07/02/2026
Hey, Paisley Currah here. I'm teaching "Gender and Political Theory" in the fall. (Worse title ever, who came up that that? (I did, years ago, when it seems my imagination was on holiday.)) Anyways, I'm very excited about this course. It's Political Science 3411 or Women's and Gender Studies 3356, meets Tuesdays and Wednesdays 2:15 - 3:30. Here's an updated description: Political theory asks how society should be organized: who gets power, freedom, and standing, and on what grounds. This course starts from the premise that gender is one of the categories politics turns on, not a private fact outside it, and tests that premise across a semester of reading. We begin with gender as a system: an arrangement for exchanging status, labor, and power between men and women, built and enforced rather than simply given. From there we trace that system's history: how the modern sex/gender binary emerged as a colonial technology, coded by race from the start, and how some populations, including LGBTQ people, have been held outside its protections altogether. We end in the present, where reproductive justice and the legal fight over who counts as male or female are both battles over bodily classification, contests over who gets to define the categories the rest of us live inside.
Drop me a line, [email protected], if you have any questions about the course.
