Body, Gender and Family in Transcultural Perspective

Semester 1 · 51081 · Bachelor in Social Work · 6CP · EN

Body, gender and family are often taken for granted as a “natural” basis of our everyday life. Nonetheless, people from different cultural contexts perceive, practice, and perform body, gender, and family in very different ways.
These diverse sets of cultural perceptions and practices tend to cross, overlap, and even mix nowadays in our globalized society. The naturality, or biological evidence of body, sex-gender and heterosexual nuclear family, although it works as a dominant category, is but just one among multiple sociocultural understandings, one which has been disputed by grass-roots and LGTBQ political movements, and deconstructed by scholars from social and cultural sciences as a specific ethnocentric ideology.
This course draws on theories and examples from sociocultural anthropology, including insight from sociology of the family and historical demography as well as from such interdisciplinary fields as feminist theory, women, gender, and queer studies. It promotes a deconstructionist approach toward body, gender, and family, to understand how these sets of categories and practices are historically, politically and culturally produced, reproduced and transformed in different sociocultural contexts, as well as in transcultural perspective.

Lecturers: Daniela Salvucci

Teaching Hours: 45
Lab Hours: 0
Mandatory Attendance: In accordance with the regulation

Course Topics
• Cultural relativism and transcultural perspective. • Theories of incorporation of sociocultural worlds: embodiment (Csordas); habitus (Bourdieu); agency. • The body-person in its sociocultural context: Western individual and Melanesian dividual personhood (Strathern). • Sexualized biological bodies and bio-power: the modern Western regime of power-knowledge (Foucault). • Sociocultural production of gender: the traffic in women (Rubin); social status, hierarchy and gender asymmetry in transcultural perspective (Ortner, Whitehead). • Gender troubles: performativity and subversive performances (Butler). • Interconnection of body, gender, family, kinship (Collier, Yanagisako). • Kinship and relatedness: blood, law, and love within Euromerican kinship (Schneider); from kinship to relatedness (Carsten). • Family and households: forms, networks and dynamics (Collier, Rosaldo, Yanagisako; Yanagisako); new forms of families (patchwork, homoparental, living apart, transnational families). • The transformation of intimacy (Giddens, Jamieson) • New technologies of body and gender reproduction: e.g. Assisted Reproductive Technologies (Grilli, Parisi; Teman).

Teaching format
Frontal lectures; reading and discussions; individual and ingroup presentations.

Educational objectives
Knowledge and understanding • Knowledge of basic concepts referring to the cultural relativism and the transcultural perspective. • Knowledge of specific sociocultural theories on body, gender and family in sociocultural anthropology, as well as in women, gender and queer studies, such as cultural incorporation; habitus; sexuality as a discourse and the biopower; the sociocultural production of gender hierarchies and asymmetries; the interconnection of body, gender, family and kinship. • Acquisition of appropriate scientific languages for the description and analysis of sociocultural phenomena. Applying knowledge and understanding • Ability to apply the cultural relativism, the transcultural perspective and a deconstructionist approach to body, gender and family. • Ability to apply anthropological approaches and concepts to the analysis and understanding of body, gender, and family both as culturally and politically constructed categories, and as experiences and practices of the everyday life. • Ability to apply academic knowledge and sociocultural theories on body, gender, and family to one own personal and professional experience, as well as to possible situations of transcultural interpretation and mediation within social work. Making judgements • Development of critical and independent thinking regarding the sociocultural production, reproduction and transformation of categories and practices of body, gender, and family. • Development of reflexive self-awareness in relation to body, gender, and family as sets of sociocultural categories and practices. Communication skills • Ability to recognize the fundamental elements of scientific writing. • Ability to develop a correctly structured short scientific presentation. • Ability to participate in scientifically grounded discussions and express an informed opinion. • Ability to communicate appropriately in an academic setting. Learning skills • Ability to autonomously extend the knowledge acquired during the course in dealing with social works settings. • Ability to acquire new approaches and theoretical concepts to analyze, deconstruct and understand taken for granted categories and the diversity of sociocultural practices.

Assessment
Attending students will assessed on the basis of their individual and in-group small work and presentation in class, as well as on the basis of a short final oral exam. In-classroom presentations (group and individual) will allow the teacher to assess students' ability to understand a scientific article, present its arguments clearly and coherently, and discuss its themes critically and reflectively. The final oral exam will allow the teacher to assess the students' ability to understand the scientific articles they have read, to summarise and/or synthesise the topics in a clear and coherent manner, using appropriate language, to discuss them critically and reflectively, to relate them to each other, and to relate them to the topics covered in class. Further instructions for the individual and in-group small work and presentation, as well as for the final oral exam will be presented during the course. Non-attending students will be assessed on the basis of a long oral exam on the contents of the course in relation to both required and supplementary readings. The oral exam will allow the teacher to assess the students' ability to understand the scientific articles they have read, to summarise and/or synthesise the topics in a clear and coherent manner, using appropriate language, to discuss them critically and reflectively, to relate them to each other, and to relate them to the course topics.

Evaluation criteria
Evaluation will be weighed as follows:Attending students: in-group small work and presentation 20%; individual small work and presentation 30%; short final oral exam (50%). Non-attending students: oral examination 100%. Criteria for the evaluation will consider the ability to accurately apply course concepts and instruments, the formulation of original opinions and analyses, and the logic structure of exposition and argumentation.

Required readings

Bourdieu, P., 2001 (1998) Masculine Domination, Stanford University Press.
Butler, J., 1993, Critically Queer, in Bodies that matter. On the discursive limits of “sex”, Routledge, pp. 221-242
.Carsten J. (ed.), 2000, Introduction, in Cultures of relatedness. New approaches to the study of kinship, Cambridge university press, pp. 1-37.
Carsten, J., 2012, Kinship, Encyclopaedia Britannica, pp. 1- 18.
Collier J., Rosaldo M. Z., Yanagisako S. J., Is there a family? New anthropological view, in Lancaster R. N., di Leonardo M. (eds.) The Gender/Sexuality Reader. Culture, history, political economy, Routledge, pp. 71-81.
Collier J., Yanagisako S. J., (eds.), 1987, Gender and Kinship. Essays toward a unified analysis, Stanford university press, pp. 1-50.
Dumont, L. 1980 (1966), Postface. Toward a theory of Hierarchy, in Homo Hierarchicus. The Caste system and its implications, The University of Chicago Press, pp. 239-246.
Foucault M., 1978 (1976), The History of Sexuality. Volume I: An Introduction, Pantheon Books, pp. 81-114.
Ortner, S., Whitehead H. (eds.), 1981, Introduction: Accounting for sexual meanings in Sexual meanings: the cultural construction of gender and sexuality, Cambridge University Press.
Rubin, G., 1975, The Traffic in Women: notes on the “political economy” of sex, in Reiter R. (ed.), Toward an Anthropology of Women, Monthly Review Press, pp. 157- 210.
Scheper-Huges N., Lock, M. 1987. The Mindful Body: a Prolegomenon to Future Work in Medical Anthropology Quarterly, New Series, 1(1), pp. 6-41.
Schneider, D., 1981, American Kinship. A cultural account, University of Chicago Press, pp. 21-41.
Yanagisako S., Delaney C., (ed.) 1995, Naturalizing power. Essays in Feminist Cultural Analysis, Routledge, pp. 1-22.

Supplementary readings

Busby, C., 1997, Permeable and Partible Persons: A Comparative Analysis of Gender and Body in South India and Melanesia, The Journal of the Royal AnthropologicalInstitute, v.3, n.2, pp. 261-278.
Fonseca, C., 2011, The De-Kinning of Birthmothers: Reflections on maternity and being Human, vibrant v.8 n.2, pp. 307-339
Giddens, A., 1992, The Transformations of Intimacy, Cambridge Polity Press, pp. 37-64.
Grilli, S., Parisi, R., 2016, New Family Relationships: between Bio-genetic and Kinship Rarefaction Scenarios, Antropologia, 3(1), pp. 29-51.
Howell, S., 2003, Kinning: the creation of life trajectories in transnational adoptive families, Royal Anthropological Institute, n. 9, pp. 465-484.
Jamieson, L., 1999, Intimacy transformed? A critical look at the ‘pure relationship’, Sociology, v. 33, n. 3, pp. 477–494.
Parreñas, R. S., 2001, Mothering from a Distance: Emotions, Gender, and Intergenerational Relations in Filipino Transnational Families, Feminist Studies, v. 27, n. 2, pp. 361-390
Simpson, B., 1994, Bringing the `Unclear' Family into Focus: Divorce and Re-Marriage in Contemporary Britain, Man, New Series, v. 29, n. 4, pp. 831-851.
Teman, E., 2009, Embodying Surrogate Motherhood: Pregnancy as a Dyadic Body-project, Body&Society, v. 15, n. 3, pp. 47–69.
Wekker, G., 2006 (1999), ’What’s identity got to do with it?’: Rethinking identity in light of the Mati Work in Suriname”, in Lewin (ed.), Feminist Anthropology. A reader, Blackwell Publishing, pp. 433-448.
Young, A., and Twigg, L., 2009, ‘Sworn virgins’ as enhancers of Albanian patriarchal society in contrast to emerging roles for Albanian women, Etnološka tribina 32, v. 39, pp. 117-134.
Additional supplementary readings will be announced during lessons

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