Women in History

Recommended Prerequisites

Not applicable.

Teaching Methods

The course is divided into two modules. For each one, the first sessions are lectures, so as to make historical time, themes, bibliography, available sources and research methodologies familiar to the students. The following sessions are mostly practical work, in the sense that students are expected to make presentations on particular issues, in the form of a book review discussed by the group. Supervising of the first stages of the final essay is also part of classes. Final essays may be either on the state-of-the-art of a particular issue or a new research using the available sources.

Learning Outcomes

Students should acquire knowledge of women's historiographic representations through European / Eurocentric normative discourses; understand the genesis and evolution of archetypes about women and their resilience and projection in present times; acquire familiarization with the plurality of women's experiences, both in metropolitan and colonial contexts to recover the presence of women in history. Students should understand: 1) how the medieval female power paradigms were hidden or demonized in the following centuries; 2) though images altered through the 19th century secularization process, behavior expectations were unchanged; 3) problematize the relationship between gender, power and experiences in different social and political situations; 4) understand the absence of women in the labor market and the non-participation in instances of power by women as myths of the 19^th and 20th centuries.

Work Placement(s)

No

Syllabus

Women and power through history: 1) The role of writing, gender and power in the social and political making of the Iberian Peninsula; lost paradigms of royal women’s symbolic power in Iberian Middle Ages; representation of powerful women (king’s daughters, sisters or wives) from 8th-13th cent.; occultation and demonization of the power pertinent to women in coeval or later historiography; contrast with historical evidence of women’s lives and deeds. 2) Gender, empire and globalization, with a focus on the role of marriage, domesticity, respectability and female emancipation in the study of modern imperial and globalization processes; feminism and imperialism in the context of XIX century empires; feminism and gender in 'non-Western' contexts; gender, intimacy and socio-political processes; gender and emancipatory struggles in the XX century; the gender of ‘politics’, the redefinition of sexuality and modifications in global political relations.

Head Lecturer(s)

Maria do Rosário Prata Ferreira dos Santos

Assessment Methods

Assessment
In class participation: 30.0%
Synthesis work: 70.0%

Bibliography

Allman, J. et al. (2002), Women in African Colonial Histories. Bloomington: IUP

Anderson B., Zinsser, J. (2000). Historia de las mujeres. Barcelona: Crítica

Chaudhuri, N.; Strobel, M. (1992), Western Women and Imperialism. Bloomington: IUP

Ferreira, M.R. (2011). “Entre conselho e incesto: a irmã do rei”. e-Spania, 12

Ferreira, M.R. (2014). “La reine est morte: la succession politique des filles de roi aux XIe et XIIe siècles”. e-Spania, 17

Ferreira, M.R. (2016). “L'action culturelle de la reine Teresa du Portugal”. e-Spania, 24

Martin, G. (2011), Mujeres y poderes en la España medieval. Alcalá de Henares: CEC

Meneses, M.P. (2019), “Mulheres e violência em massa em Moçambique no período colonial tardio”, in O pluriverso dos direitos humanos. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica.

Rose, S. (2010), What is Gender History? London: Polity.

Stoler, A. L. (2010), Carnal knowledge and imperial power. Berkeley: CUP

Vergès, F. (2020), Um Feminismo Decolonial. Brasilia: UBU