240125 VO VM3 /VM7 - Gender (as) Governace and Structure (2019S)

A globalized international gender policies and its rhetoric will be reconsidered as a Western colonial bio-policy of modernisation aiming at the implementation of the historic specific Western gender difference into the “rest of the world”.
A first focus will be on the analytical differentiation of the historic singularity of Western gender difference (linked to the expansion of Western market economy) and the diverse and fluid forms of gender construction in historically non-Western androcentric and gynocentric societies.
Subsequently, we ask for (1) the political and socio-economic techniques of transforming “traditional” into “modern” gender relations, the hegemonic definition of “modern” having shifted from the breadwinner/housewife model (up the 1980s) to the adult worker model during the 1980s and earlier 1990s, (2) the agents and agencies of the implementation of modern or post-modern Western gender difference in the Global South who/which, in fact, represent politically contradictory interests such as colonial and postcolonial empires, anti-colonial and feminist movements, and postcolonial nation states, and (3) the historic inescapabilty of the “production” of Western gender relations globally due to the theory and practise of modernity as such.
A third focus will be on the international politics and rhetoric of gender justice and women’s rights in the Global South. We will take a closer look to contemporary gender sensitive programmes of poverty reduction, not least conducted by the assumption that “global gender justice” is a reconfiguration of the rhetoric of nineteenth-century liberal maternalism.
Students should get a comprehensive overview concerning
- the differentiation between gender as a non-hegemonic diverse category, and a hegemonic structural category for a “modern” form of social stratification by sex/sexualities
- the application of gender as a social (structural) category of analysis, and
- its intersection with other social categories of domination and subordination such as class, race, ethnicity, non-heteronormative sexualities etc.