I.

Introduction
II. Basic Comparison
III. Context and Emergence of Women Studies
a. Early sociology and women activism
b. First Women Studies
c. Early challenges to Women Studies
d. Gradual decline of Women Studies
IV. Emergence of Gender Studies
a. Posterity of Women Studies
b. Gender Studies and Men’s Studies
c. Gender Studies and Queer Studies
V. WS and GS Contribution to different development practices
VI. GS’ critique of WS
VII. WS’ critique of GS
VIII. Joint Contribution
IX. Status of WS/GS in Pakistan
X. Scope and Significance w.r.t Pakistan

1. INTRODUCTION
 Women’s Studies was the study of the particular issues about women.
o It concerned itself with the problems and struggles women used to
face.
 Gender Studies on the other hand studies the relationship between both
men and women, and also their relationships with their societies as a
whole.
o How they are conceived and shaped, how they presume their
identity and their roles within those identities.
2. BASIC COMPARISON

Women Studies Gender Studies

It is an academic field that draws on Gender Studies is a field of

feminist and interdisciplinary interdisciplinary study devoted to
methods in order to place women’s analysing gender identity and
lives and experiences at the centre gender representation.
of study, while examining social and
cultural systems, and systems of
privilege and oppression in society.

It is the parent discipline of Gender This field includes women’s studies

Studies (concerning women, feminism,
gender, and politics), men’s studies
and queer studies.

It led to WID and WAD approaches It led to GAD approaches

3. CONTEXT AND EMERGENCE OF WOMEN STUDIES
 Women’s studies as an academic enterprise had its roots in 2nd wave
feminism and originated as a challenge to male-defined and male-
dominated areas of knowledge.
 Studies of sociology now take it for granted that gender is critical to
sociological analysis. This was not always so.

3.1: Early Sociology and Women Activism

 The sociology that was taught in undergraduate in the late 1960s and the
early 1970s was the sociology of men as if they represented the whole
of society, and primarily white western men.
 Women featured only briefly, in lectures on family and kinship.
 This was not a problem peculiar to sociology; women in other disciplines
were facing similar biases in relation to what counted as knowledge.
 Some activists inspired by feminist ideas, began to complain and then to
act.
 By the middle of 1970s, feminists began to organize across disciplines as
well as within them.
 Young feminist academics and graduate students met to discuss the
possibility of launching women’s studies as a new ‘women-cantered
way of knowing’ that would challenge the prevailing androcentric (male-
centric) view of society and culture prevalent in the humanities and social
sciences. (science subjects weren’t even having the debate at that stage).

3.2 First Women Studies

 Women’s studies understanding of itself as the educational arm of the

women’s movement signified engagement with the politics of
knowledge that explicitly connected teaching and research to social and
political change.
 In short, Women’s studies offered feminist politics an institutional
location.
 BY the end of 1960s, the teaching of “Women Studies” had started in
some universities of America. Less than 20 women’s studies courses
existed in America at that time.
 The teaching was institutionally anchored in new type of the so-called
Women’s Study Centers.
 This model inspired other countries to start such centers.
 In 1970s, the first Women’s studies program was approved at San Diego
State University.
  The first women’s studies courses, at postgraduate level were set up in
the early 1980s, initially at Kent and Bradford, and then York, followed by
many others.
 Throughout the 1980s both undergraduate and postgraduate women’s
studies courses opened up in the universities and polytechnics across the
UK and by the end of the decade they had their own network of women’s
studies centers, the Women’s Studies Network (later to be renamed
the Feminist and Women’s Studies Association).
 By 1998, there were more PhD programmes in America and Canda.
 Today Women’s studies is taught in more than 700 colleges and
universities including those of Pakistan.

3.3 Early Challenges to Women Studies

 In many ways the 1980s were an inauspicious time for new academic
initiatives.
 It was the Thatcher era, with its cuts in central government funding of
Higher Education, leading to a lack of academic jobs and thus little
opportunity for job mobility.
 Yet among those who had been recruited into academia before the job
slump took hold, there was a critical mass of committed young feminists
willing to put considerable effort into developing women’s studies.

3.4 Gradual decline of Women Studies

 At the same time cuts in the funding of students, the decline in student
grants and their replacement by loans meant many less advantaged
women could no longer contemplate a degree course without the offer of
“safer” subjects.
 As student numbers declined in the 1990s and early 2000s, many degree
programs shut down.
 While there were a few new ones at postgraduate level (usually badged as
Gender Studies), free standing undergraduate degrees gradually
disappeared, although a few universities still offer women’s or gender
studies routes through other degree programs.
 Postgraduate courses have, however, proved more durable.
4. EMERGENCE OF GENDER STUDIES: POSTERIORITY OF WOMEN
STUDIES
 Gender Studies grew out of the established women’s studies presence in
academia in the mid-eighties.
 This was a contested development.
 Hardline feminists who worked to get women’s studies into the academy
saw the emergence of gender studies as an appropriation of feminist
study in the academia by those of newer generations and “women’s
studies” and “gender studies” are the same, if not solely latter’s
umbrella.
  Gender studies seeks to describe the field of study to which
gender and gender relations are central, rather than “women’s
studies, which reflect an historical, chronological shift as well as
intellectual connections and the growth of empirical research in the field.
 The change to gender studies suggests that the field needs to be paying
attention to the relationships between men and women rather than
focusing predominantly on women’s experiences and knowledge itself.
4.1. Historical Context of Gender Studies
 Although gender studies are relatively recent in the academy, most work
in the area builds upon the growth of the women's movement as part of
the identity politics of the 1970s and 1980s and the development
of Women's Studies Centers in North American, Australian, and
European Countries.
 All these centers were characterized by emancipatory aspirations that
sought to provide robust empirical evidence and scholarly bases for
political change, in particular by putting gender, and in the 1970s and
1980s, more specifically women onto the political agenda and into
discourse.
 Feminist studies, especially feminist theories, remain central to the field.
although gender studies, like women's studies, are marked by a wider
range of voices and issues, acknowledging how different forms of
inequality intersect with gender.
 The shift towards gender studies also reflects a widening intellectual
base, including:
o Psychological as well as Psychoanalytical theories,
o Poststructuralist,
o Postcolonial studies,
o Critical studies of Masculinity,
o Queer Studies and LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer).
o Critical Race,
o Critiques of whiteness,
o Ecological feminism and Materialist feminism
o Technoscience studies.
4.2. Gender Studies And Men's Studies:
 The last three decades have witnessed an increasing trend in the study of
men and masculinities as an adjunct to and complement to feminism,
Women's studies, and gender studies.
 Men's studies is an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to
topics concerning men, masculinity, gender, and politics.
 It often includes men's movement, men's history and social history, men's
fiction, men's health, feminist psychoanalysis and the masculinist and
gender studies-oriented practice of the humanities and social sciences.
  Then it became established as specialized areas of academic inquiry,
broader theoretical developments began to undermine their very
rationale.
 In postmodernist and post-structuralism approaches, the very idea of
‘women’ and ‘men’ as discrete and unitary categories is challenged
4.3. Gender Studies And Queer Studies:
 Queer Studies, or LGBTQ studies is the study of issues relating to sexual
orientation and gender identity usually focusing on
o Lesbian
o Gay,
o Bisexual,
o Transgender,
o Gender dysphoria,
o Asexual,
o Queer,
o Questioning,
o Intersex people, and
o Queer cultures.
5. WS AND GS: CONTRIBUTION TO DEVELOPMENT PRACTICES:

Women Studies Gender Studies

Gender Studies Gave way to WID Gave way to GAD approach.
and WAD approaches.
Write briefly about these from the
lectures on WID and WAD.

6. GS’ CRITIQUE OF WS:

 The pragmatic reason for this shift (from Women to Gender Studies) is
that it is seen as less feminist, more respectable and less threatening
than women’s studies.
o While the term “gender” was initially used by feminists to establish
the social (as opposed to natural) basis of hierarchy and division
between men and women, this meaning has largely been lost in its
incorporation into everyday language.
o “Gender”, therefore has come to seem a safe and neutral term.
 Another objection to “women’s studies” is the problem with “women” as
a category.
o It has been recognized, since the heyday of women’s studies, that
“women” is not a unitary category.
 The premise of Gender Studies is that to fully grasp the experience of
women, the experience of men (and now all genders) must be examined
to reveal power and relations that lead to oppression.
o How can you understand oppression without knowing anything
about the oppressor?
  Gender Studies is also seen as more inclusive than “women’s studies”.
o Gender, in academic terms, reflects a broad concept that goes
beyond “women’s studies.”
o It includes all kinds of genders, which has been the principle of
feminist inclusiveness.
 Feminists think that Women’s Studies was a compromise itself as a
name, more innocuous than say Feminist Studies.
o Somehow it seems less threatening to say we all were studying
women, without specifying that one is studying women from a
feminist perspective.
o There are feminist scholars who think that Gender Studies was more
radical since it held men accountable for their privilege and made
them responsible for change along with women.
 Gender Studies comes about because there is plenty of social behavior
to be analyzed in terms of gender (especially from a feminist
perspective) that is not specifically about women.
7. WS’ critique of GS
 The use of the term Gender fails to focus on subordination of
women as a result of women’s oppression and exploitation, injustice
and structural patriarchal violence.
o According to them, GS is responsible for depoliticizing of feminist
scholarship.
o To them, even using Gender as a category to study men,
women's perspectives, actions, and concerns can be omitted and
the idea that men are the central actors in human societies and
women the passive receptors of their actions is reinforced. Dr.
Sharmila Rege, 2003
 Old guards in women's studies consider Gender Studies was a
retreat from the more radical women's studies.
o There are feminist scholars who think that Gender Studies was
more radical since it held men accountable for their privilege and
made them responsible for change along with women.
o But, at the same time, they would be opposed to the word
feminist.
 Many male faculties have no problem with gender studies
program because "it is not feminist."
 In GS, women as an oppressed group that we can research and the
study disappears.
o All we have in gender studies becomes different groups or
cultures within cultures within a mainstream culture.
o Women's studies exist to study women.
 While, GS accommodates men.
o WS argues that until they have equal inter-disciplinary
research that is truly gender-free, they must study women
 and not gender, so that they can catch up intellectually,
theoretically and, of course, politically

8. JOINT CONTRIBUTION OF WS AND GS

 The traditional curriculum teaches us all to see the world through the
eyes of privileged, white, European males and to adopt their interests and
perspectives as our own.
o It takes books by middle-class, white male writers "literature" and
honors them as timeless and universal, while treating the literature
produced by everyone else as something less.
o The traditional curriculum introduces the (mythical) white, middle-
class, patriarchal, heterosexual family and its values and calls it
"Introduction to Psychology,"
o It teaches the white men of property and position and calls it
"Introduction to Ethics."
o It teaches the majority of people in this society to "women and
minorities" and calls it "political science."
o It teaches art produced by privileged white men in the West and
calls it "Art history" (Patel, 2013).
a. Liberal Feminists:
i. Feminists who focus on the constitutional guarantees of equal
treatment of men and women are known as liberal feminists.
b. Marxist Feminists:
i. Feminists who view women's subordination in class contradictions
are known as Marxist Feminists.
c. Radical Feminists:
i. They consider patriarchy as the main culprit for women's woes.
d. Socialist Feminists:
i. They believe that women’s predicaments are determined by the
complex interplay of class, caste, race, religion, ethnicity with
patriarchy.
ii. Hence, the need for deconstructing patriarchy in a different socio-
cultural, geopolitical and historical context.
e. Psychoanalytical Feminists:
i. Focus on individual journeys of women to arrive at mental makeup
and internalization of values by the people concerned.
ii. They critique Freud for its misogyny but also acknowledge Freud’s
analysis of childhood experiences playing important role in the rest
of the life.
f. Postmodern Feminists:
i. Contest hegemony of Meta theories and dominant discourses and
bring to the fore the voice of the subjugated, oppressed and
marginalized.
ii. They emphasize “decentering” from the mainstream.
 g. Eco-feminists:
i. They believe that women’s role in the subsistence economy is
crucial for the survival of humankind.
ii. Women have symbiotic relationship with mother-nature.
iii. Male dominated development models are violent towards mother
earth and women.
h. Black Feminists:
i. Race is the central reality for the black feminists though they also
challenge the patriarchal/male domination.
i. Womanist:
i. Womanism is a contribution of Afro-American feminists who believe
that in spite of barbaric experiences of slavery, subjugation and
horror the black culture/celebrations have survived due to women’s
resilience.
ii. There is a need to promote these celebrations/cultural legacies
through heritage of oral histories, legend, grandmothers’ stories.
iii. They believe that the non-white and colored women must be proud
of history, instead of aping the white, consumerist, oppressive male
culture.
9. Status of WS/ GS in Pakistan:
i. Since the late 1980s, Women and Gender Studies programs have
been established at higher education institutions across Pakistan;
today, with curricular standards of women’s studies formalized by
the HEC, just under fifteen universities, offer BS, Masters, PhD,
and distance courses.
1. Indicative of its spread, Gender Studies is now a topic on the
Central Superior Services examination. (Dr. Kamal Ahmed
Munir, Former Dean, School of Humanities and Social
Sciences, LUMS)
ii. Women Studies curriculum for Higher Education was approved by
HEC in 2012.
1. The program title and the curriculum were later revised and
changed to Gender Studies in 2017.
iii. Other academic initiatives:
1. Pakistan Journal of Women’s Studies: Alam-e-Niswan by
Center of Excellence for Women Studies (university of
Karachi.)
2. Saida Waheed Gender Initiative (LUMS)