Transnational Gender Issues and Human Rights

This unit explores how gender is deeply embedded in the ways we define our world and act within it, how our bodies are regulated and surveilled and hence how power enters into both the enhancement and suppression of capabilities through definitions of gendered bodies and their interactions and intersections. The gendered dimension is considered from a global perspective initially through the lens of human rights. Students will explore how human rights discourses seek to intersect with some traditional modes of gendered identities and interactions by injecting questions about opportunities and outcomes of a social, political, economic and cultural nature. The human rights paradigm is critically considered too from postcolonial perspectives. These analyses are applied to the practice of community development.