1. Broadening
2. Ethics, Religion and Law
3. Gender and Sexuality

Gender and Sexuality

Why ‘Gender and Sexuality’?

Are genders inherent or performed, binary or multiple, affirming or constraining? How do ideas of gender and sexuality impact on families and society, and do all cultures think the same? What about gender and violence, sex and deviance, or love and ecstasy? How are these issues dealt with in law, by the arts, and by religion?

Make the most of your discovery modules

Remember, you should be aiming to to put together a good, coherent set of discovery modules, based on what you're most interested in. Here is a reminder of our two suggested approaches:

1. Choose a range of modules that build up your knowledge around a particular theme. These might be all from one academic discipline, or they might offer different disciplinary perspectives on the same topics.
2. Choose an academic discipline (eg law, ethics, sociology, theology, history) and choose a set of modules which will enable you progressively to deepen your skills in that discipline.

Once you have identified some possible modules to take, look at which school or subject-area is providing them. This will help you understand what perspective on the subject they will take, and what methods they will be using. This is important in helping you to understand what you should (and should not) expect from particular modules. For example:

• If you want the tools and skills to answer more theoretical questions about gender and sexuality, the disciplines most likely to provide this are ethics, philosophy, sociology, theology and cultural studies.
• Different perspectives are provided on issues of sex and gender in law and regulation (law), in the workplace (business), in education (education).
• If what you are interested in is how these questions have in fact been approached in the past (history), in literature (English, various modern languages, classics), in art (fine art), or if you are interested in how different attitudes to issues of sexuality and gender shape people’s interactions and behaviour (sociology, psychology, criminology), there are different disciplines devoted to each of these approaches.
• The first 4 characters of the module code tell you which subject area provides the module. 

If you’re attracted to this sub-theme, you might also like to explore the discovery modules in ‘Mind and Body'.