Gender studies is an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to analysing gender identity and gendered representation. Gender studies originated in the field of women's studies, concerning women, feminism, gender, and politics. The field now overlaps with queer studies and men's studies. Its rise to prominence, especially in Western universities after 1990, coincided with the rise of deconstruction.
Women's studies is an academic field that draws on feminist and interdisciplinary methods to place women's lives and experiences at the center of study, while examining social and cultural constructs of gender; systems of privilege and oppression; and the relationships between power and gender as they intersect with other identities and social locations such as race, sexual orientation, socio-economic class, and disability.
Men's studies is an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to topics concerning men, masculinity, gender, culture, politics and sexuality. It academically examines what it means to be a man in contemporary society.
Michael Scott Kimmel is an American retired sociologist specializing in gender studies. He was Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Stony Brook University in New York and is the founder and editor of the academic journal Men and Masculinities. Kimmel is a spokesman of the National Organization for Men Against Sexism (NOMAS) and a longtime feminist. In 2013, he founded the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities at Stony Brook University, where he is Executive Director. In 2018 he was publicly accused of sexual harassment. He filed for retirement while Title IX charges were pending; no charges were subsequently filed.
Feminist anthropology is a four-field approach to anthropology that seeks to transform research findings, anthropological hiring practices, and the scholarly production of knowledge, using insights from feminist theory. Simultaneously, feminist anthropology challenges essentialist feminist theories developed in Europe and America. While feminists practiced cultural anthropology since its inception, it was not until the 1970s that feminist anthropology was formally recognized as a subdiscipline of anthropology. Since then, it has developed its own subsection of the American Anthropological Association – the Association for Feminist Anthropology – and its own publication, Feminist Anthropology. Their former journal Voices is now defunct.
Lila Abu-Lughod is an American anthropologist. She is the Joseph L. Buttenweiser Professor of Social Science in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University in New York City. She specializes in ethnographic research in the Arab world, and her seven books cover topics including sentiment and poetry, nationalism and media, gender politics and the politics of memory.
The Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women is an interdisciplinary research center focused on gender and women at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. It was established in 1981. In addition to research, the center is home to archives of feminist theory and women's history as well as Brown's undergraduate Gender and Sexuality Studies concentration. Postcolonial theorist Leela Gandhi, is the Center's director, having assumed the position in July 2021.
Alice Emma Rossi was an American feminist and sociologist.
Arlene Voski Avakian is an Armenian-American academic specializing in women's studies and food history.
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg is an American academic and author who is the Mary Frances Berry Collegiate Professor of History, American Culture, and Women's Studies, emerita, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Multiracial feminist theory refers to scholarship written by women of color (WOC) that became prominent during the second-wave feminist movement. This body of scholarship "does not offer a singular or unified feminism but a body of knowledge situating women and men in multiple systems of domination."
Patricia Zavella is an anthropologist and professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz in the Latin American and Latino Studies department. She has spent a career advancing Latina and Chicana feminism through her scholarship, teaching, and activism. She was president of the Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists and has served on the executive board of the American Anthropological Association. In 2016, Zavella received the American Anthropological Association's award from the Committee on Gender Equity in Anthropology to recognize her career studying gender discrimination. The awards committee said Zavella's career accomplishments advancing the status of women, and especially Latina and Chicana women have been exceptional. She has made critical contributions to understanding how gender, race, nation, and class intersect in specific contexts through her scholarship, teaching, advocacy, and mentorship. Zavella's research focuses on migration, gender and health in Latina/o communities, Latino families in transition, feminist studies, and ethnographic research methods. She has worked on many collaborative projects, including an ongoing partnership with Xóchitl Castañeda where she wrote four articles some were in English and others in Spanish. The Society for the Anthropology of North America awarded Zavella the Distinguished Career Achievement in the Critical Study of North America Award in the year 2010. She has published many books including, most recently, I'm Neither Here Nor There, Mexicans' Quotidian Struggles with Migration and Poverty, which focuses on working class Mexican Americans struggle for agency and identity in Santa Cruz County.
Elizabeth Viana is an Afro-Brazilian sociologist and activist who was an active participant in the democratization process of Brazil. She was one of five students with feminist activist Lélia Gonzalez who founded the Group Lima Barreto, and was involved in the Nzinga Collective of Women and the Unified Black Movement. Her work prominently focuses on racial identity, academic and community activism, and reform of domestic and family roles. She currently lives in Vila Isabel, a middle-class neighborhood in the North Zone of Rio de Janeiro.
Feminist rhetoric emphasizes the narratives of all demographics, including women and other marginalized groups, into the consideration or practice of rhetoric. Feminist rhetoric does not focus exclusively on the rhetoric of women or feminists but instead prioritizes the feminist principles of inclusivity, community, and equality over the classic, patriarchal model of persuasion that ultimately separates people from their own experience. Seen as the act of producing or the study of feminist discourses, feminist rhetoric emphasizes and supports the lived experiences and histories of all human beings in all manner of experiences. It also redefines traditional delivery sites to include non-traditional locations such as demonstrations, letter writing, and digital processes, and alternative practices such as rhetorical listening and productive silence. In her book, Rhetorical Feminism and This Thing Called Hope (2018), Cheryl Glenn describes rhetorical feminism as, "a set of tactics that multiplies rhetorical opportunities in terms of who counts as a rhetor, who can inhabit an audience, and what those audiences can do." Rhetorical feminism is a strategy that counters traditional forms of rhetoric, favoring dialogue over monologue and seeking to redefine the way audiences view rhetorical appeals.
Nancy A. Naples is an American sociologist, and currently Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Connecticut, where she is also director of graduate studies. She has contributed significantly to the study of community activism, poverty in the United States, inequality in rural communities, and methodology in women's studies and feminism.
Jyoti Puri is Hazel Dick Leonard Chair and Professor of Sociology at Simmons University. She is a leading feminist sociologist who advocates for transnational and postcolonial approaches to the study of gender, sexuality, state, nationalism, and death and migration. She has published three books, and her most recent book, Sexual States: Governance and the Struggle Against the Antisodomy Law in India’s Present received the Distinguished Book Award from the Sociology of Sexualities Section of the American Sociological Association. She has delivered keynote lectures and given talks across a wide range of universities in North America and Europe.
Margot Badran is a professor of Middle Eastern history with a focus on women and gender studies. She is a well-known scholar on the topic of Islamic feminism.
