https://at-ceu.studyguide.timeedit.net/modules/HISU5520?type=COREThe course provides interested students with an introduction to gender history as a distinct research methodology and its potential benefits to any historian interested in interdisciplinary approaches to the past and contemporary history. Since the 70s of the twentieth century, when historical research first began to show a systematic interest in the history of women and the study of gender as a historical and socially-constructed category of thought and practice, the interest in gender has become more and more relevant in modern historiographic discourse on an international level. Evolving constantly in connection with and sometimes as a direct consequence of the ideological interests and involvement of its practitioners, gender history has moved progressively from dealing with isolated and de-contextualized topics towards more interdisciplinary approaches and a sophisticated analysis of the complex relationships, interdependencies, and influences through which gender was and still is deeply embedded in various types of human societies past and present and, therefore, can serve as a way to better understand their history.In concrete terms, then, this course offers an introduction to the historical study of femininities and masculinities from the Middle Ages to the more recent past and contemporary history. This will be achieved through overviews of a selection of relevant topics of discussion, such as the way in which gender was and can still be used as an ideological tool to produce and structure human knowledge, bodies, spaces, time, and material culture. The course will focus primarily on European history and on the neighbouring regions and will include non-European as well as post-colonial perspective.In a combination of lectures and interactive seminars, we will explore these topics together while paying special attention to the theoretical and methodological aspects of analysis involved, the use of various types of sources (textual and visual material, archaeological evidence), and their critical interpretation in the framework of several historical disciplines. In addition to the theoretical surveys, supported by relevant readings, several practical illustrations will also be offered of the various ways of reading and interpreting gender in different types of sources. These practical explorations will concentrate on questions such as the discernible intentions of our sources, their rhetorical make-up, the representations they produce and vehiculate, the interplay between image and 'reality,' between prescriptive norms and actual practice, social agency, contrasts, connotations, ambiguities, and ambivalences. We will also address individual 'provinces' within the larger field of gender history, such as legal aspects of gender, the history of masculinities, the emergence of the 'male gaze' as a hermeneutic category, and the interplay between the study of gender and that of sexualities. As much as possible, our exploration of these topics will be guided by a constant aspiration towards diversity, both in terms of moving away from the European-centered historical discourse and from the man/woman binary, which has dominated much of the earlier history of the discipline.