Importance Of Women's Studies

Submitted By RachelZhang1
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Since I started my study in Women’s Studies, I have learnt so much knowledge about women, gender, history, culture etc. I undoubtedly has benefited from this learning areas which are special but ubiquitous as well. This course provides an opportunity for me to examine women’s roles, contributions, and status in social and cultural context and to investigate a variety of disciplines from feminist perspectives. This course teaches me to improve critical thinking and to provide us with the intellectual means to question prevailing assumptions. It encourages me to explore the contexts and ideological origins of knowledge and to examine the relationship between knowledge and power in society. It promotes social responsibility by examining the connections between personal experience and political activity, and validates us contributions and voices (Grewal, Kaplan xxx-xxvi). Women’s Studies creates an understanding that interrelated factors —e.g., gender, race, ethnicity, class, age, religion, national origin, and sexual orientation — inform knowledge of women’s history, culture, and social roles. At the beginning of this course, we learnt about the history of scientific and medical knowledge about bodies, female, and male. It shows the knowledge about gender changes with time and place. For instance, women and men had same body, only women’s body with one difference: “there are inside the body and not outside it”. Finally the biomedical discourse shows women’s bodies were very different from men in 19th century (Oudshoorn 6-7). In Emily Martin’s reading, scientists depict male and female are characterized by the egg and sperm. It shows female are passive because of the egg must depend on sperm for making it works. The improvement of the scientific research shows the participation of women in science and technology. It makes us understand how science and medical knowledge create powerful identities of gender, race, class, and ethnicity in the modern time.
Everyone should have their own identity. Identity is an important and necessary aspect of the modern world. It is always a relation between other categories, such as nation, family, race etc. Our identities are not chosen by our. For women, identity force them to differ themselves from men, and from other women as well. The political systems are influenced the forms of identities and belonging in the modern world. Although it is a progress that “individual” become the new identity for people, women are identified the object of men. Women and men have different rights and privilege due to “the patriarchal nation-state produces citizens who are gendered” (Grewal,
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