Inter-University Gender Studies Doctoral Program

The Gender Studies Doctoral Program is offered in close collaboration with the Universities of Basel and Bern. The thematic emphasis in Zurich is on the configurations of gender, performativity, and embodiment. The Doctoral Program Gender Studies with 30 ECTS credits will regularly expire in 2023. New admissions to this program are no longer possible.

Since HS 2020, it is possible to complete a doctorate with 12 ECTS in Gender Studies at the University of Zurich. Further information is provided by the Faculty of Arts und Social Sciences: Doctoral Studies at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

Configurations of Gender, Performativity, and Embodiment

The DoPro Gender Studies research framework is composed of configurations, conceptualisations, aestheticisations, and practices of sex/gender, with the core focus set on the constellation of performativity and embodiment. This focus proves especially productive in the analysis of aesthetic, political, and epistemological discourses. Theories of performativity assume that social, psychological, political, cultural, and aesthetical phenomena are not just something to be “decoded”; rather, they produce reality. A scientific epistemological interest of this paradigm is the understanding of sex and gender as a result of norms and regulated – or, respectively, regulating – practices.

The constellation of performativity and embodiment – as it has evolved in key research fields in the humanities, in text and visual sciences, in the social sciences as well as in philosophical contexts – opens up a score of new interdisciplinary interfaces. These range from investigations of various traces of, and metaphors for, bodies in textual and visual conceptualizations, to observations of concrete corporeal practices in the creation of social artefacts and the analysis of institutionalized, legally tinged terms such as “corporate body”, and to research into regulating interventions into corporeality and gender. The approaches of both Queer Studies and Critical Race Studies are thus particularly significant impulses for the DoPro Gender Studies. Moreover, the constellation of performativity and embodiment also makes it possible to ask, and to elaborate on, questions about the nature and boundaries of bodies. As a consequence, new constellations in gender research arise as a counterpoint to – as well as in – the natural, social and technical sciences.

Current Lectures:
Courses and Activities of the DoPro Gender Studies in HS 2021 (PDF, 414 KB)
Programm des interuniversitären Doktoratsprogramms Gender Studies BS/BE/ZH (PDF, 472 KB)