240116 SE VM1 / VM7 - Transnational Feminism Comparing Women's Movements (2025S)

This course builds on feminist debates regarding the private-public divide as well as the boundaries between productive and reproductive work that lie at the root of women’s exclusion. We draw from liberal, materialist, postcolonial and intersectional feminist interventions into International Political Economy. The way accumulation and social reproduction are organized vary greatly over time although the brunt of the social reproduction burden falls on women by way of the gendered division of labor.

Currently, there is increasing talk of the crisis or depletion of social reproduction. The study of different cases in the Global North and South will help us to understand the social power relations that underlie certain accumulation strategies and how they relate to gender, family and social policies. How can we understand the resurgence of nationalist discourses propagating conservative family ideals in the context of social reproduction and the control over women’s labor, bodies and sexuality? How are heteronormativity, a dual gender order, familyism and nationalist discourses related to the organization of social reproduction and what insights into social inequalities and their reproduction does an intersectional perspective provide in these cases?

Learning Outcomes:?
• Students get to know different theoretical concepts and learn about the contributions of feminist approaches to the field of international political economy.
• Students will learn to apply theory to concrete case studies.
• Students will be able to explain the relationship between local-national-global, private – public, production – reproduction, formal – informal economy and political and economic power from a feminist perspective.