Gender and Globalization

Aim

After completion of the course the student will be able to:

• account for multiple and complex, positive and negative ways globalization effects gender identities, roles, relations and rights
• explain how gender intersects with major cultural, political, social, economic elements in the shaping of global processes
• use different gender studies perspectives to problematize changes in today's globalized world
• apply qualitative textual and visual analysis and postcolonial and decolonial critical feminist hermeneutics when interpreting global processes, the way they affect gender relations, identities, roles and rights
• analyse and contextualise creative depictions of gender and globalization
• identify and analyse different intersecting aspects of gender relations and identities in the context of globalization

Content

The course deals with cultural, social, existential, political, and environmental angles of current global challenges in their complex and interrelated influence on gender issues and trajectories. It addresses both the negative aspects of neoliberal globalization and the emergence of global gendered resistance and re-existence. The core topics tackled in the course include

1) women`s (dis)empowerment as a result of globalization2) gender and migration3) transnational feminist imaginaries and movements4) gender and global(ized) technologies5) gender, nationalism and cosmopolitanism6) gender in (post)development and degrowth global imaginaries7) postcolonial, indigenous, decolonial, postsocialist feminisms and globalization8) Gender and re-futuring

The course draws from both global North and global South and semi-peripheral academic and grass-root sources and combines conventional pedagogical formats with more open discussion fora and creative projects. The course applies textual and visual analysis, informed by critical theory, postcolonial and decolonial feminist critical hermeneutics, literary and art/cinema analysis.