The course considers the impact of gender analysis on key areas of social science investigation, and develops these with particular attention to location, ethics and the importance of global and transnational dimensions. Our expectation is that this course provides a thorough grounding for work across all other courses and for the dissertation module.

This half-unit foundational course runs across all of MT and the first half of LT. It contains both asynchronous and interactive teaching and learning elements. In LT, the teaching ends just prior to Reading Week. The take-home assessment for the course happens during Reading Week of LT.

Timed assessment to be written during the first term.

• Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar (1984) Challenging Imperial Feminism. Feminist Review 17: 3-19.
• Sedef Arat-Koç (2018) Migrant and domestic care workers: Unfree labour, crises of social reproduction and the unsustainability of life under ‘vagabond capitalism’. in Juanita Elias and Adrienne Roberts, eds. Handbook on the International Political Economy of Gender. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.
• Judith Butler (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
• Kimberle Crenshaw (1989) Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum 139-168.
• Sylvia Rivera Cusicanqui (2012) Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: A Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of Decolonization. South Atlantic Quarterly 111(1): 95-109.
• Michel Foucault (1976) The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction. New York: Pantheon Books.
• Gail Lewis (2017) Questions of Presence. Feminist Review 117: 1-19.
• Petrus Liu (2012) Queer Human Rights in and Against China: Marxism and the Figuration of the Human. Social Text 110 30(1): 71-89.
• Santa Cruz Feminist of Color Collective (2014) Building on “the Edge of Each Other’s Battles”: A Feminist of Color Multidimensional Lens. Hypatia 29(1): 23-40

Exercise (100%) in the LT.

The exercise will be a fixed period timed assessment.

Some departments have produced short videos to introduce their courses. Please refer to the course selection videos index page for further information.