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Centre for Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies

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HHU13002 Gender: History & Culure

  • Module Coordinator:
    • Dr Gillian Frank (History)
  • Lecturers:
    • Staff in Classics, History, History of Art And Architecture
  • Duration:
    • Hilary term 
  • Contact Hours:
    • 22 (One lecture per week, and 5 seminar meetings in weeks 4, 6, 8, 10 & 12)
  • Weighting:
    • 5 ECTS
  • Assessment:
    • ONE final essay addressing the major themes in the module (2500 words). There is no final examination for this module.
This module introduces students to the interdisciplinary field of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. The syllabus is organized thematically and draws from the three disciplines in the School of Histories and Humanities: Classics, History, and History of Art and Architecture. Each week, a faculty member from the school will draw from their areas of expertise and share a different methodology for understanding the ways gender shapes or is shaped by a historical period, a culture, or a cultural production. In doing so, this module offers different angles of vision from which students will learn about the historical and cultural construction of sex, gender, and sexuality.

Students will be expected to draw connections between the lectures and to relate readings to each other and to lectures. Tutorials / Seminars, which are mandatory to attend, will be key opportunities to make these connections.

Schedule of Lectures, Seminars and Readings. HT 2025.

Week 1: Course Intro (Week of Jan 20)
Studying Gender and American Culture Through 1950s Dating Advice
Gillian Frank

Required Viewing: “Date Etiquette” (1952)

Week 2: Gender Fluidity in the Middle Ages (Week of Jan 27)
Ruth Karras

Required Reading:  Martha Newman,  “Assigned Female at Death: Joseph of Schönau and the Disruption of Medieval Gender Binaries,” Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography, eds. Alicia Spencer-Hall and Blake Gutt. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021, 43-64.

Week 3: Masculinity and the Reformation (Week of Feb 3)
Graeme Murdock

Required Reading: Lyndal Roper,  'Martin Luther's Body: The "Stout Doctor" and His Biographers,' The American Historical Review 115 (2010), pp. 351-384.

Week 4: The Materials of Gender (1): Textiles and Craft (Week of Feb 10)
Seminar Week
Philip McEvansoneya

Required Reading: M.W. Labarge, 'Stitches in time: medieval embroidery in its social setting', Florigelium 16 (1999), 77-96

Required Viewing: Judy Chicago and others, “The Dinner Party,” (1974-9):
https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/dinner_party/home

Week 5: The Material of Gender (2): An Archaeological View of Gender (Week of Feb 17)
Christine Morris

Required Reading: McDermott, LeRoy 1996. Self-Representation in Upper Paleolithic Female Figurines. Current Anthropology 37:2, pp. 227-275.*

* For the seminar please read the core article: pp. 227-248. NB: (If you are able to also read more and look at the scholarly responses/comments which follow that will give you some idea of how the ideas in the article were received).

Week 6: Spartan Women: Liberation or Oppression? (Week of Feb 24) Seminar Week
Suzanne O’Neill

Required Reading: E. Fantham, et al, “Excursus - Spartan Women: Women in a Warrior Society,”  Women in the Classical World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. 56-67.

Week 7: STUDY / REVIEW WEEK (Week of March 3)


Week 8: Archaeology and Gender Politics (Week of March 10)
Seminar Week
Christine Morris                            

Required Reading: Meskell, Lynn. (1995). Goddesses, Gimbutas and New Age archaeology. Antiquity. 69. 74-86

Week 9: The Unmarried Mother and the Irish Nation (Part 1) (Week of March 17)
Lindsey Earner-Byrne

Required Reading: Maria Luddy, ‘Unmarried mothers in Ireland, 1880-1973’, Women’s History Review, 20: 1 (2011), pp. 109-126.

Week 10: The Unmarried Mother and the Irish Nation (Part 2) (Week of March 24)
Seminar Week
Lindsey Earner-Byrne

Required Reading: Department of Justice and Equality, Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee to establish the facts of State involvement with the Magdalen Laundries (Dublin, 2013).
http://policereform.ie/en/JELR/Pages/MagdalenRpt2013

Week 11: Why Do We Think There Have Been No Great Women Artists? (Week of March 31)
Philip McEvansoneya

Required Reading: Paris A. Spies-Gans, 'Why Do We Think There Have Been No Great Women Artists? Revisiting Linda Nochlin and the Archive', Art Bulletin, 104:4 (2022), 70-94.

Week 12: Wrap Up (Week of April 7)
Seminar Week
We’re Going to Party Like it’s 1979! The Sexual Politics of Disco Music
Gillian Frank

Listening: The Village People, “San Francisco”; Sylvester, “You Make Me Feel Mighty Real”; Steve Dahl, “Do You Think I’m Disco?”