Feminism and Introduction to Gender Studies
Abstract
The term “gender studies” can be understood in a very wide sense to refer to any and all fields of study that concentrate on women and men, as well as the feminine and the masculine. However, this definition fails to take into account the most significant heuristic contributions made by the rich intellectual legacy that has emerged in the aftermath of feminist movements during the 1970s and which is responsible for the development of what we now refer to as gender studies. On the basis of this legacy, this paper proposes to highlight four important analytical elements of the idea of gender, which are as follows: gender is a social construct; gender is a relational process; gender comprises a relation of power; and gender is enmeshed in other power relations.
Keywords
Feminism, Gender, Postmodernism, Theorists