Gender studies facts for kids
Gender studies is an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to analysing gender identity and gendered representation. Like queer studies and men's studies, it originated in the interdisciplinary program women's studies (concerning women, feminism, gender, and politics). Its rise to prominence, especially in Western universities after 1990, coincided with the rise of deconstructionism.
Disciplines that frequently contribute to gender studies include the fields of literature, linguistics, human geography, history, political science, archaeology, economics, sociology, psychology, anthropology, cinema, musicology, media studies, human development, law, public health, and medicine. It also analyzes how race, ethnicity, location, social class, nationality, and disability intersect with the category of gender.
In gender studies, the term gender is often used to refer to the social and cultural constructions of masculinity and femininity and not to the state of being male or female in its entirety. However, this view is not held by all gender theorists. Simone de Beauvoir's is a view that many sociologists support (see Sociology of gender), though there are many other contributors to the field of gender studies with different backgrounds and opposing views, such as psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and feminists such as Judith Butler.
Gender is pertinent to many disciplines, such as literary theory, drama studies, film theory, performance theory, contemporary art history, anthropology, sociology, sociolinguistics and psychology. However, these disciplines sometimes differ in their approaches to how and why gender is studied. In politics, gender can be viewed as a foundational discourse that political actors employ in order to position themselves on a variety of issues. Gender studies is also a discipline in itself, incorporating methods and approaches from a wide range of disciplines.
Each field came to regard "gender" as a practice, sometimes referred to as something that is performative. Feminist theory of psychoanalysis, articulated mainly by Julia Kristeva and Bracha L. Ettinger, and informed both by Freud, Lacan and the object relations theory, is very influential in gender studies.
Contents
Influences
Psychoanalytic theory
A number of theorists have influenced the field of gender studies significantly, specifically in terms of psychoanalytic theory. Among these are Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and Bracha L. Ettinger.
Julia Kristeva has significantly developed the field of semiotics. She contends that patriarchal cultures, like individuals, have to exclude the maternal and the feminine so that they can come into being.
Bracha L. Ettinger transformed
subjectivity in contemporary psychoanalysis since the early 1990s with the Matrixial feminine-maternal and prematernal Eros of borderlinking (bordureliance), borderspacing (bordurespacement) and co-emergence. The matrixial feminine difference defines a particular gaze and it is a source for trans-subjectivity and transjectivity in both males and females. Ettinger rethinks the human subject as informed by the archaic connectivity to the maternal and proposes the idea of a Demeter-Persephone Complexity.
Feminist psychoanalytic theory
Feminist theorists such as Juliet Mitchell, Nancy Chodorow, Jessica Benjamin, Jane Gallop, Bracha L. Ettinger, Shoshana Felman, Griselda Pollock, Luce Irigaray and Jane Flax have developed a Feminist psychoanalysis and argued that psychoanalytic theory is vital to the feminist project and must, like other theoretical traditions, be criticized by women as well as transformed to free it from vestiges of sexism (i.e. being censored). Shulamith Firestone calls Freudianism the misguided feminism and discusses how Freudianism is almost completely accurate.
Critics such as Elizabeth Grosz accuse Jacques Lacan of maintaining a sexist tradition in psychoanalysis. Others, such as Judith Butler, Bracha L. Ettinger and Jane Gallop have used Lacanian work, though in a critical way, to develop gender theory.
According to J. B. Marchand, "The gender studies and queer theory are rather reluctant, hostile to see the psychoanalytic approach."
For Jean-Claude Guillebaud, gender studies (and activists of sexual minorities) "besieged" and consider psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts as "the new priests, the last defenders of the morality, moralism or even obscurantism".
Judith Butler's worries about the psychoanalytic outlook under which sexual difference is "undeniable" and pathologizing any effort to suggest that it is not so paramount and unambiguous ...". According to Daniel Beaune and Caterina Rea, the gender-studies "often criticized psychoanalysis to perpetuate a family and social model of patriarchal, based on a rigid and timeless version of the parental order".
Literary theory
Psychoanalytically oriented French feminism focused on visual and literary theory all along. Virginia Woolf's legacy as well as "Adrienne Rich's call for women's revisions of literary texts, and history as well, has galvanized a generation of feminist authors to reply with texts of their own". Griselda Pollock and other feminists have articulated Myth and poetry and literature, from the point of view of gender.
Post-modern influence
The emergence of post-modernism theories affected gender studies, causing a movement in identity theories away from the concept of fixed or essentialist gender identity, to post-modern fluid or multiple identities. The impact of post-structuralism, and its literary theory aspect post-modernism, on gender studies was most prominent in its challenge of grand narratives. Post-structuralism paved the way for the emergence of queer theory in gender studies.
Under the influence of post-modernism gender studies has also turned its lens toward masculinity studies, due to the work of sociologists and theorists such as R. W. Connell, Michael Kimmel, and E. Anthony Rotundo.
These changes and expansions have led to some contentions within the field, such as the one between second wave feminists and queer theorists. The line drawn between these two camps lies in the problem as feminists see it of queer theorists arguing that everything is fragmented and there are not only no grand narratives but also no trends or categories. Feminists argue that this erases the categories of gender altogether but does nothing to antagonize the power dynamics reified by gender. In other words, the fact that gender is socially constructed does not undo the fact that there are strata of oppression between genders.
Criticisms
Historian and theorist Bryan Palmer argues that gender studies' current reliance on post-structuralism – with its reification of discourse and avoidance of the structures of oppression and struggles of resistance – obscures the origins, meanings, and consequences of historical events and processes, and he seeks to counter current trends in gender studies with an argument for the necessity to analyze lived experiences and the structures of subordination and power. Psychologist Debra W. Soh postulates that gender studies is composed of dubious scholarship, that it is an unscientific ideology, and that it causes needless disruption in the lives of children.
Feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti has criticized gender studies as "the take-over of the feminist agenda by studies on masculinity, which results in transferring funding from feminist faculty positions to other kinds of positions. There have been cases... of positions advertised as 'gender studies' being given away to the 'bright boys'. Some of the competitive take-over has to do with gay studies. Of special significance in this discussion is the role of the mainstream publisher Routledge who, in our opinion, is responsible for promoting gender as a way of deradicalizing the feminist agenda, re-marketing masculinity and gay male identity instead." Calvin Thomas countered that, "as Joseph Allen Boone points out, 'many of the men in the academy who are feminism's most supportive 'allies' are gay,'" and that it is "disingenuous" to ignore the ways in which mainstream publishers such as Routledge have promoted feminist theorists.
Gender studies, and more particularly queer studies within gender studies, have been criticized by the Catholic Church as an attack on human biology. Pope Francis has said that teaching about gender identity in schools is "ideological colonization" that threatens traditional families and fertile heterosexuality. France was one of the first countries where this claim became widespread when Catholic movements marched in the streets of Paris against the bill on gay marriage and adoption. Scholar of law and gender Bruno Perreau argues that this fear has deep historical roots, and that the rejection of gender studies and queer theory expresses anxieties about national identity and minority politics. Jayson Harsin argues that the French anti-gender theory movement demonstrates qualities of global right-wing populist post-truth politics.
Teaching certain aspects of gender theory was banned in public schools New South Wales after an independent review into how the state teachesand health education and the controversial material included in the teaching materials.
State and governmental attitudes to gender studies
In Central and Eastern Europe, anti-gender movements are on the rise, especially in Hungary, Poland, and Russia.
Russia
In Russia, gender studies is currently tolerated; however, state-supported practices that push a view related to perspectives on the gender of those in power – e.g. law solving in detail specifics of domestic violence - were abolished in 2017. Since 2010, the Russian government has also been leading a campaign at the UNHRC to recognise "traditional values" as a legitimate consideration in human rights protection and promotion.
Hungary
Gender studies programs were banned in Hungary in October 2018. In a statement released by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's office, a spokesperson stated that "The government's standpoint is that people are born either male or female, and we do not consider it acceptable for us to talk about socially constructed genders rather than biological sexes." The ban has attracted criticism from several European universities which offer the program, among them the Budapest-based Central European University, whose charter was revoked by the government, and is widely seen as part of the Hungarian ruling party's move away from democratic principles.
China
The Central People's Government supports studies of gender and social development of gender in history and practices that lead to gender equality. Citing Mao Zedong's philosophy, "Women hold up half the sky", this may be seen as continuation of equality of men and women introduced as part of Cultural Revolution.
Romania
The Romanian Senate approved by broad majority in June 2020 an update of National Education Law that would ban theories and opinions on gender identity according to which gender is a separate concept from biological sex. In December 2020, the Constitutional Court of Romania overturned the ban; earlier, President Klaus Iohannis had challenged the bill.
See also
In Spanish: Estudios de género para niños
