Ika Luri Wulandari F1F008091 GENDER STUDIES Regine Gildemeister

Gender studies developed in 1970s, as the consequence of this research was that womens studies always aimed primarily at making a practical contribution to reducing discrimination against women. A problem emerged for this research was that it took as its starting point what was actually the result of some analyses which show us that gender make a differentiation between men and women. But gender as a social category move this research to deal with analyzing gender relationship under aspects of their hierarchical arrangement and social inequality. Human being in general constitute the basis for all discipline-specific observations and that (bi-) sexuality is not a matter of importance. In fact general humanity is apparently superior to gender-membership. There is normally an unquestioning equation of the general human to the masculine (reveal by de Beauvoir 1993) and it support by Georg Simmel pointed out in 1902. Then after the feminist critique of science the disagreement with the claim to rationality, there was more emphasis on the assertion that feminist approaches both to cultural critique and to the radical questioning of the understanding of science could align themselves with a range of critical traditions within science. Particularly in the context of research in social inequality gender is seen as a social structural category. This term is concerned with the totality of institutionalized arrangements by means of which women and men confront each other as social groups (Becker-Schmidt and Knapp 1995). In another variant gender is a presented as a social construct, which means that It is investigated in strict opposition to any kind of naturalization that looks socially at the production of precisely the kind of order that we only encounter in the result as gender difference, as femininity and masculinity. Both of them are engaged in a struggle to argue their case. Bourdieus sociology has had great influence on gender studies as it opens up the possibility both of making connections with social theory and, at he micro-level, of working with the notion of play or construct. The idea of construct is also central to approaches inspired by system theory and by discourse theory in the latter case related to the political requirement for deconstruction as a scientific strategy. Actually, all of the approaches about gender have marked themselves off from the mainstream of the natural science ideal of discovery, which proceeds on the basis of a clear distinction between subject and object,

between the discoverer and what is discovered, and in which the object area is removed from its historical context. From a positive point of view means that developing a research culture that systematically avoids only reproducing familiar figures of gender difference. In this it is helpful : To avoid comparing men and women with each other as blocks in an essentialist manner or using gender as an unquestioned resource. To check everyday knowledge concerning the difference in developing questions. To space out research phases in time and, at certain stages in the analysis, to desexualize the material. The last, to investigate cross-gender activities and spaces, to open ones mind to variety, contradictions and ambiguities of everyday practice and analyze for oneself the practice of distinction. Gender and womens studies have recently been confronted to a considerable extent by the effects of their own work on science and society. In the research findings of recent years it has become abundantly clear that the social inequality of the genders, in spite of the topicalization, is still reproducing itself locally, and that topicalization is by no means followed by habitualization. Finally we can know that there neither is nor can be, in gender studies, an ideal way, an outstanding single method. At the same time, it also follows that it may contribute significantly to the development methods.