Zusammenfassung der Ressource
Women's Studies:
Perspectives and Practices
- Covers women,
gender, and
feminism
- Examines women's status in
society; wants to improve condition
of women's lives
- Challenges that men are "human" and women are "others" (androcentrism)
- Gender as central aspect
of human existence
- Gender = way society
organizes understanding of
sexual difference
- Started as concern for absence, misrepresentation, and
trivialization of women in the higher education
curriculum; and exclusion of women in power power
positions for college faculty
- esp. for women of color
- 60s/70s people demanded
knowledge be more inclusive
of women's issues
- Asked to see more women in leadership positions
- Not uncommon to have no
women authors for class
- Literature full of men's ideas of
women as subordinate, etc.
- 2 strategies that resulted in
changes in production of
knowledge of higher education
- Rebalanced the curriculum
- Shifted focus from white men to
more accurate representations
"women in history", "women in art"
- Transformation of
traditional knowledge
- "Truth" and objective
"facts" recognizes more
than just 'white male' view
- Women's studies as discipline began in second wave
- Objective: improve women's status in society
and, therefore, the condition of women's lives
- Two commitments of women's movement have
helped establish women's studies as a a discipline
- To personal change
- To societal transformation
- Goals/objectives of
women's studies
- Understand social construction
of gender and intersection of
gender with other systems of
inequality in women's lives
- To learn about the status
of women in society and
ways to improve it
- Experience how institutions
affect individual lives and to think
about privilege and discrimination
in our own lives
- Feminism
- 2 core principles
- Feminism concerns equality
and justice for all women
- Seeks to eliminate systems
of inequality and injustice in all
aspects of women's lives
- Feminism is inclusive and
affirming of women
- Celebrates women's
achievements
- Works to provide a
positive and affirming
stance toward women
- Personal perspective, political
theory, social movement
- Agency
- Feminist issues in the US are not
necessarily issues other places
- Myths
- Goals have been met
- "We're already liberated"
- postfeminism
- Negative connotations of
'feminist' and 'women's movement'
- Freedom of expression confused with freedom of equality
- Women have freedom for fashion, hair, piercings,
tattoos, etc. so people believe that makes them equal
- Stereotypes
- Angry, whiny, no sense of humor, exaggerative
- Hate men; want power over men
- Lesbians
- Reject motherhood
- White, middle class