DSOC 3230 - Gender and Global Change

(crosslisted) FGSS 3230
(D-AG)

Fall. 3 credits. Letter grades only.

L. Leonard.

This course examines men’s and women’s lives and the impacts on them of incorporation into global economic and political systems. It asks how inequalities within and across gender categories are created in the process of social change, how gender intersects with class, race, and culture to shape the way change is experienced, and how institutions and social spaces become gendered. The course begins with the study of theoretical approaches or gender planning models to promote gender equality in policies and programs. We then turn to specific substantive areas of social life to consider how gender operates in different spaces, and we consider prospects for change beyond gender planning models in the form of social movements, politics, and the law.

Outcome 1: Describe how market liberalization and the acceleration and increasing density of global exchange is shaping labor markets and job prospects for men and women across hierarchies of race and class.

Outcome 2: Trace how the circulation of people, technologies, commodities, images and ideas enables and constrains the possibilities men and women have for living gendered lives and contributes to the formation of gendered subjectivities.

Outcome 3: Analyze cultural practices and responses to global flows and what they reveal about the variety of interests, desires, and attachments people have to gendered ways of being.

Outcome 4: Assess the effects of efforts to ‘empower’ women and reduce gender inequalities using critical perspectives (feminist, post-colonial).

Outcome 5: Connect, through a semester-long writing project, the implications of the global changes we trace in the course to your own lives, trajectories, and subjective experiences of gender.