Thursday, April 02, 2009

Gender Studies

Short post on what to do for Gender Studies class. Most of my education in that area was actually Women's History and Feminist Theory. I assume it is similar to Gender Studies. When I look this up on Wikipedia, this is what I get:

Gender studies is a field of interdisciplinary study which analyzes the phenomenon of gender. Gender Studies is sometimes related to studies of class, race, ethnicity, sexuality and location.[1]

The philosopher Simone de Beauvoir said: “One is not born a woman, one becomes one.”[2] In Gender Studies the term "gender" is used to refer to the social and cultural constructions of masculinities and femininities. It does not refer to biological difference, but rather cultural difference.[3] The field emerged from a number of different areas: the sociology of the 1950s and later (see Sociology of gender); the theories of the psychoanalyst Jaques Lacan; and the work of feminists such as Judith Butler. Each field came to regard "gender" as a practice, sometimes referred to as something that is performative.[4] Feminist theory of psychoanalysis, articulated mainly by Julia Kristeva[5] (the "semiotic" and "abjection") and Bracha Ettinger[6] (the "matrixial trans-subjectivity" and the "primal mother-phantasies"), and informed both by Freud, Lacan and the Object relations theory, is very influential in Gender studies.


Okay, what I get from that is that Gender Studies should include gender roles of both men and women. I know of Margaret Mead, Carol Gilligan... Possibility of MacKinnon.

Of coarse, if you really want to see the view of gender roles of men and women through the world there is nothing better than religious texts. I don't put feminists as the best source of defining men and women.

I can't keep up.. So to bed.