Subject Area: Women's and Gender Studies
This course can also be studied in the following specialisation: History

'Gendered Worlds' is the introductory ('Gateway') course for UNSW's minor in Women's and Gender Studies. This is an area of study first introduced by feminist scholars from the late 1960s, which today informs all academic disciplines in the Arts and Social Sciences.

The course introduces students to the study of women, gender and sexualities through the lens of world history. As such, it provides a good introduction both to feminist history and to feminist interdisciplinary scholarship: that is, to 'gender' and other forms of feminist analysis. It ranges from ancient times to the present, focusing particularly on social constructions of gender (which are, at base, social expectations of 'proper' feminine and masculine roles, behaviour and identities) while also investigating how these expectations have affected women's status, male-female power relations and normative and transgressive sexual practices. The emphasis in on how these have varied over time, and in different cultures, social classes and modes of subsistence.