Gender Studies Lecture 8

Bilal Rasheed
CEO Havelian
 PAPER: GENDER STUDIES (100 MARKS)
I. Introduction to Gender Studies
II. Social Construction of Gender
III. Feminist Theories and Practice
IV. Feminist Movements
V. Gender and Development
VI. Status of Women in Pakistan
VII. Gender and Governance
VIII. Gender Based Violence
IX. Case Studies

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 Syllabus Breakup
Lectures Topics
1 Feminist movements
Feminist theories and Practice &
2
Social Construction of Gender
Gender and development &
3
Introduction to Gender Studies
4 Gender Based Violence
5 Gender and Governance
6 Status of Women in Pakistan
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 Topics for Lecture 8
1. Autonomy vs. Integration Debate
2. Women Studies vs. Gender Studies

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 Autonomy vs Integration Debate:

• Arguments for Autonomy

• Separatist and radical.
• Separatist approach of feminists for developing
women’s education separate from other disciplines.
• Don’t support integration of Women Studies into
Gender Studies.
• Freedom from the constraints imposed by the
traditional disciplines and departments.
• Free to focus all of their energies on teaching and
scholarship about women.

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• Arguments against Integration:
• Integration strategies tend to undermine feminist
goals.
• Women studies is still not ready for integration into
mainstream departments and is still too focused on
white, young and able women
• Autonomy advocates say that energy should be spent
on buliding their autonomy as a discipline and not on
changing the traditional disciplines.
• Autonomy advocates believe that independent Women
Studies’ Programs offer the best means fro generating
new knowledge through the interaction of like-minded
scholars.
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• Arguments for Integration:
• Florence Howe (1982) said that integration was
the “ultimate” strategy of women studies.
• Women Studies programs are “ghettos” doomed
to failure.
• Integration offers the lure of going beyond
studying and theorizing about change to an
actual attempt to change something.
• Focuses on influential people, who are often non-
feminist, faculty and adminsitration.

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• Reaching this audience requires a different
approach from the usual message of feminism.
• Moderate strategy aimed at bringing about a
slow paced change rather than an abrupt
transformation that Autonomy seeks.
• Integration advocates believe that women
studies’ programs are strengthened by campus
wide projects and involvement, which in turn will
promote broader change.
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• Integration advocates say that developing
women’s education separate from that of men
would lead to additional forms of sexism (the
belief that women can’t handle the regular
academic requirements)
• Separate women study programs cause
traditional departments to lose their motivation
to change as they think that work is being donein
the women’s studies programs.

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• 1983 Consensus:
• Different strategies are appropriate for
different places, and neither is fully capable of
meeting our real goals.

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 Women Studies vs Gender studies

• Feminist activism during the 60s and 70s

encouraged the development of Women's
Studies.
• As the scope of the discipline broadened and
more people wanted to include a feminist
analysis of masculinity, many programs
changed their name to Gender Studies.

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• Women's studies is a broad term - it can
include information from several disciplines -
history, sociology, anthropology, psychology -
but specific to women.
• Women’s Studies interrogates the history of
women and their contributions to society (and
how society has treated them).

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• Gender studies can include information from
all the disciplines listed above but it focuses
on gender - male and female.
• Gender Studies interrogates the way societies
conceive gender, how those cultural
categories affect the way individuals are
treated within society, and the ways in which
that cultural understanding of gender
categories interacts with all the other
products of culture (how journalism reports,
how things are marketed, etc).

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• There is a big difference between "women's
studies" and "gender studies." The former
concentrates on work relevant to women's
issues; psychology of women, women's history,
literature, etc. The latter is more generic and
would concern itself with both women and with
men.
• So, if what you're interested in dealing with is the
broad issue of how gender affects people, and
want to examine both women's and men's
experiences, you probably want to opt for
"gender studies." If your primary focus is to be
on girls and women, you probably want to opt for
"women's studies."

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• Some feminists criticize replacing "Women's"
with "Gender" as an attempt to erase the
history of women who have made significant
strides to get into academics in the first place.
• To affect a compromise, some universities call
the program "Women and Gender studies" to
be inclusive without leaving out evidence of
contribution by women in the title.
• In practice, there is little that definitively
differentiates between gender studies and
women’s studies in terms of what is taught.

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