Pilcher, 50 Key Concepts in Gender Studies
The first national women’s studies conference in the UK took place in 1976.
Firmly interdisciplinary in perspective, women’s studies initially resided mainly (if
uneasily) within the disciplines of English, history and sociology, and was dependent
upon the energies of sometimes isolated individuals working within a generally male-
oriented curriculum.
Women’s studies could become a contestation of knowledges under patriarchy and
allow a revaluation of knowledge, art and experience that had formed the basis of
women’s lives. Broadly speaking it is still centred around the social sciences, arts
and humanities rather than the physical sciences and related disciplines such as
engineering and medicine.
Even though the ‘women’s studies’ identity suggests a degree of empowerment for
feminist knowledge, it is always pulled in two directions – as a critique that
transforms existing disciplines and as a specialist, even separatist, area of academic
concern.
In the 1980s a body of knowledge and theorising around men as ‘men’.
Consequently, books (both popular and academic) on men and masculinity
proliferated in the 1990s, to the extent that ‘men’s studies’ is now recognised as a
specialist area of academic focus.
In postmodernist and post-structuralist approaches, the very idea of ‘women’ and
‘men’ as discrete and unitary categories is challenged.
Understandings of gender have developed as a complex, multi-faceted and multi-
disciplinary area, involving the study of relationships within as well as between
genders, the term ‘gender studies’ has gained currency, albeit not uncontested.
Some feel that women’s studies has lost its confidence and sense of direction and
that ‘gender studies’ is a dilution – a sign that feminist knowledge has been tamed
and reconstituted by the academy.
Women’s studies has had to accept that a Monolithical model of ‘woman’ can
exclude and affirm inequality, and gender studies is one way of addressing this
concern.
First, the study of gender remains resolutely multi- and inter-disciplinary and that is
its key strength, and has had the most profound impact on contemporary theory and
attitudes to the production of knowledge. Second, alongside the more focused, if
varied, constellation of texts, knowledge and theorising on and about gender that
constitutes gender studies, gender issues continue to penetrate mainstream
disciplines more widely (though not always with ease) and are enthusiastically
embraced by students. Third, feminism remains a central perspective for the study of
gender relations, reminding us that this discipline emerged from the identification that
women as a group were misrepresented – in both the public sphere and in the
conception of their ‘real’ natures.
ANDOCENTRISM
Androcentrism literally means a doctrine of male-centredness. Some writers, particularly those
influenced by psychoanalytical theory, prefer the terms phallocentrism or phallocentric, in order to
draw attention to the way the penis (or phallus) acts as the symbolic representation of male-
centredness. A related concept is that of phallogocentrism. Deriving from the work of Derrida and
Lacan, this term describes those ideas centred around language or words (logos) that are masculine
in style.
BACKLASH
Backlash literally means the jarring of a wheel, or other part of machinery, which is not properly in
alignment. In feminist parlance it has become used to describe a fierce rejection of an ideology by
forcefully reiterated counter-arguments. In the case of second-wave feminism, backlash
commentators often used the language of feminism itself to turn against its own principles.
