300659 Decolonizing Gender and Sexuality. Central approaches and empirical fields (MA: Soziologie der Globalen Welt) (S) (WiSe 2025/2026)

Gender rights and policies are currently being contested on a global scale; authoritarian groups, parties and movements are questioning what was once considered a hallmark of post-colonial nation states and global developments: gender justice, plurality and democratic coexistence. This seminar does not ask about the causes of this dramatic change, but about how we can understand gender relations worldwide and their transformation if we do not take gender into account as a colonial category. In other words, as a category whose ontological and epistemic point of reference is the history of ideas and culture of European societies and their colonial past as well as their post- and neo-colonial present. Therefore, the focus of the seminar is on decolonizing gender - and sexuality - as central categories of analysis.

In order to examine the gendered grammar of coloniality in academic thinking, the central question is to what extent gender and sexuality are constituted as colonial codes of knowledge and how coloniality manifests itself in gender theoretical/ gender sociological thinking. To this end, one step is to study central decolonial authors (from African contexts such as Amina Mama or Oyeronke Oyewumi or from Arab contexts such as Leila Abu Lughod or Latin American contexts such as Maria Lugones and Yuderkys Espinosa-Miñoso). With their help, we will uncover that and how the binary, heteronormative matrix has become part of an imperial framework and to what extent gender functions as a colonial knowledge category in this regard.

Another topic of the course is the lack of – sociological – awareness of how the European bourgeois-capitalist gender system developed in the framework of colonialism, and which effects this had, and still has today, both for the colonized and the colonizing contexts. Part of this is a lack of awareness of the extent to which gender as well as sexuality as analytical lenses contribute to the exclusion of non-white existence and thus perpetuates the hegemony of white, European experience and knowledge patterns. As a result, “the” gender order is based on – and represents – a racialized system of relationships in which white and non-white subjects are demarcated from one another.

This will be deepened by selected studies that highlight the central function of gender and sexuality not only in the colonial past, but demonstrate the ways in which neo-colonial patterns structure global realities today (for example local politics in armed conflicts over zones of influence or the consequences of global capitalism with its neo-imperial features or the effects of racism in European post-migrant societies).