SMJ09051 Bodies, Genders, Rights

This sub-major draws on social, political and cultural theory to interrogate key features of the world: from the life worlds of individual bodies and embodied experience to the ways in which these worlds are in turn shaped by political and social power structures that effect relations between peoples and between those peoples and states at the international and global level. The sub-major offers foundational intellectual tools to help students reflect widely and deeply about the nature of power, relations between peoples, and between states and peoples across time and space.

The sub-major begins with a sustained examination of the 'matter' of the body, its literal fleshiness and its troubling tendency to be naturalised, despite being a key site of social, cultural, historical and political contestation. Students think through what the body is and how it is that some bodies come to matter more than others. Thus, an engagement with the seemingly 'micro' matter of the body lays the groundwork for the following two subjects which focus in turn explicitly on the 'macro' issues of gender and human rights.

The second subject provides the opportunity to undertake a rigorous analysis of the notions of sex, gender and sexuality in a range of cultural and social contexts. The processes and mechanisms that construct and institutionalise gender are considered in a variety of contexts. How hierarchies of gender and sexuality are implicated in all aspects of social life is explored. In particular students interrogate the ways in which current issues troubling relations between peoples and states such as globalisation, questions of ethnic and cultural difference, citizenship and environmental stress can be understood as 'gendered'. Students also question practices of social exclusion and inclusion (an underpinning theme of the sub-major as a whole) based on gender and the ways in which gender in turn structures relations not only between peoples but between nations and states.

The final subject builds on the themes developed in the previous subjects to examine the way in which rights, and particularly human rights, are central to the ways in which relations between individuals, groups of peoples, nations and states are configured in the 21st century. From this standpoint, key issues and debates concerning the history and contemporary politics of human rights in the context of state formation (sovereign territorialisation) and globalisation and de-territorialisation are examined.

Further information on this sub-major can be found at:

Completion requirements