Gender and women’s studies

What is gender?
 Buttle defines gender as something we perform
 West Zimmerman 1987- we are not born with it and it’s not something we have but
something we do.
What is women’s studies?
 It is an academic field that draws on feminist and interdisciplinary methods in order to
place women’s and experiences at the centre of study
 It examines the social and cultural constructs of gender as well as race, socio
economic class
 Theories used in the study of women are feminist theory, standpoint theory
 Women’s studies is related to gender studies , feminist and sexuality studies

Women’s studies also referred to as gender studies/feminist studies

It came into being in 1970s when the scope of women’s studies expanded. It includes the
study of queer theory, masculinity and research.
Women studies discusses society, politics, economy and literature.
This is the interdisplinary study of how intersectionality of gender, race, age ,class,
nationality, ethnicity, ability, sexuality and other differences that impact every facet of the
social, political and cultural experience .
The basis of this academic field was laid in the 1960s and 1970s
At this time many women were concerned about the patriarchal nature of narratives that
were told about them.
They took advantage of their formal educated status and the cultural atmosphere of
radical, social and political uproar to insist on an a more systematic and potentially
transformative narrative about women’s lives
The gender and women’s studies seeks to understand gender roles in past and
contemporary society
It also examines lives of women and men in broader structural forces e.g. nation building,
globalization, economic development and legal systems
Women’s language according to Otto Jespersen
 Women talk a lot
 Women use half-finished sentences because they speak before they have thought about
what they will say
 Women link sentences with ‘and’ because they are emotional rather than ‘grammatical’
  Women use adjectives such as ‘pretty’ and ‘nice’ too much. They are also fond of
saying ‘so pretty’ and ‘so nice’
 Women use adverbs too much and tend towards hyperbole
 Women have a smaller vocabulary than men – the words they use are the
‘indispensable small change of a language’
 Women know their smaller vocabulary so well that they are more fluent in speaking
and less hesitant than men, who are searching for the precise word in their large
vocabularies
 Novels written by ladies are much easier to read and use fewer difficult words  women
often gain spoken mastery of foreign languages more easily than men, but when put to the
test in translating a difficult text, men prove superior
 Women, by virtue of their sex, "shrank from coarse and gross expressions"
 Women had a "preference for veiled and indirect expressions" which preclude them
from being as effective as men.
 Women had a debilitating effect upon the language and it was reasonable for men
"certainly with great justice [to] object that there is a danger of the language becoming
languid and insipid if we are to content ourselves with women's expressions."
 Men are responsible for introducing new words into the language

The Difference between women Studies and Gender

 Gender studies’ is also seen as more inclusive than ‘women’s studies’, taking in
men and women as well as those who identify as neither.
 Women’s studies takes in women only