Gender and Politics

In this course we will focus on how gender and sexuality relate to people’s involvement in political processes at a transnational scale—closely examining their intimacy with areas of difference like race, ethnicity, religion, class, and nation. Using a broad understanding of politics, we will examine how arrangements of power become naturalized through culture, and how people differently sustain, reproduce, resist, and contest these dynamics. With a particular focus on social movements, we will examine the circumstances under which people politically mobilize understandings of gender and sexuality, and how these mobilizations relate to issues like marginalization, migration, colonialism, and capitalism. Our broader aim will be to grasp how gender and sexuality-based inequalities produce—and are produced by—forms of political exclusion, as well as the diverse ways people work to engage, and even transform, existing structures of power.