Gender, Culture & Society in Italy Study + Internship in Florence Program Spring 2024 Semester

This course explores Italian history, society and culture through the notion of gender in its enmeshment with categories such as sex, race, ethnicity, class, nation, and sexuality. Through scholarly essays, artworks, theoretical texts, films, documentaries, literary works, and newspaper articles, students will be exposed to a wide array of ideas, debates, and discourses that have shaped and still shape both the construction and the perception of gender in the Italian context. Some of the issues this course will address are: the representation of gendered identity in Renaissance artworks; imposed and perceived gender roles in the fascist era; theories and practices of Italian feminism; the uneasy emergence of LGBTQ+ issues on the public arena; and the role gender plays in the construction of postcolonial subjectivity.