F: Gender: Theory and History (Convenor: Prof Louise Haywood)  

The mini-seminars on ‘Gender: Theory and History’ are designed to equip you with the critical and research tools needed to develop your research on gender issues across a variety of fields, genres, and languages. They will offer an exploration into the notion and category of ‘gender’ and its relevance across the centuries (from the Medieval times to the present) and across different contexts, traditions, subjects, and disciplines.

It will allow students to explore the various meanings, understandings and implications of gender, its uses in the construction of ‘identities’, and its representation, across literature, history, art, cinema, and language. It will provide students with a critical and theoretical knowledge of gender that includes also feminist theory, queer theory, transgender/trans* theory, and critical sexuality studies.

The nature and scope of the ‘Gender: Theory and History’ mini-seminars is to offer students both the option of in-depth investigation into gender-related issues and topics, and to transcend linguistic, national, and chronological divisions to pose broader comparative questions. Students interested in the subject will be able to create a Gender pathway within the MPhil, by taking also the module ‘Approaches to Gender’ taught during Lent term, as well as focusing on gender-related topics within other modules.

 

Some preliminary readings:

Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge

Butler, J. (2004). Undoing Gender. New York and London: Routledge

De Beauvoir, S. (2010) [1949]. The Second Sex, transl. C. Borde and S. Malovany-Chevallier. New York: Alfred A. Knopf

Firestone, S. (1970). The Dialectic of Sex. NY: Bantam Books

Foucault, M. (1976). History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. I.  Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Freidan, B. (1963). The Feminist Mystique. NY: WW Norton

Halberstam, J. (2005). In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: NYU Press

Hall, D., and A. Jagose (eds) (2013). Routledge Queer Studies Reader. Abingdon: Routledge, Ch. 1, 2, 3 (by E. Kosofsky Segwick, J. Butler, J. Prosser)

Hill Collins, P. (1990.) Black Feminist Thought. London: Unwin Hyman

Hufton, O. (1996). The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe, Vol. 1, 1500-1800 (London: HarperCollins), Ch. 1 and 2

Mill, J. S. (1970) [1869]. The Subjection of Women, ed. Alice S. Rossi. Chicago: UCP

Laqueur, Thomas, ‘Destiny is Anatomy’, (chap. 2), in his Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992), pp. 26‑62

Lugones, M. (2016). ‘The Coloniality of Gender’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development: Critical Engagements in Feminist Theory and Practice, ed. Wendy Harcourt, Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 13-33

Millett, K. (1970). Sexual Politics. NY: Doubleday

Rose, S. O. (2010). What is Gender History?. Cambridge: Polity, Ch. 1

Tong, R. (2008). Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction. Powell’s Books: Oregon.

 

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Session 1: “Gender, Sexuality and Other ‘Queer’ Concepts: A Theoretical Introduction” (Dr Lauren Wilcox). Week 2.

This session rehearses and reviews basic concepts of “gender”, “sex” and “queerness” and, more pointedly, sets its sights on the insistence and insufficiency of binary categories in the conceptualization, experience and performance of gender and sexuality, themselves at times bundled together and at times separated. It does so by following an intersectional approach that at once privileges and queries the signifier and concept “queer,” with its twists, bends, turns, windings and drifts. Critical questions will be addressed throughout the session, including the consideration of a historical approach to queerness and gender; the relevance of intersectional thinking (at the crossroads of gender, sexuality, class, race); the problematic dynamics between privileging and erasing sexuality in queer studies; the theoretical “turns” within the study of gender and sexuality (antisocial turn, temporal turn, spatial turn, archival turn, ecocritical turn, etc.); the impact of HIV/AIDS in the shaping of queer theory; the promiscuous identitary possibilities of trans*; and the problematic fixation of concepts such as gender or queer in the (Anglo-centric) global academia.

Core texts to read ahead of the session:

 

Butler, Judith ‘Gender in Translation: Beyond Monolingualism’, PhiloSOPHIA, 9(1) (2019) pp. 1–25.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1.8 (1989): 139-167. Available at:http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8

Davis, Oliver, Tim Dean. “Does Queer Studies Hate Sex?” Hatred of Sex. Lincoln, U of Nebraska P, 2022, pp. 45-86. (Read 45-64 at least.)

De Lauretis, Teresa. “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities. An Introduction.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 3.2 (1991), pp. iii-xviii.

Eng, David, Jack Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz. “What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now?” Social Text, Vol. 23 (3-4), 2005, pp. 1-17.

Lugones, María. “The Coloniality of Gender.” The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development: Critical Engagements in Feminist Theory and Practice. Ed. Wendy Harcourt. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016, pp. 13-33.

Puar, Jasbir K and Amit Rai. “Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots.” Social Text 20.3 (2002): pp. 117-148.

Stryker, Susan, ‘My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 1.3 (1994) pp. 237–54.

Wittig, Monique.  “The Straight Mind.” Feminist Issues 1.1 (1980), pp. 103-111. AND “One is Not Born a Woman.” Feminist Issues 1.2 (1981), pp. 47-54.

 

Further readings:

Anzaldúa, Gloria, and Cherríe Moraga (eds.). This Bridge Called My Back. Writings by Radical Women of Color. Fourth Edition. New York: SUNY Press, 2015 [1981]. Introductory chapter.

Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex (any edition, especially, first three chapters: "Biological Data", "The Psychoanalytical Point of View" and “The Point of View of Historical Materialism")

Butler, Judith. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination.” Inside/Out: Lesbian and Gay Theories. Ed. Diana Fuss. London: Routledge, 1991, pp. 13-31

Butler, Judith.  “Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion.”  Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’.  New York: Routledge, 1993, pp. 121-140.

Foucault, Michel. (1978) The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. [We Other Victorians and Scientia Sexualis: pp. 3-13, 53-73]

Gill-Peterson, Jules. Histories of the Transgender Child. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018

Gill-Peterson, Jules. A Short History of Trans Misogyny. London: Verso, 2024

Halberstam, Jack. “The Transgender Look.” In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York UP, 2005, pp. 76-96.

Halberstam, Jack. “Introduction: Low Theory.” The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke UP, 2011, pp. 1-25.

Muñoz, José Esteban. “Queerness as Horizon. Utopian Hermeneutics in the Face of Gay Pragmatism.” Cruising Utopia. The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York and London: NY UP, 2009, pp. 19-32.

Preciado, Paul. “The Pharmacopornographic Era.” Testo Junkie. Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. New York: The Feminist Press, 2013, pp. 23-54.

Prosser, Jay.  “Judith Butler: Queer Feminism, Transgender, and the Transubstantiation of Sex.”  The Transgender Studies Reader.  Eds. Susan Stryker and Stephern Whittle. New York: Routledge, 2006, pp. 257-280.

 

 

Session 2: Gender and Postcolonialism (Dr Sura Qadiri) Week 4.

According to Elleke Boehmer, both gender and national identity have in common the fact that they are constructed. She asserts that:

 

Far from being a biological or a cultural given, a nation operates as a fiction, uniting a people into a horizontally structured conglomerate into which they imagine themselves. As with the nation, so too, for gender. Although experienced as natural, as a fundamental category of identity based on innate difference, gender as the construction of sexual orientation, too, is discursively organised relationally derived, and culturally variable. (Boehmer, 2005, p.107)

 

For Boehmer, the nation is an ‘engendered’ space. Its construction involves a defining of gender roles and identities within the new nation state. In this seminar, we will consider the ways in gender and national identity are configured in a range of colonial and postcolonial texts. We will think about the ways in which colonial regimes sought to consolidate their hold over colonised communities through the disruption of local gender norms, and how these same norms were also reconfigured as part of the struggles for independence, creating complex tensions and multivalencies surrounding changes to gender roles and identities and their relationship to postcolonial national identity. Our focus will be literary, theoretical and artistic works from the intertwined contexts of France and Algeria, ranging from the late colonial period to the present. These will include Assia Djebar’s novel Loin de Médine (Far From Madina), Frantz Fanon’s ‘Algeria Unveils’ and  Kader Attia’s photo series ‘The Landing Strip.’ We will also look at readings of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, and discuss examples of postcolonial feminisms from around the world. These approaches will be an opportunity for you to consider the connections between specific gender identities and the broader collective sense of self that they are deemed to espouse in other settings and the implications of challenging or subverting such identities.

 

 

Reading

 

Elleke Boehmer, Stories of Women: Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation (Manchester, New York: Manchester University Press, 2005).

Assia Djebar, Far From Madina, translated by Dorothy S. Blair, (London: Quartet, 1994).

Frantz Fanon, ‘Algeria Unveiled’ in A Dying Colonialism, translated by Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1965).

E.M. Forster, A Passage to India (London: Penguin, 1967).

Joan Scott, Sex and Secularism (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018).

Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Context (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), particularly chapter 5.

 

Session 3: ‘Gender in Early Modern Europe: Prescriptions and Descriptions’ (Prof. Helena Sanson). Week 6.

In this session, we will explore early modern conceptualizations of “gender” in the Early modern period, with particular attention being given to the rich production of conduct texts for and about women, as well as the so called Querelle des femmes. The focus will be above all on Italy, but students are encouraged to extend their readings to other cultural and linguistic traditions they are familiar with.

 

Core reading. Everyone should read the following:

 

Kelly, Joan, 1984. ‘Early Feminist Theory and the Querelle des femmes 1400-1789’ (1st publ.l. Signs, 1982), in ed. Catharine R. Stimpson, Women, History and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 65-109. (querelle and feminism)

Vives, Juan Luis, 2000 [1538]. The Education of a Christian Woman: A Sixteenth-Century Manual, ed. by Charles Fantozzi. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press (original Latin, De Institutione foeminae Christianae (…) libri tres).

Castiglione, Baldassare, Il libro del cortegiano (1528) (any Italian edition or English translation), Book III (only)

 

Student presentation: students are invited to present on a text of their choosing after consulting the bibliography in this text (see which texts exist in modern edition for the sake of convenience):

Kelso, Ruth, 1956. Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance. Urbana: University of Illinois Press (also 1978).

 

For further reading see:

Murphy, Jessica, 2015, Virtuous Necessity: Conduct Literature and the Making of the Virtuous Woman in Early Modern England. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

St. Clair William and Maassen Irmgard (eds), 2000. Conduct Literature for Women 1500-1640. London: Pickering & Chatto.

Bornstein, Diane, 1978 (ed.). Distaves and Dames: Renaissance Treatises for and about Women. Delmar, New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints.

Bornstein, Diane, 1980 (ed.). The Feminist Controversy of the Renaissance. Delmar, New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints.

Hufton, Owen, The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe, Vol. 1, 1500-1800 (London: HarperCollins, 1996), Chapters 1, 2.

King, Margaret, 1991. Women of the Renaissance. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press.

Laqueur, Thomas, ‘Destiny is Anatomy’, (chap. 2), in his Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992), pp. 26‑62.

Maclean, Ian, 1980. The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medieval Science in European Intellectual Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sanson, Helena, 2016. ‘Women and Conduct in the Italian Tradition, 1470-1900: An Overview’, in Conduct Literature for and about Women in Italy, 1470-1900: Prescribing and Describing Life, ed. Helena Sanson and F. Lucioli (Paris: Classiques Garnier), pp. 9-38.

Zimmermann, Margarete,‘The Querelle des femmes as a cultural studies paradigm’, in Time, Space, and Women's Lives in Early Modern Europe, eds Anne Jacobson Schutte, Thomas Kuehn, Silvana Seidel Menchi.

 

 

Session 4: ‘Sex and the Body’ (Dr Charlotte Woodford), Week 8. How does what we call knowledge of the body become accredited as such? Are not the supposed ‘facts’ of biology also the product of culture? This session enquires into knowledge of the body and its regulation within the structures of power in society, and the implications of this for individual subjectivity. The core readings investigate the historically and socially contingent nature of science-based knowledge, drawing links between contemporary theory and conceptualisations of the body around 1900.

 

Student presentations connected to the MT theory essay are very welcome in this session, on any subject linked to the set readings.

 

Core readings for discussion:

Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (2004), Ch. 1 and 2

Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (2000) 

Thomas Laqueur, ‘Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology’, from The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur (1987)

Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (1989)

 

Further readings:

Ivan Crozier, ‘Bodies in History - the Task of the Historian’, in A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Modern Age (2010)

Elizabeth Grosz. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (1994)

Thomas Schlich, ‘The Technological Fix and the Modern Body: Surgery as a Paradigmatic Case’, in A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Modern Age (2010)

 

Literature and autobiography around 1900

N.O. Body, Memoirs of a Man’s Maiden Years, tr. Deborah Simon (Philadelphia 2006), orig. N.O. Body, Aus eines Mannes Mädchenjahren, first publ. 1907

See Ina Linge ‘Gender and Agency between Sexualwissenschaft and Autobiography: the Case of N.O. Body’s Aus eines Mannes Mädchenjahren’ [Memoirs of a Man’s Maiden Years]. German Life and Letters, 68(3) (2015), 38-405

N. O. Body,

Memoirs of a Man’s Maiden Years, tr. Deborah Simon, Philadelphia 2006

N. O. Body,

Memoirs of a Man’s Maiden Years, tr. Deborah Simon, Philadelphia 2006

N. O. Body,

Memoirs of a Man’s Maiden Years, tr. Deborah Simon, Philadelphia 2006

Lou Andreas-Salomé, Mädchenreigen, in Menschenkinder, first publ. 1898 (MedienEdition Welsch 2016); in translation: Maidens' Roundelay, in The Human Family by Lou Andreas-Salomé

See Marti M. Lybeck, ‘Experiments in Female Masculinity: Sophia Goudstikker’s Masculine Mimicry in Turn-of-the-Century Munich’, in Desiring Emancipation: New Women and Homosexuality in Germany 1890-1933 (2014), pp. 49-82

 

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