Outline

Overview

What is the relation between femininity, masculinity and culture? Does sexual difference affect our identity and, if so, how and in what circumstances? Does it affect our relations with others? Is there any link between cultural and racial difference and sexual difference? What contexts may shape such links? Where does equality fit into all this? Drawing on the work of major cultural theorists and feminist thinkers this unit examines various theoretical conceptualizations and popular representations of gender; the issue of embodiment; and how sex and race are articulated within gendered conceptual frames.

Unit details and rules

Unit code	GCST6905
Academic unit	Gender and Cultural Studies
Credit points	6
Prohibitions ?	None
Prerequisites ?	None
Corequisites ?	None
Assumed knowledge ?	None
Available to study abroad and exchange students	Yes

Teaching staff

Coordinator	Jan Filmer, jan.filmer@sydney.edu.au

Type	Description	Weight	Due	Length
Presentation	Presentation In-class oral presentation	20%	-	equivalent of 500-750 words
Outcomes assessed:
Presentation	Discussion Facilitation Facilitation of class discussion via Padlet	15%	-	equivalent of 500 words
Outcomes assessed:
Assignment	Final Essay n/a	50%	Formal exam period Due date: 30 Nov 2020 at 23:59	3000 words
Outcomes assessed:
Assignment	Detailed Essay Outline n/a	15%	Week 07 Due date: 12 Oct 2020 at 23:59	750 words
Outcomes assessed:

Assessment summary

Detailed information for each assessment can be found on Canvas.

Assessment criteria

The University awards common result grades, set out in the Coursework Policy 2014 (Schedule 1).

As a general guide, a High distinction indicates work of an exceptional standard, a Distinction a very high standard, a credit a good standard, and a pass an acceptable standard.

Result name	Mark range	Description
High distinction	85 - 100
Distinction	75 - 84
Credit	65 - 74
Pass	50 - 64
Fail	0 - 49	When you don’t meet the learning outcomes of the unit to a satisfactory standard.

For more information see sydney.edu.au/students/guide-to-grades.

For more information see guide to grades.

Late submission

In accordance with University policy, these penalties apply when written work is submitted after 11:59pm on the due date:

Deduction of 5% of the maximum mark for each calendar day after the due date.
After ten calendar days late, a mark of zero will be awarded.

Academic integrity

The Current Student website provides information on academic integrity and the resources available to all students. The University expects students and staff to act ethically and honestly and will treat all allegations of academic integrity breaches seriously.

We use similarity detection software to detect potential instances of plagiarism or other forms of academic integrity breach. If such matches indicate evidence of plagiarism or other forms of academic integrity breaches, your teacher is required to report your work for further investigation.

You may only use artificial intelligence and writing assistance tools in assessment tasks if you are permitted to by your unit coordinator, and if you do use them, you must also acknowledge this in your work, either in a footnote or an acknowledgement section.

Studiosity is permitted for postgraduate units unless otherwise indicated by the unit coordinator. The use of this service must be acknowledged in your submission.

Learning support

Simple extensions

If you encounter a problem submitting your work on time, you may be able to apply for an extension of five calendar days through a simple extension.  The application process will be different depending on the type of assessment and extensions cannot be granted for some assessment types like exams.

Special consideration

If exceptional circumstances mean you can’t complete an assessment, you need consideration for a longer period of time, or if you have essential commitments which impact your performance in an assessment, you may be eligible for special consideration or special arrangements.

Special consideration applications will not be affected by a simple extension application.

Using AI responsibly

Co-created with students, AI in Education includes lots of helpful examples of how students use generative AI tools to support their learning. It explains how generative AI works, the different tools available and how to use them responsibly and productively.

Weekly schedule

WK	Topic	Learning activity
Mid-semester break	Mid-semester break	Independent study (0 hr)
Week 01	SUBJECT POSITIONS I: Feminist standpoints	Seminar (3 hr)
Week 02	SUBJECT POSITIONS II: Sexuality and Gender	Seminar (3 hr)
Week 03	SUBJECT POSITIONS III: Trans identities	Seminar (3 hr)
Week 04	SUBJECT POSITIONS IV: Family formations	Seminar (3 hr)
Week 05	EMBODIMENT I: Affect	Seminar (3 hr)
Week 06	EMBODIMENT II: Emotions in research	Seminar (3 hr)
Week 07	RESEARCHING GENDER I: Intersexuality	Seminar (3 hr)
Week 08	RESEARCHING GENDER II: Boyhood	Seminar (3 hr)
Week 09	RESEARCHING GENDER III: Feminist celebrity	Seminar (3 hr)
Week 10	RESEARCHING GENDER IV: In the More-than-Human	Seminar (3 hr)
Week 11	Student presentations	Seminar (3 hr)
Week 12	Student presentations	Seminar (3 hr)

Attendance and class requirements

Attendance: According to Faculty Board Resolutions, students in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences are expected to attend 90% of their classes. If you attend less than 50% of classes, regardless of the reasons, you may be referred to the Examiner’s Board. The Examiner’s Board will decide whether you should pass or fail the unit of study if your attendance falls below this threshold.
Lecture recording: Most lectures (in recording-equipped venues) will be recorded and may be made available to students on the LMS. However, you should not rely on lecture recording to substitute your classroom learning experience.
Preparation: Students should commit to spend approximately three hours’ preparation time (reading, studying, homework, essays, etc.) for every hour of scheduled instruction.

Study commitment

Typically, there is a minimum expectation of 1.5-2 hours of student effort per week per credit point for units of study offered over a full semester. For a 6 credit point unit, this equates to roughly 120-150 hours of student effort in total.

Required readings

Week 1 – SUBJECT POSITIONS I: Feminist Standpoints

Required:

Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. “Towards an Australian Indigenous Women’s Standpoint Theory: A Methodological Tool.” Australian Feminist Studies 28.78 (2013). 331-347.

de Lauretis, Teresa. “The Technology of Gender.” Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. 1-30.

Probyn, Elspeth. “The Spatial Imperative of Subjectivity.” Handbook of Cultural Geography. London: Sage Publications, 2003. 290-299.

Recommended:

Crenshaw, Kimberle. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color” (1993) Stanford Law Review 43.6 (1991): 1241-1300.

de Lauretis, Teresa. “Eccentric Subjects: Feminist Theory and Historical Consciousness.” Feminist Studies 16.1 (1990): 115-150.

Harding, Sandra. “Latin American Decolonial Studies: Feminist Issues.” Feminist Studies 43.3 (2017): 624-636.

Week 2 – SUBJECT POSITIONS II: Sexuality and Gender

Required:

Butler, Judith. “Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire.” Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. 1-46.

Reddy, Vasu and Judith Butler. “Troubling genders, subverting identities: interview with Judith Butler.” Agenda 18.62 (2004). 115-123.

Kean, Jessica, and Rillark Bolton. "Explainer: What Is Genderqueer?" The Conversation. 26 Oct 2015.

Recommended:

Martin, Biddy. “Sexualities without Genders and Other Queer Utopias.” Diacritics 24.2-3 (1994): 104-121.

Week 3 – SUBJECT POSITIONS III: Trans Identities

Required:

Stone, Sandy. “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.” The Transgender Studies Reader. Eds. Stryker, Susan and Stephen Whittle. New York: Routledge, 2006 (1987): 221-235.

Sullivan, Corinne T. and Madi Day. “Indigenous transmasculine Australians and sex work.” Emotion, Space and Society 32 (2019). 1-7.

Recommended:

Namaste, Viviane K. “Genderbashing: Sexuality, Gender, and the Regulation of Public Space.” The Transgender Studies Reader. Eds. Stryker, Susan and Stephen Whittle. New York: Routledge, 2006 (1996). 584-600.

Stryker, Susan. “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage.” The Transgender Studies Reader. Eds. Stryker, Susan and Stephen Whittle. New York: Routledge, 2006 (1994). 244-256.

Bolton, Rillark. “Reworking Testosterone as a Man’s Hormone: Non-binary People using Testosterone within a Binary Gender System.” Somatechnics 9.1 (2019): 13–31.

Heyes, Cressida J. and J. R. Latham. “Trans Surgeries and Cosmetic Surgeries: The Politics of Analogy.” TSQ: The Transgender Studies Quarterly 5.2 (2018). 174-189.

Week 4 – SUBJECT POSITIONS IV: Family Formations

Required:

Berlant, Lauren. “The Intimate Public Sphere.” The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. 1-24.

Ahmed, Sara. "Queer Feelings." The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. 144-167.

Recommended:

Deomampo, Daisy. “Egg Donation and Exotic Beauty.” Transnational Reproduction: Race, Kinship, and Commercial Surrogacy in India. New York: New York University Press, 2016. 95-121.

Weston, Kath. “Exiles from Kinship.” Families We Choose: Lesbian, Gays, Kinship. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. 21-41.

---. “Families We Choose.” Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. 103-136.

Week 5 – EMBODIMENT I: Affect

Required:

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, and Adam Frank. "Shame in the Cybernetic Fold.” Critical Inquiry 21.2 (1995). 496-522.

Gorton, Kristyn. “Theorizing emotion and affect: Feminist engagements.” Feminist Theory 8.3 (2007). 333-348.

Recommended:

Gregg, Melissa, and Gregory J. Seigworth. "An Inventory of Shimmers." v. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. 1-25.

Week 6 – EMBODIMENT II: Emotions in Research

Required:

Ahmed, Sara. “Affective Economies.” Social Text 22.2 (2004): 117-139.

Caluya, Gilbert. “The (Gay) Scene of Racism: Face, Shame and Gay Asian Males.” ACRAWSA e-journal 2.2 (2006).

Recommended:

Munt, Sally R. “Gay shame in a geopolitical context.” Cultural Studies 33.2 (2019): 223-248.

Probyn, Elspeth. “Glass selves: Emotions, subjectivity, and the research process.” The Oxford Handbook of the Self. Ed. Gallagher, Shaun. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. 681-695.

Week 7 – RESEARCHING GENDER I: Intersexuality

Required:

Fausto-Sterling, Anne. “Dueling Dualisms.” Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books, 2000. 1-44

Das, Arpita. “‘Aching to be a boy’: A preliminary analysis of gender assignment of intersex persons in India in a culture of son preference.” Bioethics 34 (2020): 585-592.

Recommended:

Kessler, Suzanne J. “The Medical Construction of Gender: Case Management of Intersexed Infants.” Signs 16.1 (1990): 3-26.

Hird, Myra J. “Gender's nature: Intersexuality, transsexualism and the ‘sex’/’gender’ binary.” Feminist Theory 1.3 (2000): 347-364.

Week 8 – RESEARCHING GENDER II: Boyhood

Required:

Pascoe, C. J. “Dude, You’re a Fag: Adolescent Male Homophobia.” Dude, You're a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. 52-83.

Driscoll, Catherine. “Girls and Boys.” Cultural Studies Review 25.2 (2019): 233-236.

Bratich, Jack and Sarah Banet-Weiser. “From Pick-Up Artists to Incels: Con(fidence) Games, Networked Misogyny, and the Failure of Neoliberalism.” International Journal of Communication 12 (2019): 5003-5027.

Recommended:

Connell, R. W. and James W. Messerschmidt. “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept.” Gender & Society 19.6 (2005): 829-859.

Week 9 – RESEARCHING GENDER III: Feminist Celebrity

Required:

Taylor, Anthea. “‘Steve is twice the Aussie icon you will ever be’: Germaine Greer, the Crocodile Hunter’s death, and nationalistic misogyny.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 22.5-6 (2019): 630-645.

Buchanan, Rachel. “The record keeper.” Australian Feminist Studies 31.87 (2016): 22-27.

Dever, Maryanne. “Archives and New Modes of Feminist Research.” Australian Feminist Studies 35 (2017): 1-4.

Recommended:

Hirsch, Marianne. “Feminist Archives of Possibility.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 29.1 (2018): 173-188.

Taylor, Anthea. “‘The Most Revolting Ideas I’ve Read in a Woman’s Magazine’: The Female Eunuch, Affective (dis)investments, and McCall’s Reader-writers.” Australian Feminist Studies 35.1 (2020): 20-36.

Week 10 – RESEARCHING GENDER IV: In the More-than-Human

Required:

Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. “Outer Worlds: The Persistence of Race in Movement ‘Beyond the Human’.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21.2-3 (2015): 215-218.

Neimanis, Astrida and Jennifer Mae Hamilton. “Weathering.” Feminist Review 118 (2018): 80-84.

Selection of poems from van Neerven, Ellen. Throat. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2020.

Recommended:

King, Tiffany Lethabo. "Humans involved: Lurking in the Lines of Posthumanist Flight." Journal of the Critical Ethnic Studies Association 3.1 (2017): 162-185.

Hamilton, Jennifer Mae and Astrida Neimanis. “Composting Feminisms and Environmental Humanities.” Environmental Humanities 10.2 (2018): 501-527.

Learning outcomes

Learning outcomes are what students know, understand and are able to do on completion of a unit of study. They are aligned with the University's graduate qualities and are assessed as part of the curriculum.

Outcomes
Graduate qualities

At the completion of this unit, you should be able to:

LO1. This unit aims: To introduce students to key debates and concepts in the study of culture in relation to gender and sexuality, including gendered aspects of representation; to provide students with a broad explanatory and historical framework in which to position these concepts;to give students critical reading skills to perform close reading of theoretical and other texts, and form responses to these; to give students the writing and discussion skills to convey their responses to texts clearly to an audience.
LO2. This unit will help to develop the following skills and attributes: The ability to formulate and analyse significant problems regarding questions of gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity and subjectivity in relation to culture in the contemporary world; the ability to explain how cultural analysis and research contributes to understanding complex questions of gender, and how gender informs theories and practices of culture; skills in taking responsibility for their own learning and intellectual development in relation to these issues; an appreciation of the complexity of ethical issues arising in this field of study.

Graduate qualities

The graduate qualities are the qualities and skills that all University of Sydney graduates must demonstrate on successful completion of an award course. As a future Sydney graduate, the set of qualities have been designed to equip you for the contemporary world.

GQ1	Depth of disciplinary expertise Deep disciplinary expertise is the ability to integrate and rigorously apply knowledge, understanding and skills of a recognised discipline defined by scholarly activity, as well as familiarity with evolving practice of the discipline.
GQ2	Critical thinking and problem solving Critical thinking and problem solving are the questioning of ideas, evidence and assumptions in order to propose and evaluate hypotheses or alternative arguments before formulating a conclusion or a solution to an identified problem.
GQ3	Oral and written communication Effective communication, in both oral and written form, is the clear exchange of meaning in a manner that is appropriate to audience and context.
GQ4	Information and digital literacy Information and digital literacy is the ability to locate, interpret, evaluate, manage, adapt, integrate, create and convey information using appropriate resources, tools and strategies.
GQ5	Inventiveness Generating novel ideas and solutions.
GQ6	Cultural competence Cultural Competence is the ability to actively, ethically, respectfully, and successfully engage across and between cultures. In the Australian context, this includes and celebrates Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures, knowledge systems, and a mature understanding of contemporary issues.
GQ7	Interdisciplinary effectiveness Interdisciplinary effectiveness is the integration and synthesis of multiple viewpoints and practices, working effectively across disciplinary boundaries.
GQ8	Integrated professional, ethical, and personal identity An integrated professional, ethical and personal identity is understanding the interaction between one’s personal and professional selves in an ethical context.
GQ9	Influence Engaging others in a process, idea or vision.

Outcome map

Learning outcomes	Graduate qualities
Learning outcomes

Responding to student feedback

This section outlines changes made to this unit following staff and student reviews.

No changes have been made since this unit was last offered

Disclaimer

The University reserves the right to amend units of study or no longer offer certain units, including where there are low enrolment numbers.

To help you understand common terms that we use at the University, we offer an online glossary.

Current students

Overview

Overview

Unit details and rules

Teaching staff

Assessment

Assessment

Assessment summary

Assessment criteria

Late submission

Academic integrity

Learning support

Learning support

Simple extensions

Special consideration

Using AI responsibly

Weekly schedule

Weekly schedule

Attendance and class requirements

Study commitment

Required readings

Learning outcomes

Learning outcomes

Graduate qualities

Outcome map

Responding to student feedback

Responding to student feedback

Disclaimer

On this page

Useful links

Media

Student links

About us

Connect

Current students

GCST6905: Gender in Cultural Theory

Semester 2, 2020 [Normal day] - Camperdown/Darlington, Sydney

Overview

Overview

Unit details and rules

Teaching staff

Assessment

Assessment

Assessment summary

Assessment criteria

Late submission

Academic integrity

Learning support

Learning support

Simple extensions

Special consideration

Using AI responsibly

Weekly schedule

Weekly schedule

Attendance and class requirements

Study commitment

Required readings

Learning outcomes

Learning outcomes

Graduate qualities

Outcome map

Responding to student feedback

Responding to student feedback

Disclaimer

On this page

Useful links

Media

Student links

About us

Connect