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.
Patricia Hill Collins is an American academic specializing in race, class, and gender. She is a distinguished university professor of sociology emerita at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is also the former head of the Department of African-American Studies at the University of Cincinnati. Collins was elected president of the American Sociological Association (ASA), and served in 2009 as the 100th president of the association – the first African-American woman to hold this position.
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.
The Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women was established in 1981 at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, as an interdisciplinary research center focused on gender and women. 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.
Nancy Joan Hirschmann is an American political scientist. She is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor in American Social Thought at the University of Pennsylvania where she specializes in the history of political thought, analytical philosophy, feminist theory, disability theory, and the intersection of political theory and public policy.
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 is promoted by women of color (WOC), including Black, Latina, Asian, Native American, and anti-racist white women. In 1996, Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thornton Dill wrote “Theorizing Difference from Multiracial Feminism," a piece emphasizing intersectionality and the application of intersectional analysis within feminist discourse.
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.
White feminism is a term which is used to describe expressions of feminism which are perceived as focusing on white women but are perceived as failing to address the existence of distinct forms of oppression faced by ethnic minority women and women lacking other privileges. Whiteness is crucial in structuring the lived experiences of white women across a variety of contexts. The term has been used to label and criticize theories that are perceived as focusing solely on gender-based inequality. Primarily used as a derogatory label, "white feminism" is typically used to reproach a perceived failure to acknowledge and integrate the intersection of other identity attributes into a broader movement which struggles for equality on more than one front. In white feminism, the oppression of women is analyzed through a single-axis framework, consequently erasing the identity and experiences of ethnic minority women the space. The term has also been used to refer to feminist theories perceived to focus more specifically on the experience of white, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied women, and in which the experiences of women without these characteristics are excluded or marginalized. This criticism has predominantly been leveled against the first waves of feminism which were seen as centered around the empowerment of white middle-class women in Western societies.
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. According to author and rhetorical feminist Cheryl Glenn in her book Rhetorical Feminism and This Thing Called Hope (2018), "rhetorical feminism is 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.
Verta Ann Taylor is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with focuses on gender, sexuality, social movements, and women's health.
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.
