What it means to be male or female varies with time and place.

This variety is patterned, and tied up with

the dynamics of power, with the distribution of resources and with cultural representations in a society’s
gender order. Gender studies is an interdisciplinary intellectual project that seeks to understand patterned
gender differences in social life, and how these differences shape human relationships and human
experience at the individual level. This unit is an introduction to this project. We consider how gender has
been theorised and researched, and explore how questions of gender are framed and investigated in a
range of disciplines across the social sciences and humanities. Topics may include work, sexuality, war,
media, literature, abortion, beauty and more. The unit can be taken as a one-off elective in any degree, or
in pursuit of a major or minor in Gender Studies.

What it means to be identified as male, female, or other on the gender spectrum varies with time and
place. Meanings of gender and challenges to them are tied up with the dynamics of power, with dreams of
freedom, with the distribution of resources, and with cultural representations in a society's gender order.
This unit is an introduction to Gender Studies, an interdisciplinary field that seeks to understand gendered
meanings and differences, to recognize how these interlock with sexuality, race, class, disability, and
other identities, and to analyse how such intersecting identities shape human experience at the social and
individual level. We establish foundational knowledge of and key concepts in how gender has been
theorised and researched over time, particularly since the late 1960s, and explore the interactions
between grassroots gender liberation movements and scholarship in disciplines across the social
sciences and humanities. The unit can be taken as a one-off elective in any degree, or in pursuit of a
major or minor in Gender Studies.

Abstract
In this article we consider the example of gender studies as an interdisciplinary field, and argue
that gender studies, and women’s studies, from which gender studies developed, has a distinctive
engagement with interdisciplinarity. By thinking about the trajectory of women’s studies,
feminist thinking and gender studies, we suggest that this has always been an interdisciplinary
field of study. We trace both the shifts and continuities in thinking between different iterations of
feminist thinking to consider the three core fields of: gender, sex and sexuality; intersectionality
and activism; theory and methods. The article aims to open up debate over what the constructive
possibilities are of a focus upon gender, and what the relationship is between theory and
activism. This article is published as part of an ongoing collection dedicated to interdisciplinary
research.

Introduction
Gender studies form part of a significant shift into interdisciplinarity in academic fields more
widely, which is reflected in the issue-based calls of funding bodies, special editions of journals
and the growth of interdisciplinary research fields. Gender studies are an integral part of this
interdisciplinary movement that offers theoretical and methodological advantages in
understanding multiply constituted social worlds and addressing pressing global problems, such
as the dynamics of migration, uneven global power geometries and climate change. Not only are
most of the big issues in the contemporary world underpinned by social divisions including those
based on sex and gender, but also the issues addressed by sexual politics are often a key motor of
activism and change. Gender studies are distinctive in their engagement with interdisciplinarity,
which have developed though a synergy between thought and activism. This field of research
and study draws upon the tradition of women’s studies and feminist theories and activism, rather
than being merely part of recent trends and fashions, in a shift to interdisciplinary theory, which
goes beyond multi- or trans-disciplinary approaches. Gender studies have grown out of the need
to address some of the big issues in everyday life as well as on the global arena of international
politics in which cultural, economic, political and social inequalities are played out (Woodward,
2014). Gender awareness has become integral to disciplinary fields as diverse as history,
literature, science, sociology and economics, as well as emerging as a field of studies, which
goes much further than the mainstreaming of gender. Sexual politics and gender studies have
more recently engaged with some of the dilemmas, which have been presented by diversity
policies, for example, European Union equality policies, which might be seen to have gone
beyond gender or in which gender has been marginalized (Agustin, 2013).

Women’s studies, feminist studies and gender studies

It is increasingly more usual to describe the field of study to which gender and gender relations
are central as “gender studies” rather than “women’s studies”, which reflects an historical,
chronological shift as well as intellectual connections and the growth of empirical research in the
field. Although gender studies are relatively recent in the academy, most work in this area builds
upon the growth of the women’s movement as part of the identity politics of the 1970s and 1980s
(Woodward, 1997) and the development of Women’s Studies Centres in North American,
Australian and European countries. All these centres 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 diverse, and sometimes overlapping intellectual
traditions and movements, which also manifest changing times, not least in the shift from the
liberal, Marxist, socialist and radical strands of the women’s movement to the wider inclusion of
black feminism, ethnicization, racialization, and issues of bodies and corporeality, disability,
sexuality, class defined and geographically located inequalities.

The shift towards gender studies also reflects a widening intellectual base, including
psychosocial as well as psychoanalytical theories, poststructuralist, postcolonial studies, critical
studies of masculinity, queer studies and LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer) critical
race, critiques of whiteness, ecological feminism and materialist feminism and technoscience
studies. It is a broad church, but it is also a field that is hotly contested.

The move towards gender studies in the 1990s and into the twenty-first century has not been
welcomed by everyone who works on gender issues. For example, Braidotti (1994) pointed to
the way in which gender studies could be seen as taking over women’s studies and feminist
achievements and de-radicalizing the women’s movement by suggesting a postfeminist world
where men’s studies and masculinity were more important areas of research. Gender studies do
offer recognition of the importance of critiques of masculinity but the extent to which, for
example, gay studies and a male-dominated agenda has replaced feminist activism and a motor
for progress remains central to the debate. Gender studies have, however, put masculinity up for
debate and critique, and demonstrate that men as well as women are gendered. Nonetheless the
move towards gender studies, especially through its associations with postmodernist,
poststructuralist and some psychoanalytic approaches can be seen as having involved a retreat
from politics and activism. The shifts in the transmission from women’s studies to gender studies
also reflect changes in the ways in which issues of gender and sexuality have been woven into
interdisciplinary studies. There remains a tension between “mainstreaming” and the suggestion
that battles have been won in relation to gender equality and the expansion of gender studies as
an important interdisciplinary field of research. A consequence of this “mainstreaming” and
assumption that many feminist battles have been won can be seen in the language used to
describe fields of social inequalities and policies are de-gendered. For example, in the seemingly
gender-neutral discourses of policy that refer to parents and parental leave rather than
acknowledging the specificities of maternity and its embodied actualities. Similarly, in the
context of health and well-being, there is a trend towards neutralizing gender difference through
the use of generational categories such as teenagers or children. For example, eating disorders
are perceived as a teenage problem, without regard to the gender differences in relation to
differential experiences of adolescence. Gender studies need to acknowledge and address the
material and enfleshed differences as well as equality.

Women’s studies always aimed at crossing disciplinary boundaries and challenging subject
compartmentalization, which, it has been argued, needs to be dismantled and broken down to
both study and undertake research and combat oppression (Klein, 1995). Crossing the boundaries
and thinking creatively about disciplinary intersections has been expanded to generate different
ways of explaining and of acting upon the social relations, differences and inequalities, which
include sex, gender and sexuality. Some research centres focus upon gender and sexuality, such
as Birkbeck in London, or politics of gender, such as the London School of Economics, whereas
others emphasize more gender studies as part of interdisciplinarity, for example, in the United
States at centres such as the University of California, Berkeley and New York State.
Interdisciplinary gender studies constitute a broad church (Richardson and Robinson, 2015).

In this article we consider this interdisciplinary focus across three dimensions, which are at the
heart of the project of gender studies: the relationship between sex, gender and bodies, including
how sexuality is implicated in these debates, the intersection of different structures and forces of
inequality and finally the relationship between activism, theory and methods.

Sex, gender and sexuality

Gender studies have as their foundation an engagement with the sexed body and with the
interrelationship between sex and gender, which at times are inextricably entangled. Gender has
become the preferred term for referring to social difference, partly because of its wider scope and
remit than sex, which has been assumed to be biological and anatomical and to challenge the
apparent limitations of biological reductionism (Moi, 1999). However, there is a case for the
inclusion of sex and gender as part of the explanatory framework of sexual politics. Gender
studies have taken over from women’s studies in the academy for a number of reasons, not all of
them liberatory. Women’s studies and feminism not only put gender into the agenda but also
offered new ways of understanding gender as a social, cultural and political process and structure
through which societies are organized. Although many earlier accounts suggested a division
between sex as anatomical and biological and gender as the social and cultural manifestations of
sex, there are strong arguments for sex as shaped by cultural forces and made through social
practices. One of Butler’s major contributions to gender studies and to the study of social
relations and the operation of power across disciplines is her critique of sex and sexuality as well
as gender as performative. Sex, as much as gender, is produced by the processes and practices
through which it is defined and classified. Butler’s (1990,1993) work has generated questions
and debates about the materiality of sex, the fluidity and the transgressive properties of sex,
gender and sexuality. Debates within gender studies about the nature of sex and gender invoke
the need for interdisciplinary approaches as well as drawing upon a range of disciplines and
theoretical frameworks.

Gender studies have incorporated studies of masculinity (Connell, [1995] 2005, 2014) and
interdisciplinary approaches have stressed the possibilities of transformation of traditional
stereotypical masculinities (Hooks, 2004). Gender is not just about women, as has so often been
the case in the promotion of policies of equal opportunities in neo-liberal democracies in recent
times. Men are gendered too and the interrogation of hegemonic masculinity raises challenges to
power structures in a vast range of social, economic, cultural and political systems where
traditional, seemingly gender neutral norms are called into question. However, challenges to an
essentialized category of ‘woman’ have led to a marginalization, and even absence, of some of
the critiques of structural oppression such as patriarchy, which was a key concept in second-
wave feminist critiques of the operation of power at all levels.

Gender is both an empirical category and a theoretical conceptualization, which facilitates

greater understanding of social relations and divisions as well as describing them. Sport is an
example of a field that is underpinned by a binary logic of sex, in which traditional masculinity
has been particularly valued: often literally, financially more highly rewarded and valued.
Gender binaries have been challenged in the public space occupied by elite athletes and the
governing bodies of sport, like the International Olympic Committee and at more local levels of
routine sporting practices. For example, debates about gender verification testing in sport
demonstrate well some of the interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary capacities of gender studies
that have been invoked in the ever more desperate attempts by sporting bodies to provide a
scientific classification of sex (Woodward, 2012). Testing currently involves a range of ever
more complex, trans and interdisciplinary tests in pursuit of some kind of stability and draw upon
a mix of disciplines that include medical science, genetics, psychology, anthropology, cultural
geography and sociology.

The example of sport highlights the ways in which how sex and gender are understood,
categorized and lived is always in relationship to bodies. Interdisciplinary thinking has been
generated within gender studies by the pressing need to move beyond some of the limitations of
biological reductionism and essentialism and the suggestion that the social practices and cultural
systems of gender derive directly from the anatomical, biological and genetic inheritances of sex.
Interdisciplinary approaches also need to be necessitated through the exploration of some of the
interrelationships between biology, genetics, bodies and social systems. Gender studies have
been most creative and productive in embracing mathematics, science, psychology and
technology to understand how sex and science and technology are enmeshed, for example,
in Harraway’s (1997) work on technoscience and Franklin’s (2013) research on genetics.

Intersecting structures of oppression

Gender studies demand an understanding of power relations and thus of politics within and
beyond government, as well as of the social, economic and cultural processes that are the subject
of arts, humanities and social science disciplines. The structures of oppression and the processes
through which economic, social and cultural forces intersect in different contexts, both actual
and virtual and within systems of governance. The processes of racialization and ethnicization
and class-based divisions intersect and gender studies highlights the need to make sense of these
processes and particularly to why it is necessary to understand them together, rather than as
separate, discrete forces. Feminism engages with pressing social inequalities, which endure, even
if they demonstrate and are underpinned by temporal and spatial particularities. Contemporary
international societies remain marked by gendered inequalities (UN Women Reports, 2015) and
the focus of gender studies upon power relations makes this interdisciplinary field of enquiry
even more significant in the twenty-first century. Far from living in a postfeminist world,
empirical evidence suggests that inequalities persist, and that we need the feminist and gender
studies tradition of engaging with empirical, quantitative evidence. As Connell (2009) argues,
there is substantial statistical evidence of gender inequalities, including most pervasively, the
exploitation and oppression of women worldwide. However, big data demands analysis as well
as description. Gender has been put into the discourse of the classificatory systems of data
collection in different ways but United Nation’s evidence, especially following the Beijing
Conference on Women in 1995 and the 2010 UN decision to prioritize gender issues (UN
Reports, 2015; UN women, 2015) and to eliminate violence against women (UN Violence
Against Women, 2015), raised important questions about the collection of data as well as their
interpretation. When gender is on the agenda, the collection of evidence raises questions about
the interconnections between public and private spheres, which has long been a concern of
feminist critiques. Gendered inequalities operate in the apparently private arena of the home
(Violence Against Women, 2015), but it is only through an interdisciplinary approach, which
brings different critiques and diverse analyses that the interrelationship between the personal and
the political can be understood and, most importantly addressed.

Another significant aspect of the analyses of big data on international social, economic and
political divisions and inequalities relates to the relationship between disciplines. Feminist
critiques have developed possibilities for theorizing intersection of different power axes (Hill
Collins, 1990) that have been adopted by gender studies more widely to explain complex
processes through which different groups of people become disenfranchised and resist
oppression. Activism and resistance demonstrate diverse connections and disconnections, for
example, between classes, sexes and ethnic groups. The shift towards intersectionality presents
opportunities for overcoming some of the perceived limitations of focusing upon gender but also
offers challenges. Contemporary activism, for example, as expressed on social media and other
Internet forums demonstrates the contentious nature of debate in relation to priorities about the
power axes that intersect to generate social divisions. How important is gender in these
intersections? We argue that gender, although changing, remains a key determinant of inequality
in contemporary global politics.
Activism, theory and methods
Gender studies have emerged from the activism that has long characterized women’s studies and
associated feminist politics and gender studies in part grew out of the identity politics of the
1980s and 1990s. Theory and practice are widely enmeshed in sexual politics more broadly in
gender studies: acting and explaining are part of the same project. Feminism does not just seek to
explain social inequalities but also to campaign to redress these gendered inequalities. Activism
includes struggles aimed at legislative change, in which different aspects of inequality intersect,
for example, as expressed in the UK 2010 Equality Act, which encompasses an ever expanding
range of sexualities as well as diverse sources of social exclusion, including generation,
ethnicization and racialization, and human rights campaigns such as those against people
trafficking and Female Genital Mutilation. Activism worldwide generates very different
positions, not least with the growth of and the recognition of cultural diversity.

Sexual politics can be located within and in relation to diverse political traditions, which include
those of socialism and liberalism, as well as having their own distinctive structures. Gender
studies constitute a contested terrain of often strongly conflicting positions, which are disputed
within the pages of academic journals and in the academy and in the democratic space of
activism, including virtual spaces of the Internet and social networking sites. One of the defining
features of much contemporary feminist and LGBTQ activism is the possibilities of Internet-
based campaigning, such as the signing of online petitions, Websites that encourage people to
relate stories of sexism (Bates, 2014), through to feminist Website and blogs. Cyber space offers
both opportunities for women and a range of socially excluded groups to be heard as well as
being the site for additional sexist abuse (Penny, 2014).

Gender studies offer scope for innovation in methods as well as having established a tradition of
mixed methods in response to social change. The development of gender studies as an
interdisciplinary field retains the dynamism of different and often very productive conversations,
across generations, empirically in terms of lived experience and theoretically through intellectual
dialogues (Woodward and Woodward, 2009). There are connections and disconnections,
between policies and practices, which are differentially inflected across time and space. For
example, there may be consistencies in the lived experience of gender relations in different parts
of the world, but there are also significant divergences. Transformations are temporal and spatial
change and encompass intergenerational as well as interdisciplinary dimensions of gender
studies.

Along with the big data already discussed, which highlights the scale of gendered inequalities
globally, feminist approaches have often been dominated by qualitative approaches, which
highlight the lived experiences of those inequalities. Earlier feminist work, which sought to
foreground women’s stories emerged in a wide range of disciplines, such as history
(Rowbotham, 1975), sociology (Oakley, 1979) and anthropology (Moore, 1988,1994) emerged
as a useful strategy to highlight the ways in which women’s experiences had been excluded from
dominant historical and social narratives, by suggesting ways in which the stories of the
disadvantaged and dispossessed could be put into discourse and made audible and visible.
Qualitative methods have continued from the feminist tradition of highlighting the importance of
lived experience through to gender studies, where these methods allow the description of lived
experience and of excluded voices, as well as an understanding of how dominant structures are
the means through which exclusions and inequalities are perpetuated. These methods are present
both in academic-based studies and also in popular activism, which increasingly occupies
cyberspace, as manifest in the Everyday Sexism campaign (Bates, 2014). The Everyday Sexism
campaign started as a Website inviting women to send in their stories of everyday sexism and
harassment, and developed into a Twitter feed as well as a book. This project bridges the
qualitative method of women having their stories heard as well as the accumulation of a huge
collection of these stories (50,000 stories by December 2013). When placed together, these
stories highlight the links between individual incidences and structural inequalities that
academics within the field of gender studies are seeking highlight and redress.

The interdisciplinary nature of gender studies means not only that scholars can draw upon the
distinctive methods of particular disciplines but also they are well placed to create new
approaches, including mixed methods. By starting with questions about what shapes gender
relations and how sexual politics shape experience and social, economic and political relations,
gender studies demand robust empirical evidence, including statistical, quantitate data as well as
qualitative, ethnographic, critical, discursive and psychosocial approaches that seek to
understand some of the ambivalence and contradictory aspects of sex, gender and sexuality.

Conclusion
We welcome debate about the theory and practice of gender and the interdisciplinary
implications of gender as a means of making sense of social divisions and lived experience.
Gender studies also offer a means of exploring what is involved in interdisciplinary work and the
relationship between multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches, which emerge from
interdisciplinary studies as an established field of enquiry with its own capacities and distinct
features. Gender is itself a contested category an exploration of which creates new ways of
thinking about the relationship between sex, gender and sexuality. Gender is both an empirical
category and a theoretical conceptualization, which facilitates greater understanding of social
relations and divisions as well as describing them. A focus on gender generates different and
often innovative methodologies as well as a plurality of theoretical approaches, which are
directed at making sense of inequalities and at celebrating the experiences and contributions of
hitherto marginalized groups.

The journal in which this article is published encourages contributions to ongoing debates,
including what is distinctive about gender studies and the nature of the relationship between
activism, policymaking and theoretical and methodological approaches. Gender studies are part
of a developing field, which retains the excitement of interdisciplinary innovation, which
characterizes feminism and women’s studies, but extends this field of research by presenting
engagements with pressing contemporary debates and issues. This is also a contested terrain
characterized by lively debate about the relationship between gender and women’s studies,
between activism and theoretical frameworks and about political action and the policy
implications, globally and locally of focusing on gender. Many of the tensions and contradictions
of gender studies are those of interdisciplinary studies at a time when there has also been a move
towards the reinstatement of single disciplines in the field of higher education suffering from
financial constraints and reduced resources. Gender studies present productive possibilities for
contributions to knowledge, which are distinctively interdisciplinary and go far beyond attempts
to mainstream gender into conventional disciplinary structures. An interdisciplinary journal is a
good place to pursue these possibilities, address some the questions emerging from a focus upon
gender and suggest new questions about social, political, economic and cultural processes and
divisions.