Embracing Intersectional Analysis: The Legacy of Anglo- European Gender theory to Social Sciences- Humanities

Abstract

During the past forty years, Gender/Women’s Studies has developed into a well-established interdisciplinary site on inquiry and academic knowledge production, challenging traditional discipline’s understandings of women’s experiences from a critical perspective. Critical research and teaching on gender/sex, gendered hegemonies, gender relations, gender identity and social categories is today carried out in universities in many countries all over the world. Consequently, is possible to speak of feminist studies as a specific academic field of knowledge production (see Lykee 2010; Berger and Guidroz 2009). Interdisciplinary since its very origins, is mostly non-traditional, allowing for new synergies and cross-disciplinary dialogues to emerge between heterogeneous fields of theory and methodology. On this ground, one of the driving forces among diverse viewpoints has been the articulation of the paradigm gender along with other categories such as class, ethnicity and sexuality. Indeed, there is a line of continuity implied in a strong challenge to traditional sciences on the grounds that the social/cultural/human sciences throughout their history have sustained and legitimized biologically determinist approaches to sexes and culturally essentialist perceptions of gender. Within this framework, I approach Gender/Women’s studies as a “vibrant and developing transnational phenomenon and web of activity” (Lykke 2010; foreword).