Here you will find Gender Studies as Multidisciplinary & Interdisciplinary Nature. Gender studies is a field of interdisciplinary study devoted to gender identity and gendered representation as central categories of analysis. I am going to share with you various natures of gender studies like multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary.
Nature of Gender Studies
This field includes women’s studies (concerning women, feminism, gender, and politics), men’s studies, and LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender) studies. Sometimes, Gender studies are offered together with a study of sexuality.
These disciplines study gender and sexuality in the fields of literature, language, geography, history, political science, sociology, anthropology, cinema, media studies, human development, law, and medicine. It also analyzes race, ethnicity, location, nationality, and disability.
Regarding gender, Simone de Beauvoir said: “One is not born a woman, one becomes one”.
This view proposes that in gender studies, the term “gender” should be used to refer to the social and cultural constructions of masculinities and femininities, not to the state of being male or female in its entirety.
However, this view is not held by all gender theorists. Beauvoir’s is a view that many “Sociologists support, 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 Studies as Multidisciplinary & Interdisciplinary Nature
Gender is pertinent to many disciplines, such as literary theory, drama studies, film theory, performance theory, contemporary art history, anthropology, sociology, sociolinguistics, and psychology.
These disciplines sometimes differ in their approaches to how and why they study gender, however, For instance in anthropology, sociology, and psychology, gender is often studied as a practice, whereas in cultural studies representations of gender are more often examined.
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.
The feminist theory of psychoanalysis, articulated mainly by Julia Kristeva (the “semiotic” and “abjection”) and Bracha Ettinger and informed both by Freud, Lacan, and the object relations theory, is very influential in gender studies.
Gender can also be broken into three categories, gender identity, gender expression, and biological sex, as Sam Killer man explains in his Ted X Talk at the University of Chicago.
These three categories are another way of breaking down gender into different social, biological, and cultural constructions.
These constructions focus on how femininity and masculinity are fluid entities and how their meaning is able to fluctuate depending on the various constraints surrounding them.
The field of gender studies explores the ways that femininity and masculinity affect an individual’s thought process.
This is relevant in a variety of realms, such as social organizations and institutions, interpersonal relationships, and understanding of identity and sexuality.
Gender studies is a discipline created originally by activists, and those who study it today see it as their mission to identify, analyze, and correct social inequities both locally and globally.
