Gender

Lectures: 1 session / week, 2 hours / session

There are no prerequisites for this course.

This course examines the broad topic of gender in a number of different settings as an introduction both to feminist theory and gender in history (with some anthropology). For reasons of space and time it is primarily limited to the U.S. and Western Europe. Some key questions include: How does gender work? How is the body itself sexed and gendered in different times and places? How do gender, race and class work in historical context? Does gender influence state formation and the work of the state? What role does gender play in imperialism and in the welfare state? What is the relationship between gender and war? How does the state regulate the body in the modern world? What are some new directions in the study of gender?

Professor Wood is currently working on the problem of gender, state and leadership in Russia today under President Vladimir Putin. She has previously written on gender and politics in the early Soviet Union ( The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia. Indiana University Press, 2001. ISBN: 9780253214300) and also on the use of spectacle in state formation ( Performing Justice: Agitation Trials in Early Soviet Russia. Cornell University Press, 2005. ISBN: 9780801442575). As a historian, she has a particular interest in the ways in which state interests have been articulated in gendered terms in different historical periods, and also in the ways in which different state forms have affected gender relations at different times.

Professor Ekmekcioglu is a historian of the modern Middle East, working on minority-majority relationships and the history of sectarian violence in the region. She has published in Turkish, her native language, about the history of Armenian feminism in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic. Her most recent monograph is a study of Armenian survivors of the 1915 Ottoman genocide who remained inside Turkish borders after the 1923 evolution of the Ottoman Empire to the modern Turkish Republic. Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belonging in Post-Genocide Turkey. Stanford University Press, 2016. ISBN: 9780804797061, argues that gender is an indispensable tool of analysis to understand how Turkish Armenians coped with their violent past in a denialist state. Currently she works on Armenian territorial demands and the role of history in post-World War I Wilsonian diplomatic arena in Europe and the US.

Students will each be responsible to supply questions for one week’s reading and to kick off the discussion that week.

At the end of the first two sections of the course, students will each write a 3–5 page essay focusing on the themes and readings they have found most thought provoking.

Students will also each write a 20–25 page research paper on a topic of their choosing.

For further detail, see the Assignments section.

Perreau, Bruno. Queer Theory: The French Response. Stanford University Press, 2016. ISBN: 9781503600447. [Preview with Google Books]

Rose, Sonya O. What is Gender History? Polity, 2010. ISBN: 9780745646152. [Preview with Google Books]

For additional readings, see the Readings section.

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