Topic outline
Sex and gender
This topic provides students with assorted materials to discuss the basic concept of sex and gender and this concept is embedded with various practices of everyday life. Students are required to be able to identify the different characteristics of male and female body which lead to sex difference. This topic also encourages students to identify aspects which constitute gender. In the end, students should be able to explain how gender is cultural construction and how every culture defines its own gender system.
sex is biological differences and gender is the social and cultural differences between men and women. Gender is also psychological, social and cultural element
Overview of feminist movement
The topic covers the overview of the feminist movement. The first wave focuses on the goal to gain political power around suffrage and legal gain including the right to vote. The second wave broadened the agenda to include sexual, reproductive and economic matters. However, the agenda was only derived from the issues faced by middle class white. Many other groups of women's voices were not being heard. The third wave changed the perspective since the term 'feminist' was accepted by most population. The third wave focused on the micropolitics of gender equality which ranged various feminist issues leading to the fourth wave of feminism. The characteristics of the third wave is the complexity of gender equality and the individual battles, the fourth wave continues the previous battles utilizing the internet to gain social-influencing power and demanding change.
Power, gender, and the self
This topic discusses the account of Foucault's work on how the idea of self can be used to counter the oppressive aspects of patriarchal culture. In his theory of power, Foucault argues that 'sexuality is not an innate or natural quality of the body,but rather the effect of historically specific relations'. The Cartesian dualism between mind and body which privileges mind over body has been used to restrain bodily realm. Foucault insists that the body is historically and culturally specific. His idea of difference influences feminist theorists to oppose the oppression of women because of biological difference which is used to legitimate the gender inequality. Through the idea of practices of the self, Foucault suggests that the autonomous practices of individuals could provide potentials for social transformation
Poststructuralist feminism
Poststructuralist feminism is a body of theory which discuss the issues of knowledge, power and difference. The seminal work of Luce Irigaray, 'the Sex which is not One' displays her articulation of the construction of subjectivity through analysis of some characteristics of women's experiences. Developed from Lacan's psychoanalysis, Irigaray problematizes the exclusion of women from the symbolic order and the imaginary. In regard to Lacan's mirror stage, Irigaray objects the usages of flat mirror which does not reflect women as other, but as man's other. Patriarchal Western culture annihilates women's sexuality, her subjectivity and her body which is the basic logics of phallocentrism. Women are repressed with the symbolic order.
Postfeminism and girl power
Historical feminism