Approaches to Gender Studies

This chapter offers an overview of key debates within the field of gender studies research. Firstly, contemporary debates surrounding gender as either “nature” or “nurture” are contextualised via a brief explanation of the competing accounts of gender from essentialist and constructivist positions. Such positions respectively define gender either as “innate” biological expression or as constructed by society and social inequalities. Secondly, I offer a critique of universalist accounts of gender: accounts often written from dominant societal positions (generally white, heterosexual and middle-class), which ignore particularities and difference in terms of race, sexuality, dis/ability or others. In opposition to these universalist accounts, I outline the importance of lived experience as emphasised 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 we understand the material body: while poststructural accounts often emphasise language and culture, materialist (Marxist, postcolonial or feminist new materialist) accounts tend to foreground the ways in which systems, states and economic structures have shaped gender. I consider the ways in which the theoretical tug-of-war between essentialist and constructivist (often queer) understandings of gender has played out within the battleground of material bodies. Finally, I conclude by visiting accounts of gender from the borderlands, importantly from Gloria Anzaldúa a well as accounts of gendered borders from transgender perspectives. It is at these liminal points that gender is often most contested but also importantly revelatory; the inconsistencies and contradictions of the competing gender systems which meet in the borderland serving to demonstrate their constructed nature.