FGSS 3445 - Gender, Liberalism, and Postcolonial Theory

(crosslisted)
(also ANTHR 3445, GOVT 3765) (SBA-AS)

Spring. 4 credits.

S. Hodžić.

Drawing on multiple disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, this course operates at two registers. First, it offers students a productive set of analytical tools for theorizing gender and sexuality in a transnational framework. To construct this genealogy, the course focuses on the productive potential of articulations and tensions between ethnography and postcolonial theory, exploring their challenges to liberalism and liberal feminism. Second, the course places anthropology in conversation with political theory, examining what makes gender and sexuality useful to think with for understanding contemporary political formations. We will analyze how gender and sexuality are reconfigured, mediated, and mobilized to divergent ends in the encounters between market-driven regimes of neoliberal governance, rights frameworks, secularism, new discursive and legal frameworks of citizenship and belonging, and alternative social movements.