Gender and Revolution

Tuesdays, 13.30-15.00

THE COURSE STARTS ON TUESDAY, 8 March 2022

The goal of the course will be to examine a role of gender both in historical instances of social/political transformations labelled as revolutions and in ideological discourses, usually formulated on the basis of specified philosophical projects, that inspired and legitimised them. The idea of the course stems from three observations: first, that gender as an integral element of the social structure is always implicated, although in different ways, in the course and outcome of revolution, second, that it is often explicitly problematised in the above mentioned discourses. The third observation, borrowed from Valentine M. Moghadam, states that revolutions analysed from the perspective of their outcomes can be classified as realising one of the following models: modernizing and egalitarian model, with women's emancipation as an explicit goal, and patriarchal model, tying women to the family and stressing gender differences rather than equality. During the course we will examine selected examples of revolutions (both progressive and conservative), elucidate their gender dimension and pose more general questions regarding the relationship between, on the one hand, women's and men's subjectivities and, on the other, ideas as well as practices aiming at establishing alternative social orders. The course will make use of historical, sociological and philosophical works as well as visual materials.