CGS will invite Ms. Aya Kamikawa, a Setagaya ward assembly member, to "Approaches to Gender Studies," the core course of the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Elected for the Setagaya ward assembly as an openly transgender candidate in 2003, Ms. Kamikawa was returned for a second term in the election held this April, as the 2nd on the list of all the candidates.
PGSS + CGS Open Lecture:
Approach to Gender Studies Open Lecture: Transgender & Sexuality
Leturer: MITSUHASHI, Junko
(Cross-Dresser / Sexual and Social History Researcher)CONTACT:
Date: May 8th (Tue) 15:10-16:55
Place: H-213
Language: Japanese (Interpretation Unavailable)
The Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies (PGSS) at ICU started in the Spring Term of 2005. Also starting this term is the new foundation class, "Approach to Gender Studies", in which 15 scholars lecture on the possibilities of gender and sexuality studies in a diverse range of fields, including natural science.
Moreover, on Friday, May 27, CGS will commemorate the establishment of PGSS with a guest lecture, "What Can Gender and Sexuality Studies Do?" by Chizuko Ueno, a professor of Tokyo University and a recognized authority on gender studies.
The Interdisciplinary Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies provides a model curriculum for students who wish to create an interdisciplinary major that focuses on issues of gender and sexuality. Human experience is inextricably linked with sex and gender. We enter the world with the biologically defined sex of our bodies and then over the course of our lives become gendered social actors. In doing so, we encounter and engage the wide array of socio-cultural ideas, values and practices that define gender, with its associated ideas regarding masculinity, femininity, and other gender identities. In recent decades scholarly research in multiple disciplines has explored the profound ways in gender and sexuality are constructed and defined in social life and also influence and inform social action. This research has demonstrated not only the centrality of sex, gender, and sexuality in social life, but also their critical linkages to such basic everyday issues as access to education, language use, and political participation, or such large scale theoretical issues as inequality, class, power, and nature versus nurture debates.
Languages: Hibiya, Junko [CGS NewsLetter 001]
ICU is now planning to launch the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies (PGSS) in AY2005. In the contemporary development of learning, "gender" is considered to be an important concept and analytical framework. It is necessary not only for the Humanities and the Social Sciences, but also for the Natural Sciences to investigate from the gender perspective in order to develop new academic understandings. Up to now at ICU, there have been several gender related courses. From AY2005 ICU is preparing to offer the curriculum with the consistency and continuity and to integrate the gender courses in an organic way, aiming to meet the request of the students who are interested in gender and sexuality studies.
As the plans above are still tentative, please get in touch with CGS PGSS preparation office for more detailed information.