Gender, Equality and Human Rights
Objectives
The students should be able to analyse and understand the relevance and limits of the legal system to combat discrimination and help to develop and solidify Gender Equality in its various fields and manifestations.
General characterization
Code
4200104
Credits
8
Responsible teacher
Teresa Pizarro Beleza
Hours
Weekly - 2
Total - 26
Teaching language
Portuguese and, occasionally, English.
Prerequisites
Available soon
Bibliography
FIRST SUGGESTIONS:
Please read
- UDHR (1948)
- CEDAW (1979)
- Istanbul Convention (2011)
- The Yogyakarta Principles (2006-2017)
And check:
https://igc.fd.uc.pt/manual/manual_completo.html
Further reading suggestions will be given during the semester.
Teaching method
Teaching will take the form and shape of PhD SEMINARS:
Each student will have to present a topic (in Gender and HR), which shall be discussed by all - later to be developed in writing as an essay. Under my guidance, obviously.
An attempt will be made to associate / match the students particular interests with the general theme of the seminar: Gender Equality.
Evaluation method
The students' work will be assesssed based on the participation in class and short written texts I may ask them to deliver - but in essence it will be their presentation in class of their 'special' topic and the essay based on such presentation and comments that will be taken into consideration.
Subject matter
GENDER, GENDER EQUALITY, LAW
Gender is a complex business. It involves social and political considerations and various not so easy deconstruction exercises. A suspension of disbelief may be required if one wants to study and discuss all this in a serious- and open-minded way. It points us towards Human Rights issues, but also to political, economic, and social problems and concepts.
For a long time, Gender Issues, particularly in relation to Human Rights, seemed to be somewhat synonymous with Women's Issues. But today we know and assume that sexual orientation or preference, trans-gender, intersex and sexual (or gender) identity are all inextricably connected with Gender. Gender relations, Gender system, Gender hierarchies are concepts and references that somehow presuppose a consideration of all these questions. We will try and see how law, judicial decisions and other procedures have been trying (and succeeding?) to eliminate Gender Inequalities. But we will also question whether and how they have contributed to the very distinction among people on such and other bases (Discrimination, Intersectionality, i.e. interrelated forms of identification / discrimination).
Gender equality, whatever that may be, is an essential prerequisite of democracy, as virtually all International Organizations have so far acknowledged. We will try and see why and how that is so, what this Equality Paradigm exactly means and how Inequality has been historically built and between or among what (or whom). We will look into different sources of inequality and see how gender relations are also built by law and in social and political practices and discourses. And how these phenomena force us into some "upheavals of thought" (the expression comes from M. Nussbaum). Finally, we will consider whether identification by Gender is debatable outside the statistical necessity to identify levels of discrimination. Common sense may be a difficult issue to tackle in this context, but there is no way to seriously deal with concepts like Gender or with Equality, or even Women's Rights without coming to terms with it.
Most societies are based on norms derived from the simplistic idea of a dichotomy of two mutually exclusive and biologically defined sexes to whom different roles and behaviour are traditionally ascribed. This system systematically disadvantages and marginalises all persons whose sex, gender identity and gender expression do not meet social expectations.
Gender is not only about individual identity or what a society teaches us a man or women, boy or girl should be like. Gender is also a way of structuring relations of power - whether that is within families, where the man is often considered the head of the household, or in societies at large, where men tend to be the ones in whose hands political, economic, religious and other forms of cultural power are concentrated.
Sex and gender are supposed to differ, sex is seen as a biological given, gender as a social (cultural) construct. Both tend to be understood as binary categories. Intersex or ambiguous gender persons are seen as a pathological deviation from normal healthy people, even if legally permitted (transsexual or transgender legal change). This framework is transposed to sexual orientation, which tends to be an either-or category, notwithstanding the empirical and conceptual shortcomings.