|
 Gender
Studies is a significant component of the fulfilling, life-enhancing
intellectual and professional foundation that the Brooklyn Campus
of Long Island University strives for and provides as delineated
in the Brooklyn Campus' overall mission statement. Gender
Studies is the logical outgrowth of an already very successful and
popular Women's Studies program of three years standing.
Gender is often a criterion for
social stratification and different political treatment as well as a favored
vehicle for expressing values and beliefs. Beyond the academic sphere,
it is increasingly recognized that an understanding of the gender relations
and gender divisions at the heart of contemporary societies is essential to
public policy making and business alike. Given the complex yet vital role
that we know gender plays in both individualized and communal identity formations,
Gender Studies has become a rapidly developing field concerned with the roles,
constructions of self, and status of women and men in society and their varioation
or time and space. Gender Studies acknowledges the interelatedness of
gender with other significant categories such as race, ethnicity, class, age,
sexual orientation and disability. In addition, Gender Studies equips
studetns to identify and analyze biases and gender stereotypes. A major
underlying assumptiom in the field is that gender is not fixed, which leads
to an interrogation of notions of a normative femininity or masculinity.
Addressing such assumptions enables students to develop more pronounced understanding
and acceptance of others as well as a greater confidence in and acceptance of
their own identities.
 Gender
Studies includes such issueas as the biology of human reproduction, philosophies
of gender construction, feminist pedagogy, gender and health, gender's impact
on education, sex roles in the family and society, the psychology of gender
identity, and the representation of women and men in literature, the media and
cyberspace. It explores the creation, meaning, function and perpetuation
of gender constructs in human societies both past and present. Moreover,
Gender Studies provides an interdisciplinary structure where diverse theoretical
and ideological perspectives regarding gender are given a legitimate voice heretofore
unavailable in the curriculum.
Gender Studies has emerged from
Women's Studies. Thus there is a firm link between feminist inquiry and
gender studies in that women's oppression and/or freedom is connected inevitably
to the manner in whcihc gender sas been constructed by a given group within
the context of a specified geographic location and historical period.
That relationship between feminism and its concern for women's material, cultural
and economic circumstances and gender studies will be maintained at the Brooklyn
Campus. There will be a continued emphasis on feminist theory, feminist
perspectives on global human rights, women in culture and society, queer theory
across the disciplines, reproductive rights, women's health and violence against
women along with courses on constructions of femininity and masculinity across
and within cultures/nations, biological theories about men and women, social
conceptualizations of male and femal bodies, gender and bio-ethics, and how
gender workds and is made/remade in a prison economy and culture.
Gender Studies is also designed
to have practical and professional applications. It provides a unique
education to students who wish to increas their career prospects in the 21st
century as would-be educators, artists, writers, leaders, innovators, egalitarian
entrepeneurs, and challengers of oppression in any given field. Students
are encouraged to explore the crucial relationships between theory and social
change, analysis and praxis, between the personal and the public sphere.
|
