070043 SE Research Seminar - Feminism as a "Travelling Concept" of the 20th and 21st Century (2023S)

As cultural studies scholar Mieke Bal has made clear, scientific concepts change their meaning when they move between disciplines - the resulting tensions and contradictions can cause confusion, but they can also be productive for the development of new perspectives on thinking. Similarly, political terms change when they are transferred into new languages, political milieus, contexts of action. Feminism, a late 19th century neologism that gains global presence in the 20th century, is a good example. What seems plausible and applicable in one place, at one point in time, often acquires contradictory or even shifted meanings in other contexts.
The course takes this phenomenon as a starting point to undertake source-based deep drilling into the transnational history of feminism and to examine, for example, the radical agenda associated with feminism before the First World War, conflictual attributions of meaning in the context of decolonisation or actualisations in the context of new social movements in the late 20th and 21st centuries. The selection of case studies can also be based on the interests of the participants. Two different theoretical-methodological approaches will be brought into dialogue with each other: the theory of social movements and conceptual history. The course thus not only provides insights into selected sources of the history of feminism, but should also help to sound out the possibilities and limits of specific theoretical approaches - among other things with regard to the focus of a later Master's thesis.
Concentrated work on analytical terms, the elaboration of exemplary case studies, short impulse lectures on source and theory readings and focused group discussions are to characterise the cooperation in the course.