Study programmes

Gender studies are a unique, interdisciplinary study program, which can be comprehensively studied in the Czech Republic only at the Faculty of Humanities at Charles University in Prague. The goal of the M.A. program in gender studies is to acquaint the students with a gender analysis in diverse disciplines and thus prepare them for a professional career in a wide range of fields, including state and municipal administration, social policy, social administration and health care, education and research. During their graduate education the students of gender studies will become familiar with a wide spectrum of theoretical, methodological and practical questions connected to gender, which is seen as one of the basic organizational principles of society; gender and sexual symbolism and contextualization; historical and current position of women and men in different societies; influence of feminist theories and methods in research and science; and other aspects of gender an gender social order, including relation between gender and other organizational principles, such as ethnicity, race, age, social status, sexuality, physical and mental fitness, disability, and others.
Gender studies are an interdisciplinary and intersectional field of social sciences and humanities, which is rooted in the constructivist paradigm. As a comprehensive study and research field, gender studies possess its own theoretical apparatus and methodological tools for the study of visible and invisible power mechanisms, which create and perpetuate social gender order. Gender studies research and analyze the gender order through the analytical category of gender. They are built on a theory of gender order, which belongs to the most basic and fundamental features of every culture and society, and importantly affects the constitution of social structures. Gender studies study the dynamics of hierarchical and power relations between men and women, as well as between entities associated with masculinity and femininity. They follow all practices (social, cultural, discursive, institutional, and others), through which we construct and reproduce our understandings of masculinity and femininity and their alleged mutual exclusiveness. Gender, as one of the basic categories of organization of human societies is the primary analytical tool of gender studies. Gender dimension seeps through all human activity and ways, through which a person relates to the world. Power is an integral aspect of gender.
The functioning of gender dimension of society is possible to follow and recognize in three mutually constitutive levels of social reality: symbolic, institutional, and personal. All three levels are interconnected and reflected in each other. Due to the fact that gender works as a fundamental, but not only, organizational principle of society, gender analysis is useful in wide spectrum of research in social sciences and humanities. Gender studies combine theoretical and methodological approaches from diverse disciplines by covering all above-mentioned levels of functioning of the gender order.
Besides interdisciplinary dimension, gender studies are also characteristic by the use of intersectional analysis, i.e. interconnection of pedagogical and research practice with other categories of analysis, such as ethnicity, race, age, social status, sexuality, physical and mental fitness, disability and others.