Threshold Concepts in Women's and Gender Studies

Ways of Seeing, Thinking, and Knowing

Christie Launius, Holly Hassel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000554854
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Threshold Concepts in Women's and Gender Studies: Ways of Seeing, Thinking, and Knowing is a textbook designed primarily for introduction to Women's and Gender Studies courses, with the intent of providing both a skill- and concept-based foundation in the field.

The third edition includes fully revised and expanded case studies and updated statistics; in addition, the content has been updated throughout to reflect significant news stories and cultural developments. The text is driven by a single key question: "What are the ways of thinking, seeing, and knowing that characterize Women's and Gender Studies and are valued by its practitioners?" This book illustrates four of the most critical concepts in Women's and Gender Studies—the social construction of gender, privilege and oppression, intersectionality, and feminist praxis—and grounds these concepts in multiple illustrations.

Threshold Concepts in Women's and Gender Studies develops the key concepts and ways of thinking that students need to develop a deep understanding and to approach material like feminist scholars do, across disciplines.

1 INTRODUCTION

DOI: 10.4324/9781003041986-1

Why “Ways of Seeing, Thinking, and Knowing?”

Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS) courses are a common feature on a large number of college and university campuses, with over 700 programs in the United States alone. Many students take an introductory WGS course as a part of their general education requirements, whereas others wind up in our classrooms as a result of word-of-mouth advertising from peers and roommates. A smaller number of students eagerly seek out WGS courses when they get to college after encountering WGS in their high school curriculum.

In their book Transforming Scholarship: Why Women’s and Gender Studies Students Are Changing Themselves and the World, Michele Tracy Berger and Cheryl Radeloff (2011) state that “students pursuing questions in women’s and gender studies are part of an emerging vanguard of knowledge producers in the US and globally” (5). This is to say, WGS is an exciting, vibrant, and growing field. This textbook aims to introduce you to the ways of seeing, thinking, and knowing that characterize the field and are valued by its practitioners. These ways of seeing, thinking, and knowing can then be used throughout your academic study, not just in WGS courses. More fundamentally, these ways of seeing, thinking, and knowing can be (and perhaps should be) taken out of the classroom and into the world. In fact, the bridging of the divide between academia and the so-called real world is a big part of what WGS is all about.

The image at the beginning of this chapter (see Figure 1.1) emphasizes this real-world engagement. The words and image of Malala Yousafzai, a young Pakistani woman, are highlighted because her struggle—to gain access to education for girls in a Pakistani area in which the Taliban prohibited it—illustrates how feminist ways of seeing, thinking, and knowing are actualized. The image invokes the historically significant “Rosie the Riveter” pose, an image that was used in the United States to recruit women workers to industrial jobs during World War II, and has subsequently come to be associated with women’s strength and empowerment. Muralist Anat Ronen’s depiction of Yousafzai in the pose shows the historical roots of feminist movement and how it continues to influence women’s activism for gender justice worldwide.

Figure 1.1 Artist Anat Ronen Blends Images and Words of Malala Yousafzai with Imagery of Rosie the Riveter.

Source: Anat Ronen.

Using This Book

As you approach this text, we want to direct your attention to the ways that we have organized it in order to provide an introduction to the ways of seeing, thinking, and knowing in WGS. Each chapter is structured in purposeful ways in order to introduce you to the definitions of the threshold concept and to offer grounding examples that will deepen your understanding:

• The opening illustration in each chapter invites you to consider how the concept is relevant to day-to-day life, either current events, popular culture, historical moments, or other spaces.
• We have indicated in each chapter how the concept suggests a “feminist stance,” or ways of looking at the world.
• Threshold concepts are defined, as are related or supporting concepts from research, theory, or scholarship that are critical to understanding the ideas in the chapter.
• Each chapter includes examples of “learning roadblocks,” or the kinds of barriers to fully understanding the threshold concept that students typically encounter. We’ve drawn from our many years of teaching introductory WGS courses as well as conversations with colleagues to identify these roadblocks and explain why they are common misconceptions, and how students can move past them.
• In order to illustrate in a fuller way how the threshold concept operates in interdisciplinary forms, each of the concepts is discussed through the lens of “anchoring topics,” or key ideas that will root the concept within three overlapping and related areas of inquiry within WGS: work and family; language, images, and symbols; and gendered bodies. As you engage with each of the chapters, you’ll develop not only a new understanding of the threshold concept in that chapter but an increasingly deepening sense of how each of the anchoring topics is “inflected” by the concepts.
• Each chapter contains a case study that, like the opening illustration, is intended to bring the threshold concept to life for readers and to help you see how it can be understood through specific cultural, historical, or other phenomena.
• Finally, at the end of the chapter, you’ll find exercises and other ways to test your understanding of the chapter material, to engage in conversation with classmates, to write about the topic, and to apply what you’ve learned to other contexts.

We hope that this organizational structure will create multiple ways of “trying on” feminist ways of seeing, thinking, and knowing in academic and nonacademic spaces.

Feminism, Stereotypes, and Misconceptions

First and foremost, in order to understand terms like “feminist stance” and the idea that there are feminist ways of seeing, thinking, and knowing, some definitions of feminism are in order. As a term, feminism has a history; according to Estelle Freedman (2002), it was “first coined in France in the 1880s as feminisme,” (3) and made its way to the United States by the first decade of the 20th century. It was not used widely in the United States until the 1960s, however. In No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women, Freedman (2002) offers a four-part definition of feminism:

Feminism is a belief that women and men are inherently of equal worth. Because most societies privilege men as a group, social movements are necessary to achieve equality between women and men, with the understanding that gender always intersects with other social hierarchies.

(7)

In Feminist Theory from Margin to Center, bell hooks (1984) offers a succinct definition of feminism as “the struggle to end sexist oppression” (26). She goes on to argue that understanding and defining feminism in this way “directs our attention to systems of domination and the inter-relatedness of sex, race, and class oppression” (31). She concludes, “[t]he foundation of future feminist struggle must be solidly based on a recognition of the need to eradicate the underlying cultural basis and causes of sexism and other forms of group oppression” (31). Given these definitions, a feminist, then, is quite simply someone who advocates feminism. Each of the four threshold concepts that this book is structured around is implicit, if not explicit, in both Freedman’s (2002) and hooks’s (2020) definitions: the social construction of gender, the concepts of privilege and oppression, intersectionality, and praxis.

Advocating feminism or being a feminist can take many forms; in this book we emphasize the idea of taking a so-called feminist stance, which is to say, adopting a feminist perspective or way of looking at the world. As Crawley and colleagues (2008) assert,

Although feminism is, in substance, always attentive to power differences that create inequalities, particularly those that create differential opportunities for women and men (but also those that create racial and ethnic, class-based, or sexuality-based inequalities), feminism is also an epistemological shift away from a history of androcentric bias in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. As such, it is not just an “area study” (again, not just about “women”) but something much deeper: a way of orienting to academic work that is attuned to power relations, both within the academy and within knowledge construction itself.

(2)

We will discuss this in more detail in the section on the history of WGS as an academic field.

It also seems important to address here at the outset any lingering misconceptions about feminism and feminists. Many stereotypes and misconceptions about feminism, feminists, and the field of WGS circulate in our culture. These stereotypes and misconceptions pop up not only in the right-wing blogosphere and so-called lad mags like Maxim, but also in magazines like Time and Newsweek, in Hollywood movies and television shows, and in everyday conversations. Most students taking this course have probably heard quite a few of them. If you’re curious about whether your friends, family, coworkers, and others believe those stereotypes and misconceptions, try this exercise: make an announcement on the social media platform of your choice that you’re taking this class, and see what sorts of responses are made and what sorts of conversations develop. Chances are, people will supply some of the following (and maybe come up with different ones as well):

• Feminism is dead. This misconception is invoked as a way to try to derail or shut down a discussion of gender inequality, a way to dismiss someone’s critique by saying that we no longer need feminism because equality has already been achieved. The most charitable read on this stereotype is that people look at the real gains made by feminism and mistakenly assume that the need for feminism has passed. In this scenario, the person claiming that equality has already been achieved is likely experiencing the world from a position of relative privilege. The misconception doesn’t just get perpetuated on an individual level, however; it is a frequent headline in the news media. In response to Time’s cover story in 1998 declaring feminism dead, feminist writer Erica Jong (1998) noted that “there have been no less than 119 articles in the magazine sticking pins in feminism during the last 25 years.” All of this raises the question, as Jessica Valenti (2007) puts it, “if feminism is dead, then why do people have to keep on trying to kill it?” (11).
• Feminists are ugly, hairy, braless, don’t wear makeup, etc. Emphasis on the ugly. A feature called “Cure a Feminist,” which appeared in the November 2003 issue of Maxim, does a good job of illustrating this stereotype.¹ It features four images of the same woman wearing different clothing and displaying different body language that purport to show the transformation from feminist to “actual girl.” The “feminist” is wearing baggy jeans and a so-called wifebeater tank top with no bra. Her hair is messy, and her arm is raised to reveal a hairy armpit. She also has a cigarette dangling from her mouth, and she is standing with legs apart, with one hand hooked into the pocket of her jeans. By the end of her transformation, she is wearing nothing but a lacy bra and panties with high heels, standing with one hip jutted out and her hand tugging her underwear down. Her hair is styled, and she is wearing makeup. The intent of this stereotype is fairly simplistic and transparent but, nonetheless, hard to shake. As Jessica Valenti (2007) puts it, “[t]he easiest way to keep women—especially young women—away from feminism is to threaten them with the ugly stick. It’s also the easiest way to dismiss someone and her opinions” (8–9).
• Feminists hate men. The Maxim piece hits this stereotype, too. The implication here is that feminism is a hate-filled vendetta against individual men. The thought bubble coming out of the so-called feminist’s mouth says, “There’d be no more wars if all penises were cut off! Argh!” This misconception is a strategy to dismiss and mischaracterize feminism and feminists, by individualizing feminist concerns and seeing feminism as a battle of the sexes, rather than a structural analysis of systems of privilege and inequality. A more accurate characterization recognizes that feminism is interested in critiquing and combating sexism and patriarchy, not hating or bashing individual men.
• Only women can be feminists. It is clear, in the Maxim feature and elsewhere, that the default assumption is that only women would want to be feminists, given that feminists hate men, and that only women stand to gain from feminism. This view is increasingly being challenged, not only because a growing number of men are committed to being strong feminist allies to the women in their lives but also because men increasingly see the ways in which they are harmed by adhering to traditional masculine...