2017-2018-1

TO-ANGT601-8

_Előadás, _Kollokvium

TO-ANGT6, Culture/History Course

TO-ANGT6, Culture Survey Course

Angol-Amerikai Intézet (BTK Bölcsészettudományi Kar)

heti 2.00

3

nincs korlát

nincsenek

This lecture course belongs in the field of Gender Studies. It is one of the three mandatory lectures for students in the first semester of their graduate studies, assisting their decision to choose one of the three specialization tracks in the MA program, in this particular case “Gender through Literatures and Cultures in English”. The course is designed to explore the difference a feminist perspective on various concepts and categories in cultural studies, media studies, visual culture, literary criticism, and applied language studies may make. We shall advance a dialogue about the implications of the various theorizations of the analytical categories of sex, gender, and sexuality used in these various disciplinary models from the 1970s to the beginning of the 21st century. We assume as its basic premise that these categories come to mean different things in different disciplines, however, our major focus is going to be on the difference between ‘talking about women’ and producing a feminist
critique from a gender or sexuality perspective. Based on the critical readings of both classic and recent texts, we shall explore the insights and subversive potential we can gain from ‘gender’, the key concept of Feminism/s (as of the 1970s) and that of ‘sexuality’ as developed by (the 1990s generation of) Queer Theory. Our ultimate aim throughout the course is to destabilize the non-productive scientific practice of categorization in dichotomic binaries, including feminist vs. queer theorizations of women’s lived life, man versus woman; high culture versus popular culture; hetero versus homosexuality, public versus private domains of life; theoretical versus applied linguistics; fiction versus documentary writing, public service television versus commercial television; objective accounts versus subjective opinions, acts versus words, etc. This means that we are neither taking ‘women’ as a pre-given self-evident social group/category that is straightforwardly taken to be comparable with its cultural ‘images’, ‘representations’ ‘in’ cultural products. Nor are we going to accept the introduction of the semiotic construction of ‘femininity’ or ‘female subjectivity’ in its stead that hinges on an apparently non-mediated corporeal sexual difference. Instead, the course is hoped to
seek a more integrative account of the complex intersections between (hegemonic) relations of gender and sexuality, destabilizing the (theoretically) assumed reductive continuities between anatomical sex, social gender, gender identity, sexual practice, sexual desire, and sexual identity. As a result, we shall not slide from a falsely universalistic ‘woman’ (social essentialism) to a falsely individualised ‘feminine identity’ (cultural essentialism) but argue for gender as a social relation and a principle of categorization to be integral to the formation of the cultural field, including the understanding of the most relevant conceptual terms, such as authorship, identity, post/modernism, the distinction between high and popular culture, co-operative and competitive language strategies.