Approaches to Gender Studies

This chapter covers key debates within gender studies research. Firstly, contemporary debates surrounding gender as either “nature” or “nurture” are contextualized via a brief explanation of the competing accounts of gender from essentialist and constructivist positions. Secondly, universalist accounts of gender are critiqued: often written from dominant societal positions, they ignore particularities and difference in terms of race, sexuality, dis/ability or others. The chapter outlines the importance of lived experience as emphasized by standpoint epistemology emerging from Black feminism, interventions from disability studies and intersectional approaches to gender. A further contestation within gender studies relates to how the material body is understood: poststructural accounts often emphasize language and culture, and materialist (Marxist, postcolonial or feminist new materialist) accounts tend to foreground how systems, states and economic structures have shaped gender. The chapter considers how the theoretical tug-of-war between essentialist and constructivist (often queer) understandings of gender has played out within the battleground of material bodies. It concludes by visiting accounts of gender from the borderlands, from Gloria Anzaldúa and from transgender perspectives. It is at these liminal points that the inconsistencies and contradictions of the competing gender systems which meet in the borderlands serve to demonstrate their constructedness.