The program

Academic staff

Offered courses 

Master in Women and Gender

1st Semester

1. Anthropological Approaches to Gender (Compulsory)

2. Historical Approaches of Gender (Compulsory)

3. Gender and Politics (Compulsory)

4. Feminist Theory and Epistemology

2nd Semester

5. Methodological Issues: Emphasis on Gender, Biosociality & Biopower (Elective)

6. Gender, Labour and Consumption (Elective)

7. Gender, Body and Health (Elective)

8. Language, Gender and Sexuality (Elective)

Description Of Courses

WG-1  Anthropology of Gender
INSTRUCTOR: E. Papataxiarchis

The concept of gender is nowadays a classical “locus” of contemporary social theory and a useful analytic tool for the social sciences. This course examines aspects of the discussions ascertaining the value of the concept of gender in the framework of identity politics and feminism. Moreover, it focuses on the problematics developed within anthropology and historiography on the construction of gender, sexuality, and sociability in both Greek society and elsewhere.
AIMS:
TEACHING METHODS:
ASSESSMENT:

WG-2 Historical Approaches of Gender
INSTRUCTOR: Y. Yiannitsiotis

The lectures for this course aim at bringing out the historical character of various versions of male identity through examples from European history.  In other words, we shall focus on the representations of various forms of masculinity and the relevant performance practices vis-à-vis changing economic, social, political, and ideological contexts. The discussion will cover a time span ranging from the end of the 18th ce. to the interwar years. Our theoretical starting point is the historiographic discussion in the context of “women’s history”, “gender history”, “new labor history” and “history of urban classes”, while our methodological choice underscores the interaction between the analytical categories of gender and class. The selected areas of inquiry include labor, family, the home, forms of sociability and “leisure time” management.
AIMS:
TEACHING METHODS:
ASSESSMENT:

WG-3 Gender and Politics
INSTRUCTOR: V. Kantsa

The course places the concepts of ‘women’, ‘gender’, ‘politics’, ‘feminism/-s’ at the epicenter of social negotiation and attempts to detect the relations holding between them. It deals with issues that concern modernity and attempts an ‘archaeology’ of concepts by examining the historicity of the above-mentioned categories, their historical formation and their ever changing meanings. At the same time, the course is concerned with the relation between theory and politics and aims at underscoring the political dimension of modern feminist theories at both the epistemological and the methodological level. The second-wave of feminism laid emphasis on the political dimension of the conditions that were until then considered ‘personal’—which was succinctly summarized in the slogan “the personal is political”. This view led the way to an engagement with topics such as the body, reproduction, and sexuality, whereas subsequent views pointed out that citizenship claims are never neutral but related to gender, race, and sexuality, at least in the West. In the this course, the particular axes of the discussion focus on reproduction politics (motherhood, new reproduction technologies, ‘the demographic question’) and sexuality politics (marriage and citizenship, sexuality and ‘public’ space).
AIMS:
TEACHING METHODS:
ASSESSMENT:

WG-4 FEMINIST THEORY AND EPISTEMOLOGY

INSTRUCTOR: E. Tzelepi

AIMS:

TEACHING METHODS:

ASSESSMENT:

WG-5 Methodological Issues: Emphasis on Gender, Biosociality & Biopower

INSTRUCTOR: D. Trakas

The seminar is organized at five levels:

1) Review of feminist methodology, 2) development of research protocols, 3) data collection methods, 4) data management and analysis, and 5) writing and presentation of the research project. For each meeting, students are expected to be prepared for discussion on theoretical issues and to participate in a series of specially designed exercises aimed at helping them in approaching research, e.g., fieldwork research, article reviews, and in-class presentation of their own texts.

AIMS: The main goal of this seminar is to offer students the methodological tools for the development of research projects and the composition of a postgraduate thesis.

TEACHING METHODS:

ASSESSMENT:

WG-6 Gender, Labour and Consumption

INSTRUCTOR: V. Galani-Moutafi

This course consists of two basic units. The first one focuses on different questions and interpretations regarding women’s domestic labor and paid employment (from the perspective of modernization theory, developmental theory and Marxist feminist theory) and examines the interconnection between family and women’s work. Through ethnographic examples it becomes evident that the conceptualization and experience of women’s work vary according to sociocultural context. Work is approached as an area where the social construction of gender is produced, reproduced, and transformed. At the same time, work is used as a prism for studying the interaction of gender with sexuality as well as with national, ethnic, and racial identity. Other relevant issues covered in the course include economic inequality, economic rights, women’s possibilities for participation in economic life and their forms of resistance to exploitation and oppression in the work environment. Special emphasis is also placed on tourism as an area where various forms of women’s employment patterns can be traced (in the framework of individual, family, and collective enterprises) as well as the terms of work organization and business ventures.  Overall, tourism is approached as a field where the configuration and re-construction of gendered relations is investigated. Examples revealing women’s business activity are examined, mainly from a political and ideological standpoint, while a problematic is developed concerning gendered identity, family, and entrepreneurship. The course’s second unit focuses on consumption, given that consumption practices form yet another area where gendered relations and gendered identities may be investigated in different social and cultural contexts. In this unit, the approaches examined recognize the consumer’s active role in cultural production. An additional area of investigation concerns the ways in which consumption practices associated with the domestic space contribute to the negotiation and construction of gendered relations. In focusing on consumption, an anthropological discussion for the relation between individuals and objects is also developed, while special emphasis is placed on the ways in which relations between gender and objects are formed and on the influence exerted by notions of femininity and masculinity on the conceptualization, design, advertising, purchase, and exchange of objects. Consumption is approached as a cultural practice while gendered objects are considered as a component of social relations, which bestow meaning on them.  A critical presentation of examples concerning the purchase and use of goods and services in different contexts reveals the negotiation of gendered relations.

 AIMS:

TEACHING METHODS:

ASSESSMENT:

WG-7 Gender, Body and Health

INSTRUCTOR: K. Yiannakopoulos

This course examines approaches to gender, body, and health mainly from the perspective of anthropology but also philosophy, and psychoanalysis. The link between anthropology and psychoanalysis is based on the position advocating that the way we experience cultural beliefs on gender is not so much conceptual or conscious as it is physical and unconscious. We consider that the dialogue among recent anthropological approaches to the body, notably embodiment, and of psychoanalytic approaches may prove to be a useful tool for gender research. The synergy of anthropology and philosophy focuses on the discussion surrounding analytical categories of performativity, as developed by Judith Butler, and of biopolitics, as conceived and investigated by Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. Thus, the object of investigation will be health policies as practiced by government and non-government organizations, as well as the way notions of “health” and “illness” are conceptualized and physically constituted, i.e. “embodied” by acting subjects according to gender, sexuality, but also race, and class.

AIMS:

TEACHING METHODS:

ASSESSMENT:

WG-8 Language, Gender and Sexuality

INSTRUCTOR: Costas Canakis

The course has a double aim: i) familiarization with sociolinguistic research on gender and b) a preliminary approach to the (still scarcely researched) indexical relation among language, gender, and sexuality. It is, therefore, divided in two component parts. First, focusing on gender as an analytic category in language research, we shall examine the ways in which individual linguistic production is differentiated on the basis of gender, including questions of linguistic inequality and sexism at all levels of linguistic analysis. Meanwhile, we shall underscore the interdependence of linguistic patterns and gender relations as well as linguistic stances of gendered individuals. Obviously, gender and sexuality are not, in principle, indistinct. Nevertheless, examining sexuality and its deep implication in language, we shall realize that any discussion of sexuality without reference to gender is simply irrelevant, while, at the same time, any discussion of sexuality with reference to gender simply comes full circle to the conclusion that, as heteronormativity is institutionalized, whatever the relation among language-gender-sexuality, it is, to a large extent, preempted on the basis of powerful and enduring stereotypes. Yet, to the extent that language does not simply reflect society but also has a role in shaping it, there is, invariably, some space for negotiation. This negotiation—and the social cost it incurs—is obvious in the discourse of individuals (and groups) who refuse to align themselves with the dictates of institutionalized heteronormativity, distancing themselves from gendered stereotypes while taking the risk inherent in non-conformist linguistic, gendered or/and sexual behavior.

GOALS: i) To familiarize students with sociolinguistic research on gender and ii) to offer insights into the indexical relation holding among language, gender, and sexuality.

TEACHING METHOD: Lecturing, discussion, student presentations

PREREQUISITES: None

EVALUATION: oral presentation, written assignments, two short and one longer papers