Talk:Gender studies

"Importance of gender studies" Section

The title of this section comes across as if the article itself is trying to self-validate itself to the reader. It's like the article is assuming that the reader is doubting the importance or usefulness of this subject, so it decides to suddenly preempt them with an explanation of the various reasons and uses for this study. The section's presence seems reactionary, as if it were made in response to the recent increase in the awareness of this subject's existence and the negative attention that followed, where its relevance and usefulness was called into question. When framed like this, the entire section comes off as a bit preachy, which I feel compromises the neutrality of this article. The purpose of an article is to give the reader as much relevant information on a given topic as it can, not to sell the reader on said topic. That being said, it might not hurt to create a section dedicated to addressing criticism of this subject, some of the information in this section is transplanted into this new section. In the end, I feel that this would be a better way to convey this information as a counterpoint as opposed to simply bombarding the reader with all this information in an attempt to put to rest any doubts they have about this subject before they can even form. Framing it like this just comes across as manipulative and detracts from the article's neutrality. –Nahald (talk) 11:32, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

Agreed. The section in its entirety is nothing more than a glorifying endorsement of the subject, which is something that doesn't belong in a Wikipedia article. It is not Wikipedia's job to tell people what they should consider important.Rimmer7 (talk) 23:26, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

I agree with everything above. The distinction between fact and opinion should be clarified, and Wikipedia is definitely a source of facts, not opinions. With that, I do find this section less credible and natural comparing to the other sections in this page. With that being said, I think the section is already taken down. I appreciate that change.Zhuolin Wu (talk) 00:43, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Nearly unreadable—should be rewritten from scratch

This has to be one of the most unreadable and opaque articles I've accessed on Wikipedia. So many statements are provided without any attempt to contextualize them. Look at this, from the opening section:

Bracha L. Ettinger transformed subjectivity in contemporary psychoanalysis since the early 1990s with the Matrixial feminine-maternal and prematernal Eros of borderlinking (bordureliance), borderspacing (bordurespacement) and co-emergence. The matrixial feminine difference defines a particular gaze and it is a source for trans-subjectivity and transjectivity in both males and females. Ettinger rethinks the human subject as informed by the archaic connectivity to the maternal and proposes the idea of a Demeter-Persephone Complexity.

What in the FSM is this supposed to mean to a general reader with no background in the subject (the taget audience of Wikipedia)? It jumps out in the middle of an already-opaque section, seemingly out of nowhere. The whole article is like this. No, the answer is not to hyperlink all the terms. The answer is to consider the audience and rewrite this entire article from scratch. It reads like the scattered notes for a book- or paper-in-progress, not an encyclopaedia article trying to enlighten curious non-specialist readers. Curly "the jerk" Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 04:02, 20 October 2016 (UTC)

Ha. A good catch. Zezen (talk) 19:46, 1 September 2020 (UTC)

I agree, the article is somewhat up to date and the content is all relevant to the topic, but it needs more context so people can read the article without having to know anything about the topic beforehand. There seems to be some changes made in this regard but the one noted as well as others have stayed the same. Laurencraven (talk) 02:12, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

Masculine not masculine

why do you keep changing the capitalization on it? Should the capitalization of the other categories be changed to lower case? Pawn0 o (talk) 18:47, 26 June 2017 (UTC)

@Pawn0 o: It is not a category, it's transclusion of a template. The change was made by an admin, Plastikspork (talk · contribs), implementing a TfD closure, and should not be reverted without a very good reason. The capitalisation is irrelevant. Murph9000 (talk) 05:11, 28 June 2017 (UTC)

Yes the captialism of the thing is indeed irrelevant, but why delete it. The other category is capitalized, should it not be lower case as well? Sorry if im intruding, im very new here, and I want to understand what is going on. Pawn0 o (talk) 17:24, 28 June 2017 (UTC)

How come there are several "genders" but only two Genetic genders?

WP:NOTFORUM
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
Which one is the correct gender.Pawn0 o (talk) 18:50, 26 June 2017 (UTC) Gender studies is a radical left-wing ideology based on the anti-reason and anti-logic philosophy of "postmodernism," so of course it's all nonsensical bullshit. It's just a leftist political ideology that's part of Marxist/communist critical theory and has nothing at all to do with science and reality. Indeed, it openly contradicts the scientific field of Sexology (not to mention Biology and Human anatomy). It is based entirely on subjective feelings rather than objective reality. According to "gender studies" if you believe in something strongly enough, then it must be true. Hence the new fad within the past couple years of multiple fake genders cropping up everywhere. It's getting quite ridiculous, and I hope the government will start defunding universities that promote this nonsense soon. One of these gender studies "professors" just came out of the closet recently identifying as a hippo.[1] — Preceding unsigned comment added by 60.162.240.251 (talk) 04:52, 28 June 2017 (UTC)

Not forum, indeed, but quite constructive, for an IP.

Zezen (talk) 20:06, 1 September 2020 (UTC)

IP? 50.32.120.5 (talk) 00:22, 23 March 2022 (UTC)

Masculism sidebar

Per WP:NAVBOX, "The collection of articles in a sidebar template should be fairly tightly related". The only mention of masculism in this article was an unsourced reference to men's studies; however, that article doesn't mention "masculism" either. Ergo, there's nothing to suggest these topics are "tightly related", so I've removed the {{masculism sidebar}} template. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 22:05, 29 February 2020 (UTC)

Links

Hello, some words you have links to are quite easy to understand or have a general idea what it is. Some other words would be great to add links like for example "Psychoanalytically".SanaSanaColitaDeRana (talk) 02:51, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

Diversifying Contributors to Gender Studies

Hello, I am new to editing articles and discussing them on the talk page. I was wondering why there aren't many mentions of non-Western or white contributors to the field of gender studies?Jpfrimpong (talk) 18:22, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

Contextualizing Claims

"One issue that remains consistent throughout all provinces in different stages of development is women having a weak voice when it comes to decision-making. One of the reasons for this is the "growing trend to decentralization [which] has moved decision-making down to levels at which women's voice is often weakest and where even the women's civil society movement, which has been a powerful advocate at national level, struggles to organize and be heard""

Under Gender in Asia and Polynesia. Yes, there is a citation for the last quotation, but I feel that the "women having a weak voice when it comes to decision-making" is a pretty loaded claim to have with no examples, contextualizations, or background. Someone should add some sources or information here to bolster the claim, or remove the claim if irrelevant. Jemappellecaitlin (talk) 14:26, 19 June 2021 (UTC)

Evaluation of Subject Discussion

The discussions on this page reveal that this article was poorly constructed as it was filled with biased language and grammar. Aside from this, the article was also difficult to follow and filled with complicated language. Overall, the subject does appear to be sensitive. Eylenab (talk) 09:40, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

Is Gender Studies really separate from Women's Studies

Many Women's Studies programs in the US have renamed themselves as "Gender Studies," to make it more clear that men's studies and queer studies are part of the field. Shouldn't this just be a section of the Women's Studies page?Women's studies? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Pamela McVay (talk • contribs) 16:47, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

I'm not sure how many queer, genderqueer and nonbinary people - whose experience is clearly included in "Gender studies", would be comfortable with a merge and redirect to "Women's studies". If anything, it would make more sense the other way around. Newimpartial (talk) 17:50, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

Given that a very significant proportion of gender studies is specifically about women, I think that continuing to have a separate article about that makes sense. The articles are complementary. They should be, and are, linked but there is no need to merge them together any more than we would merge all the articles about different aspects of Physics into one massive article. --DanielRigal (talk) 21:09, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

Agreed. Crossroads ^-talk- 05:16, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

I take your point about subcategories needing their own article. I'll try to tweak it in a way that makes the context less problematic. Here are my general thoughts. Defining gender studies as the study of "gender identity" and "gender representation" fails to capture the scope of what Gender Studies programs research and teach. The discussion of the field just seems a-historical. Poking around, I found that the University of Indiana at Bloomington has a discusssion of the historical relationship between Gender Studies and Women's Studies in their own program: https://gender.indiana.edu/about/history.html. If you go further to look at their links to resources, you'll see that self-proclaimed Gender Studies, LGBT Studies and Queer Studies programs frequently exist within Women's Studies, as well as that Women's Studies programs call themselves, variously, Women's Studies, Feminist Studies, Women and Gender Studies, and so forth. Some of this diversity in names comes, I assume, from attempting to show the world what is special about each particular program. Having lived through the 1990's as a feminist and a historian, my experience has been that some of the name changes also had to do with survivial in an era hostile to the idea of studying women or queer people. I have heard from other academics whose women's studies programs changed their names to Gender Studies because they thought it was more progressive and from other academics whose women's studies programs changed to "Gender Studies" because they thought it would make the study of women, gender, and sexuality sound less threatening to the university's board of directors and their state boards of education. FYI, Merry Wiesner-Hanks has an extended description of the development of women's studies, men's studies, gender studies, and queer studies in the introduction to Merry Wiesner-Hanks https://www.cambridge.org/highereducation/books/women-and-gender-in-early-modern-europe/86B27B08AF675395E5ADE5544AAD4CB0#overview_. Cambridge University Press, 2019. 4th ed.Pamela McVay (talk) 16:37, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

Did Simone de Beauvoir use the term "gender"?

The article says:

Regarding gender, Simone de Beauvoir said: "One is not born a woman, one becomes one."[8] This view proposes that in gender studies, the term "gender" should be used to refer to the social and cultural constructions of masculinity and femininity and not to the state of being male or female in its entirety.

The second sentence tells us that she had a view about the term "gender" in gender studies. But that can't be right. Gender studies didn't exist when Simone de Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex. And the point she was making wasn't about a term at all; it was about women—more precisely, about the figure that the human female takes on in society. Whatever she may have written about women, it proposes nothing about the usage of the term—even if it’s precisely the term we would use for her ideas today.

I'm guessing this was the intended meaning: in gender studies, the term gender gets used for the social and cultural constructions of masculinity and femininity. These constructions were what Simone de Beauvoir was getting at in The Second Sex, when she wrote about becoming a woman.

Yipe! That's me (talk) 23:17, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing this out. I removed the reference to Beauvoir, since it seems anachronistic and is in any case sourced to the book itself, which seems to make the interpretation original research. The remainder of the article here doesn't clarify the matter either. I also added a clarify tag to the end of the paragraph as it is not clear what it is saying. Crossroads ^-talk- 22:17, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

I believe there should be greater clarification regarding Beauvoir's viewpoint, as the article says: Simone de Beauvoir's is a view that many sociologists support. We're not told what her viewpoint is, nor provided a source to validate this information, and it seems like a vague blanket statement to assert that many sociologists hold the same opinion. Kaitlinabeele (talk) 01:42, 2 October 2022 (UTC)

Another good catch; I've removed the entire sentence from paragraph three of the lead. That leaves a gap, however, regrading the origins, which should be filled appropriately. Mathglot (talk) 09:59, 2 October 2022 (UTC)

Debra Soh's Opinion

In the "Criticisms" section, Debra Soh's opinion, which is presented in the book "The End of Gender", is mentioned:

Psychologist Debra W. Soh postulates that gender studies is composed of dubious scholarship, that it is an unscientific ideology, and that it causes needless disruption in the lives of children.

The problem is that the publishing house that published the book is not scholarly, but popular. Thus the book did not go through the peer review process. Moreover, the opinion quoted in the article is more of a political statement that propagates the anti-gender movement's narrative of "gender ideology". I fear that the inclusion of this section creates a false balance. Wouldn't it be better to remove this statement? What do you think about it? –Unloose ^(talk) 18:29, 10 March 2022 (UTC)

Which article are you evaluating?[edit] Gender studies

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?[edit] I chose to evaluate this article because it covers a very influential and broad topic. My preliminary impressions of it were that it covered the basic information but made some broad and unclear references to different theorist's ideas.

Evaluate the article[edit] The lead section gives a good overall introduction although it makes references to theorists who are not mentioned in the rest of the article. The article put a little too much weight on the importance of men's studies v.s. women's studies. Women being the group who have historically been oppressed by gender inequity and who have used gender studies as a discipline to focus on important issues for them which were overlooked by mainstream society, I think this imbalance in the article replicates the injustices the field of gender studies seeks to combat. There are a few sections, in relation to particular theorists specifically which are lacking citations. The article is well written, but the way it is broken up is a little confusing. The sub-sections seem to be randomly allocated to different topics which don't seem to be of parallel importance and scope to the topic. This makes the flow of the article a bit confusing. The article could benefit from some images which could provide visual context and interest. The talk page for this article seems to be productive for the part and focused on keeping the article consistent with Wikipedia's guidelines. Overall, I think the article does a decent job of encapsulating the topic but could use some reorganization and refocusing.Sophdev630 (talk) 23:54, 21 April 2022 (UTC)

References

Article Evaluation

Which article are you evaluating?[edit] Gender studies

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?[edit] I chose to evaluate this article because it covers a very influential and broad topic. My preliminary impressions of it were that it covered the basic information but made some broad and unclear references to different theorist's ideas.

Evaluate the article[edit] The lead section gives a good overall introduction although it makes references to theorists who are not mentioned in the rest of the article. The article put a little too much weight on the importance of men's studies v.s. women's studies. Women being the group who have historically been oppressed by gender inequity and who have used gender studies as a discipline to focus on important issues for them which were overlooked by mainstream society, I think this imbalance in the article replicates the injustices the field of gender studies seeks to combat. There are a few sections, in relation to particular theorists specifically which are lacking citations. The article is well written, but the way it is broken up is a little confusing. The sub-sections seem to be randomly allocated to different topics which don't seem to be of parallel importance and scope to the topic. This makes the flow of the article a bit confusing. The article could benefit from some images which could provide visual context and interest. The talk page for this article seems to be productive for the part and focused on keeping the article consistent with Wikipedia's guidelines. Overall, I think the article does a decent job of encapsulating the topic but could use some reorganization and refocusing.Sophdev630 (talk) 00:40, 24 April 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: LLIB 1115 - Intro to Information Research

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 22 August 2022 and 16 December 2022. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Ejgrimm (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by Ejgrimm (talk) 17:11, 28 October 2022 (UTC)