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Based on postcolonial feminist theorizing particularly in anthropology and the Foucauldian notion of biopolitics the course aims at highlighting the “gap” between the actual historic and societal/ cultural specifity and variability of gender constructs worldwide, and the hegemonic Western epistemology describing any gender model of the past or “elsewhere” in terms of the historic specific Western model of a physiologically based “gender difference”.

At first, the construction of gendered identities in hegemonic Western discourse from the eighteenth century onwards will be revealed to be the historic specific effect of the emergence of the middle class and its gendered model of separate spheres, the levelling of ancient-regime social differentiations in nineteenth und twentieth centuries, and the enlighted re/definition of women as sexualized “reproducers”. Feminist campaigning, on the other hand, applied necessarily to the modern (nation) state, emancipation, thus, depending on women’s movements’ compliance with the hegemonic definition of (reproductive) middle-class womanhood. The thesis is that the radical feminist reconfiguration of a “modern femininity” blurring the separate spheres in late nineteenth century, in fact, did not challenge the hegemonic (liberal) conceptualization of femininity basically.

The hegemonic Western model of essential gender difference will be contrasted with alternative modes to construct gender in non-industrial societies cross-culturally on the premise that in general, non-modern personhood tends not to be defined by sex or gender sex, but rather by various social (and cosmological) relationships. Additionally, the global impact of the Western biopolitics of colonization and modernization in non-industrial societies will be discussed, particularly the ways in which the introduction of modernity tends to privilege males, thus producing the hegemonic gender difference sooner or later.

The course is to establish an understanding of the structural disparity of the essentially constructed hegemonic Western gender difference and “other” modes to construct gender, the question of the hegemony of the former and its global social, economic and political consequences for women.

-          inputs by the course instructor (power-point-presentation)

-          focussed working groups and presentations by students

-          discussions

active participation, presentation, final paper

Fuchs, Brigitte/Nöbauer, Herta/Zuckerhut Patricia. 1998. Vom Universalismus zur Differenz. Feminismus und Kulturanthropologie. In: Wernhart, Karl/Zips, Werner (Hg.): Ethnohistorie. Rekonstruktion und Kulturkritik. Eine Einführung. Wien: Promedia, S. 175-194.

Haraway, Donna. 1989. Primate Visions. Gender, Race, and Natur in the World of Modern Science. London-New York: Routledge.

MacCormack, Carol P./Strathern, Marilyn (Hg.). 1980. Nature, Culture and Gender. Cam­bridge et al.: Cambridge University Press.

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade/Russo, Ann/Torres, Lourdes (Hg.). 1991. Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington/Ind.: Indiana University Press.

Trinh, Minh-ha,. 1989. Woman, Native, Other. Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism, Bloomington/Ind: Indiana University Press.

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For more information please contact the coordinator of the Interdisciplinary studies program "Gender, Culture and Social Change" Elisabeth Grabner-Niel elisabeth.grabner-niel@uibk.ac.at