Women's Studies International Forum 34 (2011) 603–610

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Women's Studies International Forum

j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w. e l s ev i e r. c o m / l o c a t e / w s i f

Review essay

Doing gender: Gender and women's studies in the twenty first century
Mary Evans
Gender Institute, London School of Economics, United Kingdom

a r t i c l e i n f o s y n o p s i s

Available online 1 September 2011 Women's/Gender Studies remains a vibrant subject within UK universities. This article outlines
the major current concerns whilst at the same time tracing links between the subject and other
social and political changes in Britain.
© 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Contents

A short history of feminism in the academy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 604

604
Into the twenty first century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 605
605
Gender and development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 606
606
Gender, sexuality and the symbolic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 607
607
Gender and the institutional . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 608
608
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 609
609
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 609
609

The demise of women's/gender studies in British univer-
sities has been predicted (with some glee) by various voices
both within and outside the academy for some time, yet it is
evident that interest and engagement in this aspect of social
inequality are neither dead nor terminally ill. Indeed, whilst it
is certainly the case that few universities in the UK continue
to offer undergraduate degrees in Women's/Gender Studies
there are a number of universities (for example, the London
School of Economics, York and Cambridge) where gender
studies have a thriving postgraduate presence. At least as
important as this ‘bodies on seats’ measurement of interest is
the continuing popularity of what might loosely be described
as ‘work on women’ and the considerable audiences that
discussions specifically about aspects of women and/or
gender attract. If this is death, then the meaning of the
word demands some re-thinking.
The purpose of this essay is not, therefore, to argue the
case for a healthy, living body. Rather it is to trace some of the
lineages of that body and some of the ways in which the study
of gender has grown and developed. If we pursue that bodily
metaphor for a few moments, one of the characteristics of
human growth is that the baby is often unrecognisable as the
adult. It may be the case that, as parents are often known to
say of their offspring that ‘she/he was good natured from the
start’ (or indeed the reverse) but these judgements have little
predictive authority at the time of our birth. We simply do not
know exactly how we will turn out.
But, and it is a but that applies as much to human beings as
to an academic discipline, we do know that we can make some
general predictions about how groups of people, born into
particular circumstances, will turn out. For example, every
longitudinal study of scholastic success (or otherwise) has
demonstrated that the better educated parent will have the
more educationally successful child. Thus I would like to
suggest that one of the themes that we might consider in
considering the present state of the ‘child’ (who is in this

0277-5395/$ – see front matter © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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604 M. Evans / Women's Studies International Forum 34 (2011) 603–610
context is the academic study of gender and women) is, as with
human beings, the centrality of its parentage to its adult form. In
this essay I shall therefore set out some of the dominant themes
in contemporary gender/women's studies and consider the
parentage (and the implications of that parentage) for the work
that is currently part of university curricula.
A short history of feminism in the academy
The question of the genesis of women's and gender studies
is conventionally associated with what is described as ‘second
wave’ feminism in the west in the period from the beginning
of the 1970s. This judgement makes a distinction between the
‘first wave’ feminism of the nineteenth century, then assumes
a period of relative feminist quiescence until the energetic and
public campaigns of the later part of the twentieth century.
Historians who have traced the history of feminism (for
example, and recently, Sheila Rowbotham in Dreamers of a
New Day: Women who Made the Twentieth Century) have now
come to acknowledge that feminism has never ‘disappeared’
in any absolute sense, but has been a constant in western
history since the eighteenth century (Rowbotham, 2010).
Feminism, despite being a church broad enough to include
women who have, for example, fought against women's
suffrage, is no longer, therefore, to be thought of in terms of
absence and presence. As various authors have now pointed
out (most notably Clare Hemmings in Why Stories Matter) we
need to think of feminism, and feminist campaigners of
divergent politics, as the constant voices about the consistent
tensions and ambiguities of both the meaning of gender and
relations between the genders (Hemmings, 2011). At various
points in the history of the past one hundred and fifty years we
can see (as we can see in the history of any long term
relationship) that there have been dramatic confrontations
about questions of gender, but from this we should not
assume that the problems of gender relations have in some
sense been resolved or that attributes of the individual other
than gender have become more or less important.
In terms of the history of western feminism perhaps the
most crucial relationship in the life of our subjects of women's
and gender studies – that is, real life women and men – has
arguably been that of their relationship to the material world
of both paid work and/or economic dependence. As the
nineteenth century factory system collectivised a great deal of
work so many women, once working either in their homes or
the homes of others, became part of the world of work of
industrial societies. Women's part in this world was resisted,
contested and celebrated in various ways by various people,
from Marx and Engels (who rejoiced in the entry of women
into production) to male trade unionists who saw in the
employment of women a threat to male work and wages
(Taylor, 1983). In the First and Second World War politicians
who had fostered mythical ideas about a ‘woman's place
being in the home’ suddenly became enthusiasts (albeit short
—term in many cases) for the valuable paid work that women
could do (Summerfield, 1989). In this instance, reproduced in
various ways with various differences throughout the west,
there runs that thread which assumes that the public world,
of both work and politics, is male and that women's position
in these worlds is only ever of secondary importance. The
tensions resultant between women and men from changes in
material life gave rise to various campaigns of the part of
women for inclusion in all aspects of the social and the insti-
tutional worlds.
Yet with these campaigns for inclusion (for example, in
rights to, and during, paid work, to equal civic status) there
have always been two fundamental questions: that of the
structures and the normative order of the institutions that
women wish to be included in. When women have been
admitted to various kinds of ‘male’ preserves they have often
had to mimic aspects of male behaviour; incorporation in
specific normative orders has been demanded. Although the
case has recently been made (by Sylvia Walby in The Future of
Feminism) that ‘feminist projects have achieved all manner of
alliances, coalitions and merged projects… many of which
(though not all) have successfully achieved advanced feminist
goals ‘there remains a considerable space for scepticism about
the question of whether or not feminism has been trans-
formed by, or transformative of, the past one hundred years of
the history of the neo-liberal state (Walby, 2011). It is also
appropriate here to consider the extent to which the
institutional pressures of the academy have impinged upon
the subject matter of debates and discussions.
The impact of neo-liberalism on both contemporary
feminism and women's/gender studies is the first of the
three lineages of women's/gender studies that merits
attention, the other two being first, the present theoretical
direction of current academic work and second, the various
pressures and constraints on that work, both from inside and
outside the academy. These three aspects of lineage are, as is
the case of any parentage, all closely related to each other. For
example, the financial pressures on UK universities from the
present government's endorsement of neo-liberal policies
about the role of the state have had a general impact on all
non-vocational academic disciplines, amongst them
women's/gender studies. When the first women's studies
degrees and courses were established in the UK (from the
beginning of the 1980s onwards) students did not pay fees at
British universities and it was still assumed that universities
should have absolute autonomy in the state. These assump-
tions were to be overturned by a raft of policy decisions
(amongst the most significant of which was the Jarrett Report
of 1985) that proposed a much closer relationship between
the state and the academy than had previously been the case.
That state was, from 1979 onwards, increasingly a state
directed by those suspicious of the public sector and
committed to the much greater synergy between the private
sector and state institutions.
Yet at the same time as the British neo-liberal state
attempted to limit the extent of various forms of public
provision it did increasingly live up to some aspects of the
term ‘liberal’. Although the governments of Margaret Thatch-
er were notorious for their attack on individual civil liberties
(for example in the infamous Clause 28 limiting the
discussion of homosexuality in schools) various administra-
tions after 1990 have either implicitly or explicitly pursued
policies of greater liberality about sexuality. Attempts, for
example, to limit the terms of legal abortion have been
defeated in successive parliaments. Thus what has happened
in Britain, in common with other European states, is that a
more generally liberal consensus about aspects of private
behaviour has been achieved at the same time as neo-
 M. Evans / Women's Studies International Forum 34 (2011) 603–610
liberalism has radically re-written aspects of the relationship
between the citizen and the state.
The consequences of this new form of the state are such
that gender/women's studies have been faced with both an
increasingly open door on some matters related to sexuality
and an increasingly closed door on those relating to public
provision. The implication of these differences from that point
in the early 1970s when gender/women's studies came into
being is that the focus of academic and political energy has
shifted. For example, many of the campaigns for greater civic
and legal equality that were the subject of previous periods of
academic feminism (such as legal rights in marriage and the
recognition of the economic value of care provided by
women) have in many respects been successful: for example,
rape in marriage is recognised and care allowances are paid
by the state. Whilst it is still the case that aspects of the law
(for example the conduct of rape trials in which there is often
greater bias towards the defendant rather than the victim)
the issue of the legitimacy of issues about gender and gender
equality in both the practice and the letter of the law has been
established. Civil partnerships between people of the same
biological sex have been recognised in law (and positively
recognised in some sections of the media) and employment
practices in many contexts (if by no means all) express at
least a commitment to gender equality.
The world outside the academy is not, therefore, the same
world that was addressed by gender/women's studies forty
years ago; certainly university curricula throughout the UK
reflect the ‘gendering’ of the human subject that has been
achieved in that period. But a degree of success also poses
new theoretical problems, amongst which the most visible is
the question of how to pursue those questions about gender
and its impact in ways that reflect the growing complexity
and sophistication of gender/women's studies. In the early
1970s oppositions were made between the experiences of
men and women; some of these oppositions were generated
by radical feminists, others were shared by feminists across a
wide political spectrum. Such binary divisions have now
largely disappeared, for two reasons. The first is that the social
identities that we all possess are no longer understood simply
in terms of those of class and gender but have come to include
racial, ethnic and sexual identity. The second is that the work
of Judith Butler has dissolved the idea of given boundaries
between male and female. Her account of the acquisition of
gender through repeated performances of gender identity has
opened a considerable amount of space for the study of both
the ambiguities of gender identity and for representations of
gender (Butler, 1980). Yet it is important to remember that
Butler's first major work was published after Juliet Mitchell's
Psychoanalysis and Feminism. Mitchell's book set the scene for
feminist work in the following decades that would demon-
strate the social processes of the making of gender identity
(Mitchell, 1974).
Into the twenty first century
In the second decade of the twenty first century the impact
of the ideas of authors from the 1970s and 1980s remains
evident in feminist literature. Ideas such as the gendering of
skill, the dual labour market, the making of gendered
knowledge, and the representation of the body are just a few
605
of the examples where previous generations of feminist
scholarship have made a lasting impact, as much as in the
world outside the academy as within it. But in addition to this
‘parentage’ of contemporary feminism there are three key shifts
across all academic disciplines that have both contributed to
feminist scholarship and been derived from it. Thus in the
present context we can see at work that inter-disciplinarity
which was a feature of previous decades of feminist work and
all of the three major shifts in feminist scholarship demonstrate
this characteristic. These three key shifts are the recognition of
race and race relations in the social world, in terms of
relationships both in the ‘real’ and the symbolic world. The
fiction of the post-colonial epoch has, for example, been widely
interpreted and interrogated in terms of its engagement with
gender difference. Amongst the writers who have engaged with
the gender politics of the post-colonial are Gayatri Spivak, Trinh
T. Minh-ha and Chandra Mohanty (Spivak, 1988). Secondly, the
politics of gay liberation, together with writers of ‘queer’ theory,
have extended the discussion of sexuality . Writers such as
Jeffery Weeks, Terry Castle, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick have, in
different disciplines articulated the centrality of sexual identity
to human experience (Castle, 1993). Thirdly, and of consider-
able importance, has been the impact on many academic
disciplines of four writers in particular: Michel Foucault, Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari and Amartya Sen (Foucault, 1965).
These writers (from the disciplines of history, philosophy and
economics) have been hugely significant in the direction that
feminist debates have taken: Sen, for example, has been of
major importance in furthering the centrality of the emanci-
pation of women to projects of both economic and civic
development and in the re-thinking of aspects of morality
(Nussbaum, 2000).
What we can see in the work of the above is the
recognition that the human subject is not uniquely male
and that gender identities, ambiguities and conflicts are a
crucial part of human experience. Yet what remains as a
question for academic feminism, as much as for feminism
with an engagement in the public world, is the extent to
which gender identity is the most crucial aspect of human
identity. There are few contemporary writers on gender who
refuse the complexity of gender identity (many of the
certainties of previous radical feminist work about gender
as the definitive characteristic of human existence have
largely disappeared) but the very disappearance of that
certainty has presented feminism with important questions
about the extent of the explanatory status of gender, be it in
terms of either the social or the symbolic. A debate
characteristic of the impact of the complexity of this
disappearance of certainties is that which took place between
Nancy Fraser and Judith Butler in 1998 and is, in some
respects, continued in a more recent article by Nancy Fraser in
2009 (Fraser, 1998). The relative theoretical innocence of
feminist writing in the early 1970s has been replaced by far
more theoretically sophisticated engagements with all as-
pects of the social and symbolic experience of gender.
This chronological account of the development of aca-
demic gender/women's studies in the past forty years
suggests that accounts of the ‘death’ of interest in feminism
are widely exaggerated. Nevertheless, that death has been
reported and it has been proposed that we live in a ‘post-
feminist’ age (Tasker & Negra, 2007). On both sides of the
606 M. Evans / Women's Studies International Forum 34 (2011) 603–610
Atlantic various writers have hailed and denied this charge
and examined popular culture and the media for evidence
both to endorse and refute the charge. In the UK Angela
McRobbie has been amongst those who have argued that
traditional regimes of gender have been ‘re-stabilised ‘and
that aspects of gender mainstreaming have been collusive in
this process (McRobbie, 2009). Neverthless, as McRobbie points
out, there remains considerable enthusiasm in the academy for
debate and discussion around all aspects of gender (McRobbie).
This apparent success of gender/women's studies returns
us to that question asked earlier: that of the relationship
between gender/women's studies and feminism. When
feminism entered the western academy in the early 1970s
there were various voices identifying concern that this shift,
from political movement to academic study, would divert
feminist energy from the achievement of political campaign-
ing for women. The evidence of the past forty years on this
topic is mixed: on the one hand what might be described as
the jouissance of early, 1970s, feminism has been replaced by
a more measured feminism, integrated into many aspects of
the political and cultural institutions of the UK. On the other
hand, the many campaigns that feminism has fought (about
domestic violence and the recognition of unpaid women
carers for example) have owed at least part of their success to
the research conducted within the academy. But, and to
return here to the most recent comments of Nancy Fraser,
questions still remain about the extent to which feminism is
collusive with the aspirations of neo-liberalism.
The curriculum of many gender and women's studies
courses and degrees in the UK reflects many of these concerns,
particularly in the areas of gender and development, gender,
sexuality and the symbolic and the ways in which gender
differences structure institutions, such as those of education
and the work place. In all cases, there is a consensus that gender,
in all these contexts, matters. The question, of course, is how
and why it matters and it is there that the theoretical literature
referred to above becomes crucial. The following section will
deal briefly with each of these areas.
Gender and development
The 1980s were defined by the United Nations as the
Decade for Women and it was during these years that major
feminist critiques of the development policies of the global
north were published. Two particularly important critiques
were those by Chandra Mohanty and Gayatri Spivak. The first
argued (in an essay published in 1988) that there was no one
universal ‘woman’, but diverse women whose work was
consistently integrated into a capitalist, and imperialist,
agenda of the making of profit (Mohanty, 2003). This
emphasis on the history of the forms of the engagement of
the global north with the global south is further developed in
the work of Spivak, whose most important essay, ‘Can the
Subaltern Speak’ has been widely influential as statement
against the disconnection between marginalised women and
those who speak for them (Spivak, 2010). The work of both
these authors raises a central question in women's/gender
studies (and indeed in any academic account of the poor or
the dispossessed) of how the more privileged can speak for
others. (This question has been raised by Ann Oakley in her
work on feminist research methods in western contexts)
(Oakley, 2000). Work on gender and development in the past
ten years has taken forward the questions raised by Spivak
and Mohanty: amongst important authors writing today are
Sylvia Chant, Diane Perrons, V.Spike Peterson and Shirin Rai
(Chant, 2007). All these writers are continuing a tradition in
which they regard it as an essential part of feminist writing on
development to ask questions about who profits from
‘development’; the very term, once often regarded as a
neutral aspiration has come to be seen as deeply problematic.
The issue of globalisation has therefore become a central
concern of many writers as have two other issues : the first
that of what has been described as the ‘Islamic revival’, a form
of religious engagement that has particular consequences for
divisions between women and men and their different access
to the public world (Mahmood, 2005). The second issue is
that of the very divisions of the public world itself: Linda
McDowell has written of the ‘gendered space’ of the City of
London whilst Wendy Brown has explored questions of both
the literal and the metaphorical boundaries of social space
and their relationship to gender divisions (McDowell, 1997).
At the same time the theoretical tools (particularly those of
social anthropology) which study the global south have
continued, after earlier work by, for example, Henrietta
Moore, to be both challenged and used in novel ways
(Moore, 1994). Particularly important in the critiques of
both Moore and later writers was the way in which the
refusal of earlier writers to discuss both the relations of
gender and imperialism were held to account.
One of the characteristics of all current writers on gender
and development is that they recognise the global impact of
both globalisation and neo-liberal economics. But this is not
simply about recognising the context in which development
policies are placed, it is also about recognising that the global
corporations that increasingly dominate world economics are
themselves (just as much as the corporations and organisations
of earlier forms of imperialism) gendered institutions. Raewyn
Connell has pointed out that across institutions related to
economic life (from corporations to trade unions) we find ‘a
patriarchal institution’ (Connell, 2009). She goes on to point
that these institutions exist in various forms of relation to that
more public form of institutional life: the state. Throughout the
world, states make policies that regulate and constitute gender
relations. Optimistic views about the engagement of the state
with various forms of feminism here meet those far more
pessimistic views (such as that of Connell) which see the state,
both in the global north and the global south, as the primary
(although not the only) location of social ascriptions of gender.
Connell cites the examples of the making of the terms ‘husband’
and ‘wife’ but to this list we might add the example of the ways
in which states interpret the meaning of the word ‘woman’. The
proscriptions about various forms of social engagement
attached to the agency of female human beings in many
countries, most vividly in Saudi Arabia, have become the focus
of passionate feminist engagement (Ahmed, 2011).
At that point where the feminism of the global north
confronts the apparent absence of feminism in the global
south the complexities of ‘travelling theory’, as Kathy Davis
has described the trans-national engagement with feminism,
become particularly apparent (Davis, 2007). The wish of
women outside the west to speak in their own languages
about their own situation has been widely asserted but with
 M. Evans / Women's Studies International Forum 34 (2011) 603–610
that comes issues about gender and the state which
demonstrate that forms of social inequality other than those
of gender massively interrupt the assumption that gender is
the single and most important aspect of social inequality. Not
least of the defining factors of social inequality is that very
considerable inequality between the global north and the
global south, an inequality which is rightly seen in material
terms (access to such fundamentals of human existence as a
reliable supply of food and clean water, shelter and access to
education and medical care). The assumption that all societies
have various forms of gender differentiation is one that has
been contested (for example, in the work by Oyewumi
Oyeronke on the Yoruba of Nigeria) but largely maintained,
albeit with the qualification that forms of gender differenti-
ation are varied (Oyewumi, 1997). At the same time, the
inequalities between the global north and the global south
are also those of the south's unequal and often fragmentary
engagements with the technological and scientific compe-
tence of the west. These various forms of inequality constitute
seemingly unbridgeable links between women in different
parts of the world, differences that are formed around a
theoretical relationship in which ‘theory’ is produced in
metropolitan spaces and then ‘applied’ to specific locations.
The further, considerable, problem that has therefore been
recognised, albeit sometimes implicitly, in work on gender is
that of the ways in which theories of gender are produced
outside the contexts to which they are applied and that this
disjunction feeds and maintains that assumption of ‘modern’
and ‘traditional’ societies, together with that equally potent
distinction between the ‘secular’ and the ‘religious’ (Asad,
2003). Although this assumption has been the subject of
various critiques (not least in both fiction and non-fiction
about the ‘post colonial’) there remains a very powerful
assumption that the various societies of the world can be
located within various locations of ‘progress’. That progress is
often largely attributable to different degrees of technological
sophistication, particularly the sophistication of large scale
production. Again, the assumption has been interrupted by
arguments from both feminists and environmental cam-
paigners, asserting the greater competence of indigenous
technologies over the imported and/or imposed.
The emphasis in the above on the work of feminist writers
should not, however, allow the exclusion of the recognition of
studies about the ongoing cultural disturbances around the
identities of men as well as women. It is apparent that certain
societies (most notably Saudi Arabia and Iran at the present
time) interpret the teachings of Islam in ways that enforce a
strict segregation of the public inter-action of women and
men; others (for example Turkey) have legislated to attempt
to minimise certain forms of visible gender difference. The
various quests for female identity in a globalising world have
been met, we can observe from the above, by considerable
degrees of resistance by groups of men. The problem, as many
feminists would remark, is that men's quests for identity have
been articulated through the invocation of inherent differ-
ences between the biologically male and biologically female.
In terms of Karl Marx's famous remark that the progress of a
society could be marked by the degree of the emancipation of
women it would appear that many societies have a certain
distance to travel to be defined as in any sense (other than the
technological) as ‘modern’.
607
Gender, sexuality and the symbolic
The theoretical disruption to women's and gender studies
occasioned by the publication of Judith Butler's Gender
Trouble has continued, in the years since its publication in
1980, to inform accounts of sexuality, most particularly in the
study of the representational. When Butler built upon the
work of Simone de Beauvoir (and J.L.Austin) to propose a
theoretical account of sexuality that emphasised the elusive,
but endlessly constructed, boundaries of male and female,
masculine and feminine, she allowed the study of all forms of
representation to move from a statis (of the recognition of
gender) to a new, and often rewarding, place of uncertainty.
In this, her work was much enhanced and enriched by ‘queer
theorists’, who challenged previous definitions of both actual
and fictional identity. In studies both of ‘high’ and popular
culture, we can continue to see the influence not just of Butler
but of others who have developed aspects of her work
(Gunnarsson). But at the same time it is important to recall
that just as Butler's work is rightly regarded as innovative
Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando, published in 1928 explored
many of the same possibilities of the displacement and the
disappearance of gender identities : essentially that circum-
stances could provoke the emergence of the gendered self.
Woolf was writing fiction and as such the person of
Orlando can be left to the reader's imagination: we do not
literally have to ‘see’ Orlando. But in the visual media (film,
television, photography) the person of ‘woman’ is repre-
sented even though gender is also ‘bent’ in numerous forms
and contexts. The imagination of diverse forms of gender has
long been part of the world's cultural heritage but the
exploration of these complex forms is today more visible in
the west than in other parts of the world. These new
explorations take the form of the re-thinking of dress, the
relationship between the body and art in ways that literally
make the human body the canvas of art and, in explicitly
commercial ways, the pornographic exploitation of the body.
Thus in the same culture that body artists such as Orlan use
their own bodies as the site of art the portrayal of the bodies
of unnamed women (and it is far more often women than
men who are represented in pornographic images) are used
for financial gain (Orlan, 1994). In women's and gender
studies (in the work, for example, on television and film by
Rosalind Gill, Elizabeth Cowie and Sadie Wearing) there is an
important awareness of the ways in which the visual
representation of women carries with it complicated ‘signs’
about female characters (Gill, 2007). The portrayal of women
as morally positive or morally negative may, for example, be
located through dress and/or demeanour. Those binaries that
Marina Warner first defined in her study of the Virgin Mary
persist despite the global presence of such female superstars
as Madonna, a figure about whose presence Ann Kaplan has
asked, ‘perversion, repression or subversion?’ (Warner,
1976).
That very forceful demonstration of sexuality that was
part of the self presentation of Madonna can, in retrospect, be
defined as part of that visible sexualisation of culture which is
now assumed to have taken place in the past thirty years.
Whether or not this is actually the case (and not yet another
instance of the famously questionable ‘moral panics’ that
periodically engulf the west) evidence from various aspects of
608 M. Evans / Women's Studies International Forum 34 (2011) 603–610
urban life in the west would suggest that an active sexual
identity is demanded of citizens from an early age. When
Sheila Jeffreys wrote of the damage to women of the sexual
revolution and the ‘permissive’ culture she was writing before
the recent manifestations of what has been described as the
‘pornification’ of everyday life (MacKinnon, 1989). A consid-
erable lobby within feminism has always been against
censorship, initially on the grounds that once censorship is
established it is often difficult to establish how its regulatory
expectations will both be defined and policed. More recent
feminist views on topics that include censorship have argued,
inspired by the ‘rhizome’ theories of Deleuze and Guattari
that the human imagination cannot be controlled or con-
tained: corralled in one context it will manifest itself in
another (Jusova, 2011).
The imagination and representation of gender thus
continues to offer diverse theoretical challenges: choices
between censorship or its absence, questions about the
impact (and indeed the existence) of the phenomenon of
sexualisation and even more fundamental questions about
the power relations both explicit and implicit within the
representation of gender. The massive industries that now
surround the female body pose questions for feminism that
continue to be the subject of controversy. For example, the
growth throughout the west of the industry of cosmetic
surgery (and other radical forms of body modification
through rigorous diet or extreme forms of exercise) demands
that we ask questions about the degree of ‘free’ choice that is
being explored and exercised by women (Davis, 1995). The
argument that women are over-internalising potentially
damaging psychological expectations about their bodies,
expectations which they cannot meet, is further bolstered
by arguments about the increase in such illnesses as anorexia
nervosa and bulimia. Here many feminists connect the
commercial representation of women with that evidence of
damage to individual women that can be found in many
national statistics of illness.
These kinds of questions, and in particular the contradic-
tions between a western world that is increasingly tolerant of
same sex relations yet increasingly demanding of conformity
to certain kinds of sexual identity, continue to engage
feminist scholars. Equally important are issues about the
gendered impact of new medical technologies, questions
about these issues have been raised by, for example, Sarah
Franklin in the context of new reproductive technologies
(Franklin, 2007). Throughout the work of these authors, and
many others, there is a recognition of the tension that
continues to exist around the challenge to male power and
heteronormativity of new forms of female agency, not the
least of which is the control that many western women can
now command over reproduction.
Gender and the institutional
The study of gender, as readers of this journal will know,
has become an established part of the curriculum of
universities throughout the west. It is thus that this section
about gender and the institutional begins with the context of
education: for many feminists the transformative possibilities
of education (both secondary and higher) remain of key
importance in the making of women's life chances. Various
authors (for example, Gabriele Griffin, Valerie Hey, Miriam
David, Diane Reay and Louise Morley) have explored both the
various ways in which the study of gender has been defined
and articulated and the impact of gender on the educational
achievements of women (Reay, 2001). These writers, whilst
working within the UK, have also developed significant
studies of gender outside this national context and demon-
strated that in the UK and elsewhere the pattern of the
educational achievements of girls being comparable, if not
better, than those of boys up to the age of 16, is one that
gradually diminishes in post compulsory and higher educa-
tion. This decline is then, as many other feminist students of
the labour market have pointed out, replicated in the gender
pay gap and the under representation of women in the
professions and senior management (Scott, Crompton, &
Lyonette, 2010).
This persistence of gender inequality, summarised above
in one paragraph, yet the subject of a considerable research
and published literature, is explained in two ways. The first
(and an explanation that is generally uncontroversial in the
literature) is that the birth of children has a far greater
negative impact on life in the work place for women than it
does for men. Across the west, women with children either
leave the work place for some years (for example in
Germany) or return to work on a part-time basis (a pattern
common in the UK) (Warren). The absence of comprehensive
systems of viable child care facilities makes it impossible for
parents to meet the demands of both full time work and
parenthood. A second explanation (and far more controver-
sial) is that of Catherine Hakim, who has argued that in fact
women with children have less wish than others to remain in
full time work and that their marked absence from the work
force is a matter of choice rather than coercion (Hakim,
2004).
This argument has created some controversy and various
authors (for example Rosemary Crompton) have suggested its
problematic aspects (Crompton & Lyonette, 2005). Yet what
perhaps needs greater emphasis than is sometimes given is
the impact of different economies across Europe on different
patterns of gendered labour market participation rates. For
example, the UK has, in many parts of the country, a housing
market that demands high rents or mortgage payments. For
those households with only one wage earner, those payments
would be impossible to meet. In other countries, for example
Germany, where housing costs are often less and where there
is a lower emphasis on owner occupation, there is less
economic need for a dual income household. This does not
necessarily carry with it the implication that discrimination
against women in the work place does not exist, or that
women with children would not prefer to remain in the work
force but it does suggest that both women and men exist
within material as well as ideological contexts and that
choices about made within complex pressures and demands.
Arguments about women and paid work bring to the fore
differences of opinion about the inter-sections of gender and
the state. The state, at least in much of western Europe, has
long been the provider of various forms and degrees of
assistance (through health care, education and financial
support of various kinds). In recent years pressure was
brought on those same states to redress some of what was
seen as the balance against women in various state
 M. Evans / Women's Studies International Forum 34 (2011) 603–610
institutions, for example law and welfare provision. Thus,
from the 1970s, many western states (with various degrees of
enthusiasm) re-addressed what was seen as the masculine
bias in their laws and acknowledged responsibilities. Laws on
domestic violence, rape, divorce and abortion were all re-
written to give a greater degree of civic equality to women. At
the same time, there was increased pressure on the state to
become the provider of child care, and of shelter for women at
risk from male violence.
The change of government in the UK in 2011 brought with
it a Coalition Government (of the Conservative and the Liberal
Democrat parties) that was committed to limiting state
spending. Thus has begun a drawing back of the relationship
between women and the state that had previously articulated
a recognition that the state had an obligation to provide
support, in various forms, for women. Hence, for example,
financial assistance for single mothers and projects estab-
lished to support victims of domestic violence has either been
withdrawn or curtailed. Many feminist groups have cam-
paigned against these cuts in public spending and argued that
the Coalition Government are imposing disproportionate cuts
on vulnerable women (Women Agains the Cuts). As Barbara
Einhorn has pointed out in the context of the transformation
of what was once East Germany, the transition to an
aggressive form of a market economy often revives patriar-
chal assumptions about the ‘place’ of women and the degree
of the state's responsibilities towards them (Einhorn, 2010).
What the changes in the UK involve for the theoretical
understanding of the relationship between women and the
state involves complex issues, not least about social class and
the underlying expectations of state policies: as Beverley
Skeggs has pointed out women have class as well as gender
identities and Anne Phillips has questioned policies of equal
access that carry no questioning of equality of outcome
(Skeggs, 1997). In circumstances of the limitation of state
spending, both the ‘gender’ of the state and its class
sympathies become of paramount importance.
Conclusion
Women's studies, either as such or more often as gender
studies, is alive and well in the UK. If measured in student
numbers, this claim could be easily dismissed but academic
subjects can be ‘alive’ and of on-going interest in different
ways. What is alive therefore, is less the institutional presence
of women's studies, than the recognition of the part that
gender plays in the making of social identity and circum-
stance. The ‘cultural’ turn of aspects of the social sciences in
the last decade of the twentieth century brought much closer
the social sciences and the humanities and new disciplines
such as cultural studies became locations of important work
on gender. At the same time we might note a ‘turn’ towards
the conceptual in gender/women's studies. This should not be
taken to mean that the conceptual was absent from previous
work but that feminist scholarship is increasingly organised
in terms of cross-disciplinary ‘themes’ rather than in the
discussion of more precisely disciplinary concepts (Barrett,
1992). But the new harshness of the form of neo-liberalism in
the second decade in the twenty first century offers the
prospect of a turn towards what Sara Ahmed has termed the
‘new materialism’ (Ahmed, 2008). That materialism suggests
609
not a return to the rigid structural certainties that once
(rather more perhaps in theory than in practice) dominated
the social sciences but to a form of the material that
recognises both circumstance and the implications of bodily
presence.
The ‘child’ of women's studies has grown up into a mature
and complex adult. Yet the genetic parentage of that child still
remains apparent: a recognition of the social and the
symbolic implications of gender accompanied by a persistent
engagement with the issues of the world outside the
academy. This dual parentage of theory and practice
continues to give women's studies its vitality and its
resonance : although corralled in the academy, women's
studies continues to demonstrate the possibility of the
creation of transcendent knowledge. In the case of the
present political circumstances of a tsunami of the political
normalisation of neo-liberal expectations, that possibility is to
be treasured even though assumptions about the ‘success’ of
feminism remain highly questionable. Such assumptions tend
to assume a static social world, rather than one that is
constantly changing and, as such, making constantly new
demands for those who wish to maintain a social and political
space for the idea of gender equality. As many feminist
writers have recognised, the greater feminist presence in
various institutions of the neo-liberal state has not inter-
rupted the energetic pursuit by those states of economic
dominance, the normalisation of the market economy and
various forms of military or quasi-military engagement
(Butler, 2009).
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