How meaningful is "women's studies" intellectually?

It's not quite (by which I mean 'at all') as black-and-white as that over here, but I see what you mean.

edited 14th Feb '11 9:03:32 AM by SoberIrishman

Because events are important and people are not. Who did what is only a side note, rather than something of more than mild importance. It's like saying the things Einstein did were important because he did them, rather then Einstein being of mild importance because he did important things.

My understanding of the conflict is a bit coloured, because I learned most of it from a Scottish friend of mine who is a Celtics fan.

[ed.] that's individualist interpretation of history. Had Einstein lived ina different setting, he might have never reached the conclusions he did. Study of nuclear phsyics was a new,, but already busy field in the 1930's. It had been boosted because of the new scientific freedoms in Weimar Germany. All that is important.

Heroes don't just materialize out of nothing and change the course of history. A second world war might have been fought even if Hitler had died in the first one. America would have gained independence even if it hadn't been Washington leading the revolutionaries.

History is not a list of people, places and years. And especially not a list of wars.

edited 14th Feb '11 9:10:34 AM by JethroQWalrustitty

It's just that Catholics have always been the higher-ups in maybe 60% of businesses, even when the Loyalist Government was a lot more hardline. And also, it's never been a Catholic-Protestant thing; more of a British-Irish thing, but it was hypothetical anyway, so blegh.

edited 14th Feb '11 9:13:00 AM by SoberIrishman

And that's why those people are of mild importance. Einstein, and what he had to go through, are secondary to his discoveries. If he hadn't made them and someone else had, he wouldn't be worthwhile at all.

History is not a list of people, places and years. And especially not a list of wars.

It's a list of events and the order they took place in. The conditions of the time are also worth a quick look as well. The people are trivia, that's what The Other Wiki is for. People are rarely, if ever, important.

You're very depressing.

Quite so.

Would you like a hug?

The point of women's studies et. al. is to take people who otherwise might be somewhat normal and fill their heads with feminist claptrap designed to make them see all of history as a conspiracy to oppress poor little them. It is not intellectually meaningful, because there is no intellect involved.

Wikipedia says:

Women's studies were first conceived as an academic rubric apart from other departments in the late 1970s, as the second wave of feminism gained political influence in the academy through student and faculty activism. As an academic discipline, it was modeled on the American studies and ethnic studies (such as Afro-American studies) and Chicano Studies programs that had arisen shortly before it.

Says it all...

Hm, I don't think so. It's of academic interest if you want to focus on accomplishments done by women and the issues that specifically affect women. The more neutral version of gender studies would focus on issues that affect women solely and then focus on issues that affect men solely. I don't see why it wouldn't have intellectual value. If a particular implementation of the course is dominated by a racist or a sexist, you wouldn't discount the entire field of study. There's no reason that womyn's studies is any different from focusing on society in a different light then you normally would.

It is similar to studying a technical problem under a different paradigm from usual to ferret out different issues with the design. Memory focused or speed focused? Space focused or simplicity focused? Etc.

Unlike Deboss I value arts in addition with science/math. I just think that whichever you focus on, you require some electives from the other side. That is, if you take arts, you're required to take some science. If you take science, you're required to take some arts.

edited 14th Feb '11 9:55:16 AM by breadloaf

There is, in my experience, two methodologies of women's studies. One offers a gendered look at institutions, critiquing them when necessary. The other insists on ripping every institution possible. The problem is that the latter are considerably louder and more controversial, thus it's what folks see.

It's like saying the things Einstein did were important because he did them, rather then Einstein being of mild importance because he did important things.

Which events are considered important does sometimes depend on who was behind them and/or who was affected by them. My history books rarely talked about people who weren't white men, which obviously doesn't mean that they were the only ones who did interesting or important things.

Foremost, I am interested in knowing exactly which element of science feminists find objectionable. Its purity or its precision? Is its objectivity offensive? [...] The ideological nature and impractical logistics of this position clearly demonstrate that the academics promoted by the women's studies program are politically grounded.

The point feminist thinkers like Sandra Harding are making is that it's impossible to do science without your perception of the world colouring the results - which questions you ask, how you interpret the answers and so on  ^*

It makes sense to me.

The point feminist thinkers like Sandra Harding are making is that it's impossible to do science without your perception of the world colouring the results - which questions you ask, how you interpret the answers and so on. So instead of trying to be objective, a scientist should try to be aware of how s/he is subjective and how this is likely to influence their work.

That's a dangerously antiscientific viewpoint.

Reposting link:

http://www.dailybruin.com/index.php/article/1997/05/reinvention-of-science-fails-b

Evidently, it is difficult for some feminists to accept that science is a gender-neutral discipline. Unlike feminist theories, scientific theories are based upon objective testing, not political ideology.

edited 14th Feb '11 12:22:16 PM by silver2195

Too bad.

How so?

The fact that scientists are colored by their perception of the world, by the domninant scientific consensus at the time etc. is not a new idea, nor one that stems from feminism, in fact it's well-tread ground. Namely through the concept of paradigms introduced in Kuhn's the structure of scientific revolutions. Lakatos research programmes embodies much of the same thing. It isn't necessesarily anti-scientific it's simply an aknowledgment of the fact that scientific research isn't done in a vacuum, it will always be corlored by (in the case of Kuhn) the current paradigm, though obviously a revolution can happen, hence the name of his seminal work.

What some feminists, and I use the term lightly, try to claim is that science and math is inherently biased towards a male view of the world. Which I find to be really, really weird. In fact, I find it sexist towards women. What they are basically saying is that women can't do math, an old stereotype, but in the repackaging of a "feminist" theory and an attack on the supposed patriarchal "science" which elavates the abilities of men while undervaluing those of women. However it comes off more as underestimating the abilities of women, which is weird considering that these people are self-proclaimed so-called feminists.

edited 15th Feb '11 4:27:29 AM by Mathias

Evidently, it is difficult for some feminists to accept that science is a gender-neutral discipline. Unlike feminist theories, scientific theories are based upon objective testing, not political ideology.

[1]

Fallible human interpretation of the testing results still happens.

Not particularly meaningful, it should be a tiny subgroupof the humanities. However, it's blown out of proportion. I don't know if that's more or less than other minority studies, though.

My main issue with most "X studies" fields is that they're overly multidisciplinary.

How so? I thought the intention of minority studies was to avert that very problem. At least that's what others tell me.

[1]

Fallible human interpretation of the testing results still happens.

An example or two would have been much better than a link to a video of the Joker laughing.

Yes, misinterpretation of data happens. But scientists are trying for objectivity, so the accepted and correct solution is to review all the experiments for unsupported conclusions or leaps of inference, and perform more experiments to determine whether those conclusions or inferences are actually true. This takes a good scientific mindset, to recognize mistakes and investigate them, not simply a differently biased mind.

Women aren't exactly a minority. You're studying the cultural and social contributions of slightly over half the human race. That's a pretty broad topic.

Even with genuine numerical minorities, though, you tend to still be talking about pretty big groups of people, most of whom are very diverse from each other and involved in a wide variety of fields. Hence, studying their contributions tends to involve touching on a lot of different things without the elbow room to go into sufficient depth on any of them.

edited 14th Feb '11 5:01:39 PM by Iaculus

I'm sorry I questioned the Gospel.

Oh, right, I get it now.

@Myrm: Calling someone's position unfounded is not evidence that it is actually unfounded, only evidence that someone else holds a different position.

@everyone: The original link neo gave didn't really prove much, because it is:

1. An opinion piece from UCLA's student newspaper and
2. About how science is objective, not biased towards men, and therefore feminist attacks it have no validity; not that the entire subject of women's studies is flawed.