Gender and Sexual Politics MA:

Course goals

Through this course, you will:

• Acquire knowledge of key anthropological approaches to gender and sexual politics in relation to various aspects of social, political, and economic life.
• Understand and apply the category of gender and gendered analysis to critically examine political, economic, historical, social and cultural processes.
• Develop a broad comparative perspective on the topic of gender and sexual politics, while understanding the relationship between theoretical and ethnographic approaches.
• Learn how to apply the approaches and debates around gender and sexual politics to contemporary events and case studies, while remaining critical about their applicability.
• Learn to incorporate questions relating to gender and sexual politics into research methodologies. 

Content

The course provides an introduction to theoretical and anthropological approaches to gender and sexuality and shows their value for the ethnographic exploration of different aspects of social, political, and economic life. Instead of looking at gender and sexuality as neutral, universal differences based on nature, the course inspects how they figure within socially specific power relations and how they get reconfigured. The course looks at the ways in which gender is crucial to constituting, maintaining and/or challenging social inequalities, while intersecting with other structures of power and differences (such as race, ethnicity, age, class, kinship etc.). Such an intersectional focus will help to understand and think about how to ethnographically study power, resistance, the state, agency, embodiment, and desire. The course combines anthropological approaches to gender and sexuality with other anthropological literature and different disciplinary approaches within critical (feminist) theory.