Curriculum for the Academic Year 2011-12
MA Program
Fall Term
Mandatory courses:
Academic Writing – 2 credits for the whole academic year (Elissa Helms, Andrea Kirchknopf, David Ridout, Sanjay Kumar) (4 ECTS). Mandatory for 1 year program, the first year students in 2 year MA program and for GEMMA students, strongly recommended for Matilda students)
This course is designed to help students develop the academic research and writing skills they will need to complete the thesis and other requirements for the MA degree. The fall semester focuses on technical writing skills including organization of arguments, critical reading, quoting sources and avoiding plagiarism. The second half of the course, which extends into the winter semester, includes a workshop on writing literature reviews and is otherwise dedicated to helping students develop a thesis topic and prepare for the final stage of thesis research and writing.
Foundations in Gender Studies I:Histories, Theories, Futures − 4 CEU credits (8 ECTS). Fall term. Group A, C. (Francisca de Haan) (students register with one of the two offered courses)
(Mandatory for students in the 1 year program and for the first year students in the 2 year programs Critical Gender Studies, MATILDA (5 ECTS) and GEMMA). Core course in feminist history for the 1st year GEMMA students.
This is an introductory course in Gender Studies in which we will discuss some of the central theoretical orientations and debates which have defined feminism and its theoretical and academic branch, Women’s and Gender Studies, both historically and in our time. The theoretical moments in the “interdisciplinary discipline” of Women’s/Gender Studies discussed in this course include Liberal Feminism, Marxist-Socialist Feminism, Radical Feminism, Black Feminism, and Third-Wave Feminism. In addition, we will read about feminism and colonialism; feminism and post-colonial theory; women’s peace activism (Are women more peaceful or better peace keepers than men? Why has peace been such an important issue for women and feminists throughout the twentieth century? What is the relation between war and gender power and gender violence?); examples of non-Western feminisms; the notion of “compulsory heterosexuality”; masculinities; and the concept of intersectionality. Throughout the course, we will place these texts, debates, and concepts in their historical and cultural contexts, trying to understand why certain issues arose when they did, how that shaped them, and how these historical linkages are still relevant today. This theoretical overview will be supplemented next term (in Foundations in Gender Studies II: Identity, “Experience,” and Power/Knowledge) with analysis of Postmodern and Post-structural Feminism, transnational feminism, as well as various theories concerning feminist epistemology.
Foundations in Gender Studies I − 4 CEU credits (8 ECTS). Fall term. Group A, C. ( Anna Loutfi) (Mandatory for students in the 1 year program and for the first year students in the 2 year program in Critical Gender Studies if they are not enrolled in the other Foundations I. course)
This course is designed to provide students with a basic introduction to key concepts and debates in the interdisciplinary field of gender studies. It does not treat gender as a distinct analytic category, but sets out to explore its relationship to other analytics, such as ethnicity, nation, social location, sexuality/sexual behaviour, and class. The course focuses on the historical development, since the Enlightenment, of powerful intellectual traditions such as liberalism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. It explores the ways in which these distinct traditions have engaged with, and problematized, questions of gender identity, sexuality, the family, reproduction, and the body – in relation to the social organization of labour, leisure, desire, family life, and political economy. A central focus of the course is the historical production of gender as both a social category and a social problem, looking at debates around the question of sexual difference – its nature, its political significance, its legal, social and cultural meanings, and its relationship to other vectors of identity and human subjectivity. The course looks at ‘gender’ as a key organizing principle in modern political discourses, but one that is difficult to grasp. So, we contextualize ‘gender’ in relation to ongoing and enduring Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment debates about sexual difference, equality, and citizenship, revolving around questions such as: What kinds of bodies = what kinds of citizen? How do the stakes change when we speak of natural or bodily differences (as opposed to culturally or socially constructed differences)? What kinds of rights and duties should citizens have vis-à-vis each other, society and the state, and why would gender matter in the organization of such rights and duties?
Methods Elective (methods courses are designated with an “M”)– 2 credits to be fulfilled in either the fall or winter term.
1st year students in Critical Gender Studies and 1st year GEMMA students have to take at least 4 credits in methods courses, 2 credits out of these should be for the compulsory course Interdisciplinary Approaches (Eszter Varsa).
Elective courses:
Discourse Analysis (“M”) − 2 CEU credits (4 ECTS). Fall term. Group B, C. Core Course in feminist methodology for the 1st year GEMMA students. (Erzsébet Barát)
The seminar explores the interdisciplinary category of ‘discourse’ through various ways of analyzing language use in as an integral part of social events. The major aim is to show how discourse as an explanatory category in different disciplines of humanities and social sciences has emerged to go beyond the dichotomy of text/context. As an introductory course to qualitative research its objective is to compare the (enabling) limits of different approaches to discourse, both in terms of their theoretical and methodological differences. We shall study samples of analysis to demonstrate their advantages and limits in order to explore the value systems and sets of beliefs informing the linguistic devices of the data as well as that of the particular approach to discourse itself. To enhance the explanatory force of each approach to analyzing the relationship between signification and social practices, the readings of sample analyses will focus on a shared set of data from the social field of sexuality and gender. By the end of the course, successful students will have developed an awareness of the role of language (use) in the conflicts and power struggles that inform and shape the relations producing the differentiation between men/women and/or within women and men themselves. Students will also have developed an awareness of social and political factors involved in different ways of producing the meaning of ‘discourse’ itself. Finally, they will be able to develop concepts and translate them to corresponding analytical steps in order to compare and contrast discoursal representations and representational practices in their data
Feminist Research of Popular Culture and the Media − 2 CEU credits (4 ECTS). Fall term. Group B, C. (Erzsébet Barát)
This course is an introduction to the materiality and particularity of power relations of gender/sexuality in and through popular culture in general, and in various genres in the media in particular. There is, however, an important point to be made about the range of the actual cultural fields covered. It is mostly related to television and advertising. The course is an exploration of the impact of gender both on popular cultural products as well as its effects on the changes of the discipline of cultural and media studies. It is this intersectional approach that will inform the discussion of the texts chosen for discussion throughout the course. The course is designed to cover the recent developments in the field and will pursue the genealogies of the relevant disciplinary and cultural changes through the key points retrospectively, in the light of the emerging argumentations. Students will be encouraged to reread the papers in the context of their own cultural contexts.
The Human and Post-Human - 4 CEU credits (8 ECTS). Fall term.A, B, C. (Allaine Cerwonka)
This course investigates “the human” as an idea, as an analytical category, which has had profound impact on the modern era. As a category developed in its modern form during the Enlightenment, it has served as the basis of our conception of political and social rights; it has also defined the relationship people have to that/those which fall outside of its boundaries (such as animals, technology, the environment, etc.). The course takes an historical approach to ask the following central question: Out of what social and political relations did our modern concept of the human develop? To this end, we will look at an interdisciplinary array of materials – historical, philosophical, and scientific – to understand how and why people were defined as a “species” through early Enlightenment taxonomies, as well as through 19th century debates about Darwin’s theory of evolution. We will see the way the human has never been a stable biological category, but rather has functioned as a vehicle for asserting a vision of the social order, political rights and ethics since the dawn of the modern period.
The course will focus on particular borders of the human, specifically the border separating it from the animal and the machine. In doing so, we will look at historical motivations and practices through which the human was differentiated from the ape or the “freak”, connecting this history to the power relations which were being shaped by a particular definition of the human, such as colonial relations and race relations. And we will consider these two borders in particular in relation to the posthumanist literature (Donna Haraway, Judith Butler, Cary Wolf) who argue that the boundary between human-machine-animal should be redrawn in order to expand political rights to others.
By the end of the course, students should be able to explicate the main political debates out of which the human as an idea developed and key terms in the post-humanist, feminist critique. They should be able to identify the difference between the human as presumed to be a biological, universal “fact” and the human as a socio-historically specific idea produced out of Enlightenment shifts in governing. Finally, students must also be able to demonstrate an ability to independently identify and analyze other contemporary or historical debates/issues (of their choice) relevant to the concept of the human (e.g. debates around technology, cloning, science, animal rights, etc.) through an original research project. These skills will be demonstrated through seminar discussions, oral presentations, as well as independent research and written work.
Space, Gender and Sexuality - 4 CEU credits (8 ECTS). Fall term. Groups A, C. (Allaine Cerwonka)
This course will introduce students to key works and concepts in social geography with a special emphasis on those that relate to areas of interest to gender studies scholars. In particular, we will examine how space and place are not objective, material facts. Rather, they are physically produced and given meaning (or identity) by the social relations that comprise them. To this end, we will look at some of the phenomena that shape the identity of places, such as globalization (i.e. the flow of people, capital, media images, commodities etc. across national borders), race relations, colonial histories, or political ideologies. We will examine these processes in relation to particularly significant places, such as the nation, the suburb, the scientific laboratory, the museum, the zoo, the wilderness, and so forth. Seminar analyses and readings will help students read spaces for the social relations they contain and for the ideologies or identities (like sexualities or race) that they make appear natural. We will also examine the way spatial relations produce identities that feel very natural to us, with a particular emphasis on the way sexuality is produced through them. We will look at the way the sexual identity and desire is experienced and produced spatially.
By the end of the course, students need to be able to identify in sophisticated terms how space is socially constituted out of power relations. They must be conversant in the main arguments of key theorists in this field (such as Doreen Massey, Mary Louis Pratt, and others on the syllabus). Finally, through an independent analysis and seminar discussions/presentations, students must demonstrate an ability to do a sophisticated critical analysis of a construction of place or concept that relates to, but goes well beyond, the issues discussed in the course.
Women`s Movements Worldwide: Debates, (Power), Differences, and Developments in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries − 2 CEU credits (4 ECTS). Fall term. Group A. Core course in Feminist History for the 1st year GEMMA students.(4 ECTS for MATILDA students) (Francisca de Haan)
This course deals with women’s movements and feminisms from about 1400 to 2000 and in a number of regions and countries around the world. The main aim of the course is to explore historical and contemporary varieties and complexities of feminism(s). In contrast to widely held views, “feminism” did not start in the 1960s, nor is it just a “Western” phenomenon. Moreover, feminism was not only about the vote for women (the so-called First Feminist Wave) or “burning bras” (the so-called Second Feminist Wave), nor is it anti-religion. Women’s movements and feminisms historically have taken many forms, they have been concerned with a wide range of social, economic, cultural and political issues, and they have developed in different parts of the world, including Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe. The course also aims to show that women’s movements and feminist ideas are not given, fixed, or isolated phenomena. Rather, they develop in, and in interaction with, specific local, national, and/or transnational economic and political conditions and discourses. Women’s movements and feminisms always have to be historicized and contextualized, as we will see with regard to the examples of colonialism and the Cold War. Lastly, feminism at least since the early decades of the nineteenth century was an inter/transnational movement, with a transnational worldview. We will explore this with respect to the major international women’s organizations and the role of the League of Nations and the United Nations.
Introduction to quantitative reasoning (“M”) 2 CEU credits (4 ECTS). Fall term. (Éva Fodor)
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." The proverb is attributed to mid 19th century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, suggesting that feminist concerns about the utilization of numbers as evidence is not particularly new or specific to feminism. Feminist anxieties notwithstanding, this course will view numbers and quantitative data simply as one type of representation of the social world, in and of themselves no worse or better than words, music or other types of symbols we tend to use in our daily lives. Unfortunately, statistics - much like the text of certain post-structuralist philosophers - tends to be shrouded in jargon and thus seemingly impenetrable for the uninitiated. It is this cloud of jargon we seek to dismantle during this course so by the end you’ll understand the uses and limitations of quantitative data for answering a (limited) range of questions about society. This is a skill, which you may find useful in a wide range of situations: from dinner table conversations through working at international NGO’s, going to graduate school in the social sciences to evaluating the effectiveness of a policy measure.
This is an elementary statistics course. Very elementary. In other words, you will learn a few basic issues about how to use/read/present quantitative information in a somewhat intelligent manner but you will not dissect equations and thus will not inquire into the mechanisms behind the statistical procedures we review. You will, however, learn the basic use of one of the major quantitative data analysis programs, SPSS
Gender in Post- socialism 2 CEU credits (4 ECTS). Fall term. Group A, B (Éva Fodor)
This course examines the gendered experience of state socialism and post-state socialism in CEE and the fSU, with occasional comparative glances at Western societies. Themes include the development and nature of the public and private divide in post-state socialist societies; new discourses about domesticity; consumption; sexuality; the abortion debates in the region since 1989; nationalism; global economies involving CEE and fSU women’s bodies; and the relationship of transnational feminist discourses to people in the region. The course is interdisciplinary and will be run as a seminar with active input expected from the participants.
Prostitution - 4 CEU credits (8 ECTS). Fall term. Group A, B (co-taught by Éva Fodor and Eszter Timár)
This course is an interdisciplinary exploration of prostitution facilitated by two co-teaching professors who will enthusiastically merge their different disciplinary backgrounds in order to survey the concept of prostitution both theoretically and empirically. We approach prostitution both as a social phenomenon and a concept which enjoys tremendous currency within discourses of modernity in general and in feminist thought in particular. The course is designed with the help of two interrelated guiding questions: What our the most crucial assumptions – and subsequent debates - in the ways feminist thought and Gender Studies think about prostitution? In what forms and why is prostitution an iconic trope for of modernity? The texts in the syllabus will touch on the contemporary social realities of prostitution, and various discursive nodes of modernity through which these realities are posited. These nodes include: the public/private distinction, the political theory of subjectivity and citizenship, the concept of exploitation, nationalism and the military, commodification and commodity fetishism, sexuality and the body as well as global geographies of migration and trafficking.
Literary Theory and its Feminisms - 4 CEU credits (8 ECTS). Fall term. Group B, C. (Sophie Howlett)
An overview of the major Literary Theories of the twentieth and twentieth first century relevant to Gender Studies, contextualised within the History of Ideas and applied to texts. This course is both a survey of literary theory with a particular emphasis on providing a context for feminist and gender theory, and an introduction to the application of such theoretical methods or viewpoints on literary and other texts. There will be a particular emphasis on post-structuralist approaches with introductions to the most prominent informing theorists in gender studies, eg Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler et al and such topics as 'the relationship between Hermeneutics and Feminism'.
‘Literary Theory’ provides a base of theory and skills on which the gender student may then go on to build more gender specific theory, and further reading and interpretative skills within the gender/feminist context. It is also a foundation course for any student of the humanities. Topics to be covered include: phenomenology and hermeneutics; ideology (power structures) and the text - Marxism, Foucault, Bakhtin; psychoanalysis and feminism; deconstruction; identity and the post-human; Queer Theory; Post-Colonialism and feminism.
Gender and Higher Education in the Post-Socialist Area - 2 CEU credits (4 ECTS). Fall term. Group A. (Sophie Howlett)
Reading Women`s Literature, Writing Histories Differently − 4 CEU credits (8 ECTS). Fall term. Group B, C. (Dejan Ilic)
The course offers critical readings of various types of women’s writing, focusing on contemporary authors.
In the first part of the course some general questions concerning women’s writing and feminist literary criticism will be discussed.
The second part deals with the specific problems of women’s/feminist literary histories. The questions of the canon, and alternative literary histories are discussed, taking into account the achievements of feminist scholarship in the field. Theoretical and methodological problems of writing gendenred histories are to be debates in the class. Finally, a postmodern literary genre of historiographic metafiction will be discussed in gender perspective.
The third part of the course is focused on a number of theoretical frameworks for reading women’s literature. Firstly, the concept of Écriture feminine as it was introduced by H. Cixous will be discussed more in detail. Then the relevance of the concept of identity for feminist literary studies is debated. Feminist reinterpretations of reader-response theories are debated, and the way theories of the border offer a new interpretative framework for reading of women’s literature. Finally, some specific questions of feminist autobiographies are raised.
Anthropology and the Erotic Other −4 CEU credits (8 ECTS). Fall term. Group A, B. (Hadley Z. Renkin)
The purpose of this course is to explore the cultural and political meanings of sexuality and the erotic, and the ways in which they have been central to and defined by processes of Othering and subordination, both within and between societies. We will examine ideas of the sexual/erotic as embedded cultural practices, focusing on how different understandings of sexual identities, communities, and politics intersect with, shape and are shaped by, and support or contest, broader systems of power and meaning. From the United States to New Guinea to Eastern Europe, and from Foucault to Fascism to (post)Fordism, the class will draw upon material from anthropology, history, and cultural studies to investigate and compare these understandings and their consequences across time and space. The course is meant both to destabilize our often unquestioned assumptions about sexuality and the erotic, and render more visible their entanglements with a wide range of other vectors of social and cultural power, such as race, class, and gender.
Performativity —2 CEU credits (4 ECTS). Fall term. Group B, C. (Eszter Timár)
Performance and performativity have been key words in Gender Studies at least since Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s The Epistemology of the Closet. This course examines how these concepts became so important in our research whether we study gender or sexuality. First, we will look at the development of the concept of performativity in speech act theory, and subsequent debates around it which enabled its productive work in Gender Studies. This general introduction will be followed by an in-depth discussion of Butler’s application of the concept of performativity to our sexed and gendered lives. We will also review the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on queer performativity to follow her lead into discussions on the philosophical genealogy of performativity and performance, tracing them to the modern tradition of antitheatricality in political thought. We will also consider how that tradition shapes our thinking about femininity. We will close with readings on performativity and nature.
Interdisciplinarity and Intersectionality in Women’s and Gender Studies 2 CEU credits (4 ECTS). Fall term. Group A, B, C. Core Course in feminist methodology for the 1st year GEMMA students (Eszter Varsa)
Women’s and gender studies in its theoretical and methodological foundations is located at the crossroads of traditional disciplines and analytical approaches. This course is designed to provide an introduction to some key concepts and debates related to disciplinarity-interdisciplinarity as well as related to the integration of approaches to and analytical perspectives on gender with that of “race”/ethnicity.
In the first part of the course we are going to examine inter-, multi-, and trans-diciplinarity and the differences among these concepts. We are also going to look at how in the study of gender concerns for additional insights to include “race”/ethnicity as a dimension of analysis emerged. In the second part of the course we are going to study examples of interdisciplinary and intersectional analysis with a focus on the methodological consequences of interdisciplinarity and intersectionality including the positive outcomes and the difficulties involved in their application.
Cross-listed courses from other departments/programs:
Human Rights and Biopolitics – 4 CEU credits (8 ECTS) Fall term. Group B. (cross-listed from the Political Science Department) Fall Semester (Judit Sándor)
Throughout history many attempts have been made to control the size and composition of populations. From the sterilization of the mentally ill to the strong social welfare benefits offered to support childrearing, these were based on different ideologies from eugenic thinking through maintaining ethnic or gender balance to economic nationalism.
These topics lie at the intersection of political science, international relations, philosophy, and human rights. The course offers a unique cross-disciplinary approach by introducing the human rights framework in the classic and contemporary forms of biopolitics. Authors such as Foucault, Agamben, Rose, Esposito, Kamm, Rothschield, Duster and Habermas will serve as the theoretical basis for the discussions and seminars that will aim to analyze different types of biopolitical endeavors from all parts of the world. Students will be encouraged to bring examples and cases from their own countries or to present on and analyze a selected field within biopolitics.
History of Daily Life (Central Europe, 14th to 17th Century) – 2 CEU credits (4 ECTS) Fall term. (cross-listed from the Medieval Studies Department) Fall Semester (Gerhard Jaritz)
Since the 1970s, the History of Daily Life has become a field of historic research that has developed new interests in the analysis of (medieval) sources. The main impetus arose from German-speaking historians who took over many ideas from French research (mainly the Annales School). The most important questions of the History of Daily Life concentrate on the role of repetitive, habitualized, and routinized behavior of humans in the past. Other problems concern various aspects of the roles of mentality and material culture in this framework.
The class is an introduction into this field of research. Special attention is paid to the theoretical and methodological aspects of analysis, to the usage of the various types of sources (written material, images, archaeological evidence), and to their critical interpretation. We will also concentrate on questions of source intention, representation, image and “reality”, norm and practice, contrasts, connotations, ambiguities, and ambivalences.
The research and analysis have to be seen in context with the role and influence of different aspects of space in medieval life. There, in particular, the phenomenona of “public” and “private” space have to be taken into account and any kind of social space played an important role, too. Proper studies into the History of Daily Life cannot be realized without the regular consideration of various gender-related aspects. The use and perception of symbols and signs open relevant perspectives for questions of perception and their analyses.
Colonialism and Postcolonialism– 2 CEU credits (4 ECTS) Fall term. (cross-listed from the Sociology and Social Anthropology Department ) Fall Semester (Prem Kumar Rajaram)
Definitions of ‘colonialism’ and ‘postcolonialism’ vary. Colonialism is sometimes understood as a specific event or experience of the past. Colonialism is also understood as an ongoing exercise of economic, military or political power by stronger states over weaker ones (‘neo-colonialism’). Still others point to colonial epistemology or forms of knowledge, premised on the privileging of western forms of understanding, and indeed of living, and the appropriation or derogation of ‘local’ or ‘native’ forms. As a result, postcolonialism is sometimes understood in straightforward temporal terms (‘after colonialism’). Other times postcolonialism is understood as a quotidian condition of cultural, political and/or economic marginality. And yet more understandings see the marginal condition of ‘postcoloniality’ as an ‘in-between’ intellectual or cultural condition, existing at the interstices of European modernity, with which it has a complex, intertwined and symbiotic relationship. Postcolonialism is thus about questions of agency, subjectivity, power and justice, all couched within the resounding question of who gets to speak? And on whose behalf?
The course provides a detailed review of colonialism and postcolonialism. The course is arranged thematically, rather than temporally. Rather than beginning with colonialism and ending with postcolonialism, the course draws lines of connection and disconnections between the two.
Winter Term
Mandatory courses: for the 1st year students in 1 year and 2 year MA Program in Critical Gender Studies:
Methods Elective – 2 credits to be fulfilled in either the fall or winter term. Not compulsory for students who took a method course in the fall term.
Foundations of Gender Studies II — 2 CEU credits (4 ECTS). Winter term. Group C. Core course in feminist theory for the first year GEMMA students (Eszter Timar) (students register with one of the two groups)
This course will focus on the multiple and sometimes conflicting ways feminist theory produced scholarship since 1980 which sought to deploy the concept of difference in order to release some political and epistemological potential in undermining a homogenous, universal(izing) concept of gender. The curriculum includes a selection of key texts and texts representing key arguments in order to trace this development of difference in feminist scholarship. The course is designed to provide an opportunity to read and discuss in detail these texts and the turns they inaugurated or represent. Themes will include essentialism, postcolonial feminist theory, intersectionality, deconstructive feminist theory, French Feminism and psychoanalysis, sexuality, embodiment and the posthuman body.
Foundations of Gender Studies II - 2 CEU credits (4 ECTS).
Winter term. Group C. Core course in feminist theory for the 1st year GEMMA students (Anna Loutfi) (students register with one of the two groups)
The first part of this course uses gender as an analytical lens through which to examine the continuities and discontinuities between earlier forms of liberal, Marxist and psychoanalytic thought – and later intellectual traditions emerging in the twentieth century such as postmodernism, poststructuralism, transnational feminism, feminist epistemology, and the New Materialism currently dominating many science and gender issues. Gender is retained as a critical tool with which to explore dissent and debate within these traditions. The second part of the course focuses on specific topics chosen by the students and presented as part of organized group work, drawing on the readings and discussions from previous Foundations classes.
Academic Writing continued
Elective courses:
The Gender / Sexuality Intersection − 2 CEU credits (4 ECTS). Winter term. Group B. Core course in feminist theory for the first year GEMMA students (Erzsébet Barát)
The course is designed to advance a dialogue about the implications of the various theorizations of the categories of sex, gender, and sexuality in the past three decades, assuming as its basic premise that these categories come to mean different things in different disciplines. Based on the critical readings of both classic and recent texts, we shall explore the insights and subversive potential we can gain from ‘gender’, the key concept of Feminism/s (as of the 1970s) and that of ‘sexuality’ developed by (the 1990s generation of) Queer Theory. Our ultimate aim is to destabilize the non-productive dichotomy between feminist vs. queer theorizations of women’s everyday life. Instead, the course is hoped to seek a more integrative account of the complex hegemonic relations between gender and sexuality, destabilizing the (theoretically) assumed reductive continuities between anatomical sex, social gender, gender identity, sexual practice, sexual desire, and sexual identity. In other words, queer theorists’ knowledge production will be a helpful criticism of most feminist theories’ separation of biological/anatomical sex and social gender but without arguing for the queer non-foundationalist celebrations of sexualities as playful, de-centered performative acts, postulating woman as dematerialized and disembodied signification of fun only.
Women and/in the United Nations − 4 CEU credits (8 ECTS). (8 ECTS for MATILDA students) Winter term. Group A. (Francisca de Haan)
This seminar-style course explores how the improvement of “women’s status” became part of the UN agenda and how “women’s rights” gained recognition as “human rights.”
We will look at the role of international women’s organizations in advancing gender equality within the UN as well as the role of the UN in creating/strengthening a global women’s movement, the history and impact of International Women’s Year (1975) and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW, 1979), and the current main issues and discussions regarding women and gender in the UN context. Throughout the course we will ask how broader political events and constellations such as decolonization and the Cold War have impacted on these developments.
The materials we will read and discuss include histories of the UN and its main agencies, biographies and autobiographies of major actors, UN documents and various internet sources.
Gender, Nation, State: Anthropological Perspectives – 4 CEU credits (8 ECTS). Winter term. Group A. (Elissa Helms)
This course reviews some of the major theories and case studies on the ways in which the discourses and practices of states and nations are gendered. In keeping with anthropological approaches to the study of state and national processes, we concentrate on the effects of state power and national(ist) discourses on 1) culturally specific conceptual frameworks and 2) the everyday lives of women, men, and other socially defined groups. We consider both men and women, masculinities and femininities, as well as sexuality as they intersect with issues of state and nation. Particular areas of focus include reproduction, kinship, ethnicity, violence, and notions of modernity.
From Biopolitics to Necropolitics: Theorizing Life and Death in the 20th and 21st Centuries — 4 CEU credits (8 ECTS). Winter term. Group B, C. (Anna Loutfi)
This course will take students through theories of biopolitics, beginning with the impact of Michel Foucault in the 1970s when he coined this term in order to describe a particular kind of modern state formation motivated solely by the need to preserve certain kinds of life (over others). The course then examines theories that have been developed in the wake of Foucault’s intervention (such as Giorgio Agamben’s political philosophy on sovereign power and bare life). It traces a genealogy of ideas and concepts informing the contemporary field of biopolitics that goes back to earlier thinkers (pre-Foucault), whose work is being continually revitalized today through a biopolitical lens (e.g. the work of Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt). The course also looks at Achille Mbembe’s argument for analyzing modern governance through the lens of necropolitics rather than biopolitics, and students are encouraged to think about the ways in which discourses of (human) rights and political ethics are structured by the rhetoric of ‘necessary killing’, alongside rhetorics of reproducing, saving, preserving, and improving life.
Sex, gender, race, and class are treated as key analytical categories for looking at contemporary biopolitical issues in an era of so-called ‘neoliberal’ capitalism: e.g. issues such as global security, the management of health, biotechnology and reproductive rights.
Gender and Genre: Feminist Interventions – 2 CEU credits. Groups B, C. (4 ECTS). Winter term. (Jasmina Lukic)
The course investigates the role of gender in the recent history of several genres in literature and popular culture. Those are the genres that were profoundly transformed by the influence of feminist theory and more generally the second wave feminism, and which on the other hand became the strong vehicle of promoting gender consciousness themselves. After looking more generally into the theory of genres, the course will investigate critically gender/genre intersection in consciousness raising narratives, autobiography, science fiction, feminist romance, graphic novels, lesbian soap opera and feminist films.
Gendered Memories of War and Political Violence — 4 CEU credits (8 ECTS) Winter term. (Andrea Pető)
(cross-listed to the History Department and to the Department of Political Science and to the Department of Public Polic, Jewish Studies)
20th century has been “a century of wars, global and local, hot and cold” (Catherine Lutz). The course explores the different ways in which war and political violence are remembered through a gender lens. Central questions include: what are the gendered effects of war, political violence, and militarization? How have wars, genocide and other forms of political violence been narrated and represented? How do women remember and narrate gendered violence in war? How are post-conflict processes and transitional justice gendered? What is the relationship between testimony, storytelling, and healing? How is the relationship between the “personal” and the “public/national” reconstructed in popular culture, film, literature, and (auto)biographical texts dealing with war, genocide, and other forms of political violence? How are wars memorialized and gendered through monuments, museums, and other memory sites? Besides others, case studies on Hungary, Turkey, Germany, Rwanda, former Yugoslavia, and Argentina will be used to elaborate the key concepts and debates in the emerging literature on gender, memory, and war. For selected participants the course also consists of a field trip to Istanbul and four mandatory field trips in Budapest to visit major sites, museums and collections related to the course.
Qualitative Methods in Social Science Research: Oral History (“M”) − 2 CEU credits (4 ECTS). (4 ECTS for GEMMA students) Winter term. Methods course. Core Course in feminist methodology for the 1st year GEMMA students (Andrea Pető)
(cross-listed to the History Department)
This interdisciplinary course is to help students with the methodology section of their thesis. It will familiarise students with some of the main methods of qualitative social science research and equip them with the skills they will need to formulate research questions, carry out the qualitative research and analyse their data. The course finishes with a discussion of the ethical dimensions of research and writing. Given that oral history is a technique and a way of constructing histories the course tries to offer an overview of different ways of how to construct the information and how to analyse it in a wider theoretical context. The course consists of two parts: lectures are followed by seminars where participants will have the chance to practice making and analyzing interviews.
Re-imagining Social Movements: Activism, Resistance, and Cultural Change — 4 CEU credits (8 ECTS). Winter term. Group A. (Hadley Z. Renkin)
Social movements and social activism are critical to political engagement and social transformation. Traditional social science approaches to social movements and social change have seen forms of collective resistance and protest primarily as either irrational, spontaneous reactions to oppression, or as strictly rational expressions of reasoned dissent. In this course, we will challenge such views, employing an anthropological perspective which takes cultural practice as analytically central in order to see social movements instead as cultural struggles over meaning. We will first critically review the dominant theoretical frameworks which have shaped interpretations of social activism and social movements. We will then explore more recent theories of power, politics, and social change, in order to locate social movements within complex cultural structures of power, domination, and transformation. For each segment of the class, we will first examine a specific theoretical framework from which questions of social actions, movements, and change have been addressed. We will then go on to explore, through concrete ethnographic examples, the ways in which these perspectives enable - and foreclose - particular understandings of the nature of social movements, and of their implications.
Body, Gender and Commercialization of the Human Body — 2 CEU credits (4 ECTS) Winter Semester. Group A, C. (Judit Marcella Sándor)
The human body, its organs, tissues and cells are increasingly used in various new contexts. In biomedical research, in stem cell research and in assisted reproduction the human body is to fulfill various scientific and commercial purposes ranging from essential life-saving treatments to aesthetic enhancement. Reflecting on this complex phenomenon, this course will analyze complex issues, such as the commodification and commercialization of the human body by applying both the human rights and the gender approach. Analysis of academic texts and judicial cases about biobanks, tissue- and organ donation, biotechnological inventions, organ and egg trade, organ trafficking, tourism, and trafficking of women will provide a rich repertoire of social and legal questions for lectures, seminars and film sessions.
Queer Theory, Queer Politics — 4 CEU credits (8 ECTS). Winter term. B, C. Core course in feminist theory for the first year GEMMA students (Eszter Timár)
This course will look at the political stakes in the division between heterosexuality and other forms of sexuality in particular and interrogates the category of “normal” in general. It is organized around some key concepts fuelling both the thinking of sexuality and the directions of LGBT movements since 1969 putting a particular emphasis on the politics manifested in the activism precipitated by the AIDS crisis in the US. These key concepts include: the concept of queer, homosexuality as identity, coming out and the closet, citizenship, perversion and rights. The objective of the course is to give an introduction to the poststructuralist body of queer theory, its past and present connections to activism from the HIV-crisis to homonationalism, and its more recent theoretical developments. The purpose of the course is to foster critical thinking about the aspects of our, and other’s, lives we think of as “sexuality” as well as to highlight some basic heteronormative assumptions in modern social thought.
Cross-listed courses from other departments/programs:
(the list is not complete):
The Politics of Gender based Violence - 2 CEU credits (4 ECTS). Group A. Winter term. Cross listed from Department of Public Policy. (Andrea Krizsán)
Gender based violence is one of the main social forces producing and reproducing gender inequality. Brought to international and national policy agendas by the feminist movement in the ?80s it has lately become a core policy issue discussed not just in the framework of gender equality policy but related to policies on human rights, crime prevention, child protection, health, development, cross border migration and trafficking and conflict and post conflict intervention. This course aims to look at the politics of gender based violence through understanding the main challenges of framing it as a policy issue. Starting from discussing the history of feminist mobilization around gender based violence and the feminist approach to it the course will progress through understanding contestation to the feminist framing, alternative approaches to it and proceed to examining currently available norms and state responses addressing it. The course will pay particular attention to some specific forms of gender based violence such as violence in intimate relations (domestic violence), sexual violence, cultural forms of violence, trafficking and violence in conflict and post conflict situations.
Equality Policy in Comparative Perspective - 2 credits (4 ECTS) Cross listed from Department of Public Policy. (Andrea Krizsán and Viola Zentai)
The main aim of this course is to familiarize students with how the abstract principle of equality is turned into policy and practice. Starting from what equality means as a basic legal principle and right in modern democratic systems, the course moves on to present and critically analyze the policy visions, policy approaches and policy tools used to put equality into practice as they evolved from an individualist understanding characterizing the post World War II human right regime to proactively transformative redistributive visions present in current European policy arenas. The course discusses different inequalities, and particularly race and ethnicity, gender and disability, simultaneously, aiming to see them and policy interventions addressing them both in their distinctiveness but also in their sameness and their intersections.
Spring Term
Masterpieces in Gender Studies (“M”)- 2 CEU credits (4 ECTS). Compulsory for the 1st year students in Critical Gender Studies, who have to take 4 credits in methods courses; for the 1st year GEMMA students as a Core Course in feminist methodology; optional for Matilda students.. (instructor TBA)
Thesis Writing Workshop – 4 CEU credits (8 ECTS)
Mandatory for all graduating MA students
4 groups, instructor(s) T.B.A.
PhD Program in Comparative Gender Studies
Fall Term
Mandatory courses:
The Uses of Comparative and Integrative Perspectives for Women’s and Gender Studies – 4 credits (Susan Zimmermann)
This course, through the lens of comparative and integrative studies, aims to develop and critically discuss de-colonizing or decolonial perspectives on gender and in gender studies around the world. These perspectives emerge from a dual process of de-universalizing knowledge and theory with an unacknowledged focus on privileged world-regions and social strata, and at the same time of de-provincializing knowledge and theory related to dominated world regions and social strata and therefore as a rule deemed particular. In addition, these perspectives build on a critical reflection of how these two processes relate to each other. In the first part of the course, we discuss how comparative and integrative studies, broadly conceived, have contributed to this project, and focus on some of the conceptual problems and limitations involved. In the second part, we explore core research areas in which research grounded in gendered comparative and integrative perspectives has generated innovative and unexpected findings and contributed to the production of de-colonizing knowledge and concepts.
Research Methods in Gender Studies – 2 credits course (Elissa Helms)
This 2 credit course is designed to familiarize students with some of the most commonly used methods of research in Gender Studies and to equip them with the skills they will need to formulate research questions, carry out the research, analyze, and write up data for their PhD theses. The course combines consideration of theoretical and ethical issues with practical readings and exercises in three main areas: participant observation, interviewing, and textual/discursive analysis. Guest lecturers with different areas of expertise will allow students to discuss first-hand experiences with research and writing.
1st Year Ph.D. Preparation Seminar – 2 credits (Francisca de Haan)
Continues in winter term
Sexological Subjects: Sex, Science, and the Making of Modern Society - 2 credits (Hadley Renkin)
The “scientific” study of sex and sexuality has been a key mechanism of biopower, central to the shaping of modern societies and their identities, communities, and politics. Through its complex and changing intersections with categories of race, class, gender, criminality, morality, health and illness, it has constituted and been constituted by distinctions between order and disorder, civilized and savage, and Outsider and Insider, in ways that have defined and legitimated the borders of proper and improper being and acting. This course will interrogate a range of these intersections and their effects, exploring the science of sexuality as a form of cultural production par excellence. It will investigate both the ways in which scientific knowledge about sex and sexuality is embedded in historically and culturally specific assumptions, and how it functions to produce and reproduce diverse identities, practices,andrelationships.
Reading not only scholarly analyses, but also primary sexological sources and relevant historical events, we will focus on the ways this particular form of knowledge production has served to secure and maintain certain understandings of bodies, behaviors, desires, and relationships, while foreclosing alternatives to them, and thus to naturalize particular relations of power. Yet we will also remain attentive to the ways in which the production of “scientific” knowledge about sex and sexuality has created new identities and communities, and stimulated new forms of resistance. Topics considered include: sexology’s scientific ancestors, the emergence of sexology as a discipline; disorderly women, racialized Others, masturbation panics, sexualized diseases, scientific racism and fascist science.
Winter Term
Mandatory courses:
1st Year Ph.D. Preparation Seminar /continued/ 2 credits – (Francisca de Haan)
3rd Year Writing Seminar – (Allaine Cerwonka)
This course is designed for students who have advanced to candidacy to facilitate the writing of their substantive dissertation chapters. Its core requirement, to circulate a 10+ page section of a substantive dissertation chapter in progress, is designed to give students a deadline and community to support their independent dissertation writing. The structure of the seminar will be a serious writing workshop. This means that members must read the writing of other students and provide thoughtful, productive, and meaningful feedback to facilitate their peers’ revisions. Depending on the number of students enrolled, participants may be able to present more than once (either a revision of their first submission or a second piece of written work). Those taking the course for credit will need to register; however, all students who are advanced to candidacy and have begun to write their dissertation chapters are strongly encouraged and welcome to participate as auditors. Each participant must expect to attend regularly so that they can take part in the discussion of others’ work as well as receive productive, critical feedback from their peers.
Students participating in the seminar are expected to be able to identify key issues to be resolved in their own dissertation material and develop a plan for resolving those issues. By the seminar’s end, each should have an idea of what the particular, original contribution of their own research is, what the main argument of their chapter is, and how it facilitates the argument of the dissertation as a whole. This learning goal will be achieved through their individual preparation of a dissertation chapter and presentation, and by the critical questions/feedback of the other members of the seminar. Ideally (but not required), participants should better understand more broadly how the over-arching argument of a dissertation is supported and developed by the sub-arguments and “evidence” (analytical support) within the individual, substantive chapters. This learning outcome would be achieved through analysis of and comparison across the writing of the other members of the seminar.
Elective courses:
Cultural Productions of the Self - 2 credits (Allaine Cerwonka)
This course uses historical and theoretical sources to analyze how the modern notion of the self developed in the West. It does so in order to highlight the constructed nature of identity, but more importantly, to show that identity has a very particular history. It connects shifts in ideas of the self to the secularization of Europe, the rise of the middle class, the rise of the modern novel, and new forms of political power. Additionally, the course asks about the consequences of “identity” – interrogating how it has become a key means for people to imagine their place in society and their experience of being a person/alive. Therefore, beyond looking at the relationship of the self to structures of power, we will also consider how it has been employed in forms of contemporary self-help culture, identity politics, and feminist methodologies. We query why, in the face of the anti-humanist critiques (post-modern/post-structural, feminist, post-humanism) of the constructedness of identity, has personal identity become a cultural obsession in the West and a preoccupation of much contemporary social research? Why does it serve as the basis of “mainstream” liberal ideology, as well as “alternative” frameworks (new age philosophy, psychoanalysis, feminism, etc.)? Why is it considered a cultural value for individuals to be “authentic”? Within the general investigation about the historical roots and contemporary manifestations of the modern self, we will give special attention to how gender has functioned as a more specific identity category in modernity and social politics.
By the conclusion of the course, students must demonstrate a mastery over the key historical developments in the literature that formed modern ideas about the self. They must demonstrate fluency with key ideas such as liberalism, the Enlightenment, anti-humanism and Foucault’s theory of productive power. Students must also be able to apply (some of) the key conceptual frameworks of the course to a relevant issue of their choosing which meaningfully extends the scope of the course material. These skills will be applied through seminar discussions and through independent critical analysis in oral presentations and courses papers.
Travelling Concepts in Gender Studies – 2 credits (Jasmina Lukic)
Generating ‘traveling concepts’ is an inherent feature of all theories. And in feminist theory, with its intentional, self-reflexive eclecticism, the question of traveling concepts is of particular importance. Producing an interdisciplinary frame of thinking, where traditional modes of knowledge production are put in question, feminist theory is continually re-thinking its key concepts, thus creating changes in conceptual framework that have significant theoretical and methodological implications.
In this course students are invited to participate in a critical debate over several key concepts in contemporary feminist thinking, exploring the ways these concepts have been used in more recent theoretical debates. The emphasis is on feminist perspective, but in some cases, for the sake of clarity and better understanding of specific conceptual histories, other perspectives are also included.