Kommentar |
With a transnational perspective, including primary sources as well as scholarly texts from the USA, Europe, Africa (specifically South Africa), this course situates respective women’s histories and feminist theories and practices in a broader historical, political, and cultural as well as geographical context. The course accesses multiple archives as developed in the Global South and North. Various topics, campaigns, conflicts, theory production, organisational development, forms of institutionalisation and forms of subversion and struggle are explored and where possible collectively re-applied to the lived experience of students and currently contested issues and contemporary politics. As much as this course aims to unfold the whole richness of women’s history, gender studies and feminist theory in dialogue with Queer Studies, this course offers another important level of knowledge production for students: it also teaches methodological approaches which reflect the intersectionality of the content. The interrelatedness of violence, racialise gender systems and nation building is another focus of this course. The culture of violence during conflict and in post-conflict societies is analysed in the light of national identity politics and the social production of tradition and culture as assumedly static guarantors of patriarchal and other systems of privilege. This lecture aims to provide an intersecting understanding of feminist theory and critique, of current debates about nation building and nationalism, and of racism and xenophobia from a feminist and anti-racist/postcolonial perspective. |