Teaching Gender and Popular Culture

Abstract

The academic study and teaching of gender has had a relatively short history. Fuelled by the political and cultural emergence of second-wave feminism, gender — often under the aegis of Women’s Studies — developed as a separate area of investigation as late as the 1960s, drawing attention to a range of inequalities that women face in both personal relationships and social positionings. Second-wave feminists also highlighted the fact that the academy itself was a deeply patriarchal structure with a number of academic disciplines acting to exclude the experiences, voices and identities of marginalised peoples, including women. Responding to second-wave critiques, English — along with other subjects in the humanities, arts and social sciences — began to focus on gender as a structuring principle and contest the supremacy of many classic, male-dominated/written texts of the literary canon. Questions were asked about the absence of ‘great’ women in this field and attempts were made to ‘fill in the gaps’ and undo the male bias — Kate Millett’s influential Sexual Politics (1970), for example, identified patriarchy as a socially conditioned belief system whose attitudes and systems penetrate literature, philosophy, psychology, politics and life itself.