ABSTRACT

The word “gender” circulates everywhere these days. Terms like “gender gap,” “gender-bending,” and “gender bias” are all currently part of our common vocabulary. The term arose almost simultaneously with the globalizing of Women’s Studies and in many people’s eyes it has posed a challenge to Women’s Studies. In fact, for the past 20 years, people have often talked about Gender Studies rather than Women’s Studies and some universities have even changed the name of the major to Gender Studies. The idea behind gender is that it is not enough to study women as a unique group to come to a true and useful understanding of women’s situation-including their past and present condition. Rather, one needs to take into account men’s lives as well; the entire male-female organization of a society, a family, or a workplace contains essential information. One cannot simply investigate women to understand violence, economic inequity, or the place of women in political processes; the field of gender relations holds the key to the situation of women. To some extent this recalls the assertion in the early days of Women’s Studies that women could not be understood outside the context of the family because women’s identity depended on the rules, norms, and context of family life. Most matters pertaining to women’s identities unfold in some form of male-female relationship, including the overall values of society when it comes to

masculinity and femininity. For some that relationship may constitute an important duality that is a basic building block of the world. Women do not stand alone. Beyond the assertion of gender’s relevance, however, definitions

of the term are highly variable. The most common understanding of gender among the public is that it is a substitute for the term “woman”. Among people in the academy, some take the term to mean that the social facts of men’s roles as “men” are important to an understanding of the social facts of human organization generally. Studying gender entails describing men and women equally. That is, we need more information about men as a sexed group, not merely as the major human actors who are only accidentally men. Men’s Studies has thus come to be a growing undertaking in the university. A second definition asserts that to understand women we must understand how men’s and women’s roles as sexed beings relate to one another. Because men’s roles in society have involved so much power, their activities naturally influence the roles of women and their overall status. In this interpretation, the charge is to dig down into the operations of men as men in their overall attitudes towards themselves and the privileges they exercise over women and children. Finally, gender is also an idea or category that emerged from many different fields of thought including poststructuralist, anthropological, and literary theory. Around it developed additional terms such as “binary” and “universalism,” which have provided the term gender with new meanings in many Women’s Studies classrooms. Given all these varying definitions of gender that this chapter will

explore, what are the plusses and minuses apparent in using that term to date? Critics maintain that gender takes away the interest in women because men are seen as endlessly fascinating due to their power and privilege. In short, for critics, the study of gender merely reinforces the status that men have held in society and in university curricula by shining the academic spotlight on them one more time only from a different angle. Additionally, as we shall see, the term “gender” is also seen as a category devised by white Western feminists to discuss the power of their men, with whom these women are at odds. Instead of the solidarity between men and women based on oppression found outside the West, scholars of gender put an overemphasis on division, albeit in the context of a common

gender system. Finally there are some who find “gender” too restrictive and unresponsive to identities that are fluid, passing between male and female and even surpassing those categories. Despite such criticism, some will claim that gender has been a

major breakthrough for Women’s Studies researchers and students as well as for scholars in many of the university’s more traditional fields. Why is it that from New York in the United States to Kazan in Russia programs in Gender Studies are seen as advanced in comparison to an outdated feminism and a “weak sister” disciplineWomen’s Studies? These questions suggest that there are plusses, breakthroughs, and negatives we can associate with the term gender. Before coming to any conclusions about the role of gender in Women’s Studies, we need to dig deeper into its many definitions and to examine its usefulness to date.