Everyday Women's and Gender Studies

Introductory Concepts

Ann Braithwaite, Catherine Orr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317285304
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Everyday Women's and Gender Studies is a text-reader that offers instructors a new way to approach an introductory course on women's and gender studies. This book highlights major concepts that organize the diverse work in this field: Knowledges, Identities, Equalities, Bodies, Places, and Representations. Its focus on "the everyday" speaks to the importance this book places on students understanding the taken-for granted circumstances of their daily lives. Precisely because it is not the same for everyone, the everyday becomes the ideal location for cultivating students' intellectual capacities as well as their political investigations and interventions. In addition to exploring each concept in detail, each chapter includes up to five short recently published readings that illuminate an aspect of that concept. Everyday Women's and Gender Studies explores the idea that "People are different, and the world isn't fair, " and engages students in the inevitably complicated follow-up question, "Now that we know, how shall we live?"

Part One

Chapter One

Knowledges

Imagine the following: You’re browsing the catalogs of a number of different universities and colleges as you try and decide which one to attend. You start noticing how varied the possible programs of study are: Women’s and Gender Studies, African American Studies, Ethnic Studies, Indigenous and Aboriginal Studies, Sexuality and Queer Studies, Disability Studies. So many are new to you; you didn’t have anything like this at your high school. You also notice Canadian Studies, American Studies, Peace and Conflict Studies, Human Rights Studies, Equity Studies, and Social Justice Studies. All of these are in addition to fields you do recognize: English, Math, History, Chemistry, and the like. And you wonder, what’s so different about these new programs? Why do so many of them seem to be about “identity,” and especially about identities that have been discriminated against in the past (and maybe even still today)? And even those that aren’t as focused on identity still seem to focus on “rights” in some way.

You start thinking about why there are so many of these sorts of programs at the university level. Do these groups of people really need this kind of focused attention—since, after all, we live in a much more equal society now than, say, 40 or 50 years ago? And doesn’t pointing out all these differences between people simply perpetuate feelings of resentment or guilt or prejudice or even hatred? Why bring it up? Who takes courses in these programs anyway? Are they just for people who identify with those groups, or can anyone take them? You wonder what exactly is being taught in these courses; how much could there be to say about any of these identities after all?

As you think about whether you would want to sign up for such a course, you realize that just debating with yourself about the existence of these courses is getting you to think about what is important to “know” at university or in your life beyond the university. These courses seem to suggest, just by way of their existence in the course catalogs, that there is something missing in those other courses that you’ve been taking in high school. Is knowledge of the world different if you look at it through different eyes, from different perspectives, at different times? And does knowledge itself change if it aims to promote something like social justice or human rights? All these questions! Now you want to find some answers. So you decide to give one of these courses a try.

Situating Women’s and Gender Studies

As an academic discipline, Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS) seeks to destabilize our everyday habits of thought and provide alternative visions about the ways we make meaning of, and subsequently shape, our worlds. It focuses mostly on exploring identity-based differences among people and examines the range of institutions, structures, and practices—both historical and contemporary—that perpetuate injustices toward individuals and/or identity groups. And WGS demands that we reflect on how we are differently positioned—sometimes in awkward and contradictory ways—with regard to privileges we possess as well as discriminations we experience. As such, WGS takes up questions that go beyond women and gender to consider race, sexuality, disability, social class, age, national origins, and more, all at the same time. Basically, WGS is an academic field that strives to create knowledge that reimagines human relations and seeks to bring about the ethical transformation of those relations in ways that both recognize and benefit broader numbers of people. As with any other academic discipline you encounter, then, WGS has an agenda. But, unlike many disciplines, it is more transparent and self-reflexive about what that agenda is.

As you may have noticed, WGS is offered in most colleges and universities, but hardly at all at the primary and secondary levels. There are many reasons for this, not the least of which is how we as a society tend to think about where and when knowledge transmission—as opposed to critical thinking about that knowledge—happens in our educational systems, and what we think is important to know at different stages of life and educational development. And, like all disciplines, WGS is slightly different in its various college and university locations. All academic knowledge projects reflect their specific geographical, historical, and cultural locations; they are, in other words, situated in local, as well as national and international, contexts that reflect certain ways of seeing the world⁽¹⁾. So while it might seem obvious to say that what you are exposed to in this course as a way of introducing WGS is different from what someone else at another institution is exposed to for the same purpose, this difference is worth considering as a more general principle about knowledge itself. That is, thinking about knowledge as having a specific context in which it is produced and transmitted allows us to ask critical questions about how and why some things become important to know whereas other things are treated as all but unnecessary to consider.

⁽¹⁾THINK ABOUT: Where is your university or college located? Are there courses or programs that seem specific to that location—about your particular province or state or region, for instance? What about programs that speak to particular issues or concerns—like international development or entrepreneurship? What are some of the newer programs and what are the ones that have been around for a long time? What seems to be missing altogether? This is a chance to take a look around your institution and see how it thinks about knowledge, what it identifies as important options for students and what it doesn’t, and to ask yourself if you have any concerns about these options.

These kinds of critical questions about knowledge are central to WGS. Thus, accounting for the specificity of knowledge contexts is also central to the task of this book and to how each of its major concepts is explored. A universal approach to knowledge would consider any bit of knowledge to be a “truth” no matter where it is located or who is making a knowledge claim. But if you are someone who moves between two or more locations, cultures, or perhaps even disciplines, you’ve probably learned that “the truth”—about what is most important, about the way the world works, about what success looks like, about who we are and why we’re here—is anything but the same in all the situations you move through. Also, you’ve probably realized that people rarely agree on what constitutes any “truth,” and that’s especially the case when it comes to issues of identity. If disciplines like WGS are interested in producing knowledge that addresses people’s lives, then it makes sense that they would seek to be contextually specific, both arising out of and reflecting the particularities of those places in which people find themselves. This book emphasizes the importance of this context and this specificity.

Knowledge and Invisibility

One of the ways to see this idea that all knowledge is situated—in other words, that it is reflective of the specific historical and contemporary contexts in which it was produced—is to consider how a discipline like WGS emerged as an academic field more than 40 years ago. The late 1960s was a time when a number of identity-based disciplines—Black Studies, Native Studies, Chicano or Latino Studies (especially in the United States)—were launched, in the wake of social movements to resist long-standing inequities and make visible both the presence and contributions of marginalized groups of peoples. Following this idea of identity-based resistance, the obvious case to be made for “Women’s Studies” (the most common name for this field, up until recently) was the need to talk about women, to offset their absence throughout academia and just about every other facet of society. Within institutions of higher education, women, as an identity group, were barely present as professors, researchers, scientists, medical doctors, legal scholars, psychiatrists, religious authorities, critics, writers—in other words, as knowledge producers—let alone acknowledged as interesting objects of study in almost any field. Indeed, the major critique that became the impetus for this field’s development was that the curricula across academia seemed to focus either exclusively on men, or, more troublingly, assumed men as the standard for every statement about humanity in general. And so, the early concern with the absence of women was (and still is in some contexts) a concern with both who is doing the studying and who is being studied. Thus, the call from early developers of this new knowledge project was to “add women” into existing fields, both as knowers and as that about which something more should be known. What quickly became apparent, though, especially to those women who didn’t see their own identities and experiences reflected in this new project, was that any move to privilege one identity category—in this case, gender—regarding who and what should be known invariably created tensions around other identity categories: for example, race or class or sexuality. In other words, questions quickly arose (and continue to arise) around which women are being added in—which women become the knowers and the known, which women are made visible and stand-in for those who were previously absented, and which women still remain unseen or barely mentioned⁽²⁾?

⁽²⁾KNOW ABOUT: “Add women and stir” is a phrase that represents an implicit critique of the notion that social change happens by adding a few token members of an identity group without investigating and addressing the reasons for their initial exclusion. While the “diversity” achieved through adding different bodies to any given institution or organization is an important step, it rarely changes what we will talk about here and in subsequent chapters as the “terms of inclusion.”

This question of visibility and invisibility is central to how WGS thinks about the systems of knowledge it both critiques and produces. Indeed, much work in WGS continues to concern itself with identifying the many ways in which certain invisible, taken-for-granted ideas exist around us and then challenging those ideas for how they perpetuate a range of social inequities. Think, for instance, about how easily something as ordinary as our language reveals assumptions about a number of activities or occupations. Terms such as nurse and male nurse or doctor and female doctor suggest that these professions (along with their discrepancies in authority, pay, and status) are more naturally the purview of one gender and must thus be identified as different—by making their descriptive adjective visible—when another gender occupies them⁽³⁾. Of course, these designations of difference are partly historical; female nurses and male doctors were for a long time characteristic of the strict gender divides in the medical professions. But the persistence of these invisible adjectives, even today, reveals something about commonly held expectations about gender and about who seems to be more suited to particular kinds of work. Even more important, these early practices of identifying invisible adjectives also raised questions about whether these occupations remained the same when their gendered associations shifted. In other words, did those professions—what they involve, how they are conceived, the social value they are accorded—change when gendered barriers were crossed? What else might have been altered in what was assumed to be the work of “nursing” or “doctoring” when men and women (respectively) entered those professions? Asking questions about visible and invisible assumptions (by identifying some of those invisible adjectives, for instance) quickly led to exploring how knowledge itself can change when the knowers change, because new knowers bring different perspectives, different histories, and different investments to the same situation.

⁽³⁾TALK ABOUT: Generate a list of other common terms and phrases where you see this idea of invisible adjectives at work. Don’t limit the discussion only to gender as an invisible adjective; think also of sexuality (i.e., marriage and same-sex marriage), race, disability, and any other identifier. How does spotting these invisible adjectives help you think more about what gets taken for granted as a norm, and what gets highlighted as different than that norm? Here’s another example: food and organic food.

To explore the consequences of this practice in the historical context of our own location (the university or college), let’s consider a course called “Canadian History” or “U.S. History,” a course that is commonly offered (and in many places is required), and compare it to a course on “African Canadian History” or “African American History” (typically not required, and perhaps not even offered). What is the difference between these courses? What does the descriptor in front of these courses suggest to us about what is invisible in the first title that is made explicit in the second? What quickly becomes clear is that the “Canadian” or “U.S.” history courses were always (and again, perhaps still are in some cases) preceded by any number of invisible adjectives—around race certainly, but probably also around gender, class, sexuality, and religion too—that just weren’t named. What identifying invisible adjectives does is make apparent that those more commonly offered history courses have tended to assume whiteness as their primary subject—that is, the adjective “white” was always there in front of those other history courses, but almost always remained unspoken as the default assumption about the content of the course. Typically, such courses are not consciously about whiteness as a racial marker; rather, whiteness is not mentioned so much as simply assumed as the default for who is important to know about from the past.

Furthermore, we can see how deeply embedded a universalizing approach to knowledge is when we consider that, for the most part, these courses largely focused on institutions such as governments, wars, business, trade, and maybe education and medicine. That these courses were implicitly talking about whiteness (as well as maleness) becomes evident, since activities in these contexts were almost always conducted by those with (white) race and (masculine) gender privilege. Thus, it was whiteness and masculinity—or what white men were doing—that became the norm for what counted as historically relevant, and, therefore, what was worthy of exploring in a college course on U.S. or Canadian history. And even this observation could be—and was—further complicated by persistently accounting for invisible adjectives of even more identity categories. For instance, it wasn’t just white men as a whole who were the default subjects of these histories, but a particular group of white men, who also embodied other dominant identities based on class, region, sexuality, citizenship status, religion, and ability. Noting these invisible adjectives renders categories of historical actors even more narrow and provokes still more questions: Where are the old men and the young boys, men of lower classes, gay or asexual men, men with disabilities (and any combination of these categories), who are also historical subjects from which we can learn something about our collective pasts?

What becomes apparent in this exercise of uncovering invisible adjectives is that attempts to make any group of previously invisible people visible involve more than just inserting marginalized groups into the universalizing histories of the past. And this realization has led us to think about knowledge differently, about what has counted as knowledge and where and how knowledge could be gleaned. So, for example, if the activities of marginalized groups—women, men of color, people with disabilities, children—were all but nonexistent in the histories of governments, wars, business, trade, education, and medicine, then researchers had to look elsewhere, to other kinds of activities, in other locations, to find these identity categories and their lived experiences. And looking elsewhere meant that completely new kinds of histories could come into view: histories of family and kinship structures, child care practices, food cultivation and preparation, consumer practices, the production of useable craft, housing design and use, adornment practices and cultures, and so much more. History, and historical thinking, became more expansive and more complex when both the subjects (the knowers) and objects (the known) of the past were no longer only a small minority of people and new knowledges could be generated by looking at other sites for other kinds of histories. And these new methods of seeking expansion and complexity by questioning invisible adjectives has become the goal of so much of the work in WGS and other identity-based fields.

Recognizing invisible adjectives, then, is central to the ways in which WGS produces and questions knowledge. WGS aims to make clear that knowledge, rather than merely reflecting some singular and universal truth, always reflects particular points of view, partial perspectives, and very specific ways of being in the world. As a result, becoming aware of what (and who) has been invisible means also becoming concerned with what (and who) is seen as neutral, universal, and dominant, and, by default, what (and ...