Courses - Faculty of Arts
Gender Studies
Stage I
Gender: Global and Local
Develops an understanding of key concepts that underlie gender analysis, and how they are expressed in politics, culture and society. Examines the meaning of gender across a range of subjects and issues on the global stage and in our everyday lives.
Restriction: GENDER 100
Stage II
Thinking Gender
Interdisciplinary examination of feminist theories of gender and sexuality. Focuses on contemporary issues, debates, and practices, while grounding them in foundational theories and investigating how these issues and debates play out across disciplines and practices. Examples include the perils of identity politics, tensions between feminist and queer theories, the politics of representation, and gender justice in a globalised world.
Prerequisite: 30 points passed
Restriction: GENDER 308
Transgender and the Queering of Sexuality
Considers challenges of being transgender, coming out and queering sex/gender normativity. Transgender theory is deployed to analyse and interrogate material and subjective aspects of transgender, including generational attitudinal changes and the implications for capitalism, politics, culture and society. Draws on psychoanalytic-influenced theories to question and queer human sexuality, libidinal investments in masculine domination and sex/gender essentialism.
Prerequisite: 30 points passed at Stage I
Restriction: GENDER 311
Stage III
Gender, Sex and Commodification
Focuses on current and controversial issues at the intersections of sex and gender and their co-construction. Issues will be approached from contemporary feminist and queer theory perspectives. Various topics are critically examined in both theoretical and practical terms, such as co-constructions of gender and sexualities in pornography and advertising, technologies and reproduction, representations of transgender bodies/identities, and the selling of cybersex.
Prerequisite: 30 points at Stage II in Communication, Gender Studies, or Sociology
Restriction: SOCIOL 324
Gender and Change: Making Waves
Explores the relationship between gender and other structures of inequality, like sexuality and ethno-race, and progressive social change. Develops and engages students’ theoretically informed critical skills in order to interrogate how gender inequality is re-produced, contested and/or transformed through all or some of the following: literary texts, visual representations, media texts, everyday practices and interactions, and policy.
Prerequisite: 30 points at Stage II in Gender Studies, or 15 points at Stage II in Gender Studies and 30 points passed at Stage II in BA courses
Transgender and the Queering of Sexuality
Considers challenges of being transgender, coming out and queering sex/gender normativity. Transgender theory is deployed to analyse and interrogate material and subjective aspects of transgender, including generational attitudinal changes and the implications for capitalism, politics, culture and society. Draws on psychoanalytic-influenced theories to question and queer human sexuality, libidinal investments in masculine domination and sex/gender essentialism.
Prerequisite: 30 points passed at Stage II
Restriction: GENDER 211
Postgraduate 700 Level Courses
Critical Theories and Methods in Gender Studies
Engages, using an interdisciplinary approach, critical theories and epistemological debates in gender studies; provides grounding in key gender studies methods and methodologies; traces the evolution in approaches to gender from early feminist scholarship to the present; requires independent research and application of theories and methods.
Special Study
To complete this course students must enrol in GENDER 701 A and B, or GENDER 701
Research Project
Restriction: GENDER 785
To complete this course students must enrol in GENDER 780 A and B, or GENDER 780
Dissertation - Level 9
To complete this course students must enrol in GENDER 785 A and B, or GENDER 785
Dissertation - Level 9
To complete this course students must enrol in GENDER 793 A and B, or GENDER 793
Thesis - Level 9
To complete this course students must enrol in GENDER 796 A and B