Gender Studies vs. Gender Studlies
Photo by Flickr user kristykay22. Used under a Creative Commons license.
The title of this post by Hugo Schwyzer says it all
“A man getting a gender studies major is most likely to be gay”: on the importance of refuting that problematic stereotypeRead his associated post here.
My initial reaction, while colorful, would have sounded highly ironic so I'll just say I agree with Hugo and strongly disagree with the notion that men have to be gay to be interested in gender studies. If nothing else, 10,000 years of unreflectively othering everybody else has tended to leave us straight, locally-dominant-ethnicity males aaaaabout 9,975 years out of date. (Or worse! For instance I don't really see Hammurabi shooting his friends in the face the way Dick Cheney, the current apical bud of patriarchy, did.) And whereas regarding women as if they were real estate or cattle might have seemed logical for a bunch of highly bellicose, pre-literate, barely post-nomadic goat herders with no better social models to work with it's... been a while. So I'm just not seeing where you'd have to be gay, or even have mothers, sisters, wives, daughters, or other female lovers, friends, and acquaintances that you cared about, to take interest in or benefit from gender studies.
(More to the point, a good, non-dependent starting point for gender studies for men might be looking into the *phobia* part, the constant, uncertain fear men, even nominally "manly" men experience, that leads to homophobia in the first place. Because, seriously, minus the phobia part homosexuality is approximately as threatening as, as common as, and as blamelessly uneventful as Presbyterianism.)
This is possibly your best headline *ever.* Love it!
Back in the infancy of women's studies, when it was still controversial to refer to it as "gender" studies (women feared they'd get erased one more time), it really was common for men in WS classes to be either gay or questioning. That was definitely my experience when I started grad school in the late 1980s. You'd see one, *maybe* two men in the classroom. Now - at least in my neck of the woods - WS fulfills a business school requirement. Intro to WS often has 40% men. My, how times have changed.
On homophobia: one of my favorite pieces is "Becoming 100% Straight" by Michael Messner. Do you know it? He tells the story of how as a young, skinny, would-be basketball player, he developed a crush on a young boy called Timmy, then fouled him heinously to prove he wasn't gay. Freud makes an appearance too. It's a smart, well-written article that's not heavy-handed, IMO. (I have the .pdf if anyone wants it.)
ReCaptcha on steroids: "New housewife"
[Hi Sungold! I don't know Becoming 100% Straight. It doesn't seem to be Google-able but it seems to be a gender-studies staple. (Lots of quizes and exercises mention it.) Thanks for the tip. --fl]
I think I'm interested in that PDF, Sungold.
Sunflower
i could argue that presbyterianism is more threatening than homosexuality. i mean, they want your SOUL!
[Yeah, but they're pretty mild about it. And besides, so does the Metropolitan Community Church (which sometimes "forgets" to take their crosses down afterwards when they borrow space from Unitarians. :-) Thanks, Nekobawt. --fl]