By Kath Woodward and Sophie Woodward

In our new book, Gender Studies: A Multidisciplinary Approach we explore gender across a range of different disciplines, in a multidisciplinary approach. Gender Studies have always been seen as interdisciplinary, as, for example, have social policy, ecology, environmental science, criminality and sports studies, but we develop a multidisciplinary approach. This approach encourages questions, for example about the role and classification of gender within each discipline. It crosses disciplinary boundaries and encompasses different disciplines from the arts through social sciences to the natural and biological sciences. Our multidisciplinary approach respects the particularity and integrity of each discipline, each with their own questions, techniques, practices, methods and theories, but makes the case for two-way communication between disciplines.

We use a ‘facet methodology’ (as developed by Jennifer Mason), where each chapter is a ‘facet’ of gender and we put different disciplines in relation to each other which offer flashes of insight on that aspect of gender.  We start with Everyday Experience, since gender is lived and understood through many disciplinary fields. Then we look at Power and Politics, not least because gender relations are power relations and gender is classified and regulated through political systems as well as through lived experience. In order to understand where it comes from and who is telling the stories. The next chapter is Herstories and Histories, followed by Bodies and Embodiment, the focus of disciplines like biology and the medical sciences as well as within philosophical approaches like phenomenology. The final facet – Rules Laws and Regulations – deals with the classification of gender where the state and regulatory bodies try to define gender and sex. The challenges of definition, developing guidelines, as well as how these are contested by activists and people who dispute  the restricted definitions are evident in the consequences of the UK Supreme Court ruling about biological sex. Lastly, we reflect on how disciplines can talk to each other and develop better understandings of their own work.

In the book we show that gender is complex: it intersects with different forces of power such as race, ethnicity, social class and disability. Gender is empirical: we need to be able to quantify participation with different disciplines and fields of research, for example of students and staff in universities and within schools and research institutes. How many gender identifications are there? Gender is also conceptual, providing an explanatory framework for exploring and understanding inequalities, processes, connections and disconnections. How do we know and care about it and why is gender so important?

All societies classify gender in some way and many build on the relations between sex and gender. Disciplinary conversations show how and why gender binaries have been challenged, as well as how and why different disciplines understand sex and gender. Once disciplines talk to each other we can explore the source and justification for different political positions on gender. Appealing to biology and bodies is not simple; bodies too are influenced by sociocultural and material forces.

Sometimes gender is recognised, visible and the subject of research, whereas the exploration and even the presence of gender can be absent; women have so often been hidden from history in most disciplines, empirically and conceptually. Tensions between exclusion and inclusion, having a voice and being visible, and invisibility and silence, need explanation rather than dismissal  as features of neutrality and objectivity in the natural sciences. In disciplines such as physics and economics, there has been a  lack of empirical presence through the  absence of female students and staff and members of the canon-their  founding fathers. In order to take action  to promote wider participation, there has to be some deconstruction of disciplinary objectivity and neutrality, and of  gendered, racialised, classed stereotypes and expectations, which gender as an explanatory concept can provide.

We argue through the book that we need conversations between disciplines, to address the big issues, such as climate change where we need  climate scientists, social psychologists, philosophers and social scientists, as well as in everyday life and  personal relations. Scientists can speak to arts and social science scholars to access the parts of the puzzle that can’t be accessed in the laboratory. Qualitative nethodologies, including narratives, film and visual imaging, and sociological critiques of social media can offer rich data on lived experience, such as  making sense of contradictions like climate change denial and vaccination refusal. Quantitative methods can provide us with the bigger picture. Gender provides a route into these debates.

Disciplines have their own boundaries, theories and practices, but exchange and dialogue between disciplines can be very productive, even necessary and essential. Gender offers an excellent, if complicated means of exploring connections and disconnections. Disciplinary conversations facilitate our understanding of gender in a world where debates can be conflictual. Talking and listening in this context provides evidence and understanding.

Kath Woodward is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at The Open University, UK.

Sophie Woodward is Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester, UK.

Gender Studies: A Multidisciplinary Approach is available in Hardback and eBook.

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