Sylabus
Full syllabus available for download here.
In-class presentations of required readings are part of the course requirements. You can sign up for the presentations via this google form.
Course schedule
Week 1 (February 18) Introduction
No required reading.
I. Vulnerable and precarious lives
Week 2 (February 25)
Butler, J. (2009). Frames of war : when is life grievable? London & New York: Verso. Introduction: Precarious life, grievable life (pp. 1 – 32).
Week 3 (March 4)
Carastathis, A. (2015). the politics of austerity and the affective economy of hostility: racialised gendered violence and crises of belonging in Greece. Feminist Review(109), 73-95. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/fr.2014.50
Lorey, I. (2015). State of insecurity : government of the precarious. London & New York: Verso. The government of the precarious: an introduction (pp. 1 – 15).
Week 4 (March 11)
Farris, S. R. (2012). Femonationalism and the “regular” army of labor called migrant women. History of the Present, 2(2), 184-199. doi:10.5406/historypresent.2.2.0184
Lorey, I. (2015). State of insecurity : government of the precarious. London & New York: Verso. Chapter 3: Welfare state and immunization (pp. 41 – 61).
II. Anti-gender thinking and movements
Week 5 (March 18)
Scott, J. W. (2013). The uses and abuses of gender. Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies, 16(1), 63-77. doi:10.5117/TVGEND2013.1.SCOT.
Paternotte, D., & Kuhar, R. (2017). The anti-gender movement in comparative perspective. In R. Kuhar & D. Paternotte (Eds.), Anti-gender campaigns in Europe : mobilizing against equality (pp. 253 - 276). Lanham & New York: Rowman & Littlefield.
Week 6 (March 25)
Kuhar, R. (2015). Playing with science: Sexual citizenship and the Roman Catholic Church counter-narratives in Slovenia and Croatia. Women's Studies International Forum, 49, 84-92. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2014.07.005
Case, M. A. (2016). The role of the popes in the invention of complementarity and the Vatican’s anathematization of gender. Religion & Gender, 10(10). doi:10.18352/rg.10124. Retrieved from: https://www.religionandgender.org/articles/abstract/10.18352/rg.10124/
Week 7 (April 1)
Korolczuk, E., & Graff, A. (2018). Gender as “ebola from Brussels” : the anticolonial frame and the rise of illiberal populism. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 43(4), 797-821. doi:10.1086/696691
III. Misogyny, sexual objectification and emancipation
Week 8 (April 8)
Manne, K. (2017). Down girl : the logic of misogyny. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chapter 1: Threatening women (pp. 31 - 34); Chapter 2: Ameliorating misogyny (pp. 55 - 76); Chapter 3: Discriminating sexism (pp. 77 - 105).
Week 9 (April 15)
Bauer, N. (2015). How to do things with pornography. Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press. Chapter 1: Pornutopia (pp. 1 – 12); Chap. 2: Lady Power (pp. 12 – 21); Chap. 4: Beauvoir on the Allure of Self-Objectification (pp. 38 – 52).
(April 22) No class. Easter Monday.
Week 10 (April 29)
Scott, J. W. (2012). The vexed relationship of emancipation and equality. History of the Present, 2(2), 148-168. doi:10.5406/historypresent.2.2.0148
IV. Choice feminism vs. feminism as practice of freedom
Week 11 (May 6)
Gill, R., & Orgad, S. (2017). Confidence culture and the remaking of feminism. New Formations(91), 16-34. doi:10.3898/NEWF:91.01.2017
Budgeon, S. (2015). Individualized femininity and feminist politics of choice. European Journal of Women's Studies, 22(3), 303-318. doi:10.1177/1350506815576602
Week 12 (May 13)
Milan Women's Bookstore Collective. (1990). Sexual difference : a theory of social-symbolic practice. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Selection.
Arendt, H. (1958). The human condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Chap. 24 (pp. 175 – 181), chap. 25 (pp. 181 – 187), chap. 34 (pp. 243 – 247).
Arendt, H. (1961). What is freedom? In Between past and future : six exercises in political thought (pp. 143-171). New York: The Viking Press. Selection.
Week 13 (May 20)
Zerilli, L. M. G. (2005). Feminism and the abyss of freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Chapter 3: Feminists make promises : The Milan Collective´s Sexual Difference and the project of world-building (pp. 93 – 123).
Syllabus can be subject to change during the semester.
Anotace
The course covers two broad areas of theorizing. Firstly, it will explore social and political ontologies of vulnerable and precarious subjects. Social movements and reactionary political thinking that aim to act against “gender ideology” are understood as ways of managing new forms of precarity. Secondly, the course focuses on recent theorizations of gender oppression (misogyny, sexual objectification) and emancipation. Following these theorizations we will closely examine two ways of understanding feminism as either feminism stressing the importance of choices independent individuals make or feminism as a collective practice of freedom.
The course is taught seminar-style, i.e. it consists mainly of the discussion of assigned readings and other materials. Formal lecturing will be kept to a minimum.