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OPINION: Professor says gender studies is ‘burgeoning field’ — but is it really?

As if academia really needs another publication about gender issues, the Mississippi University for Women just launched a new feminist journal.

It’s called “Medusa: An Undergraduate Journal of Feminist Philosophy” – why do feminists like evil female character names (Medusa, Jezebel, Lilith, etc.)? — and it welcomes submissions that “bridge feminist thought with other critical, cultural, gender, literary, queer, race, disability, social, political theories.”

Apparently, that was too many words to fit into the title.

The journal just released its first issue and plans to continue publishing one each year.

Articles in the new issue include “After Becoming a Transwoman: Conocimientos of Transgender Women and Paternalism” and “A Culturally Sensitive Understanding of a Queer Environmental Ethic,” as well as “Expanding Moral Considerations and Obligations to Nature.”

Of the six independent articles, three deal with queer and transgender issues, which some say are not feminist at all. Allowing men to compete in women’s sports – or occupy spaces created for female victims of abuse to heal – is the opposite.

Professor Jill Drouillard said she created “Medusa” as an opportunity for undergraduates to gain publishing experience, according to The Commercial Dispatch.

“A space for undergraduate students working within this subdiscipline of philosophy has been lacking,” the assistant professor of philosophy and women’s, gender and sexuality studies told The Dispatch.

Drouillard said her area of scholarship is a “burgeoning field as witnessed by the increase of scholarly work being published in this domain.”

The name of the field certainly is “burgeoning” with words like “gender,” “sexuality,” and other terms being added to women’s studies departments at many universities. But are there jobs? There are only so many professorships of women and gender studies.

And for a field so honed in on writing and philosophy, it is curious that some international experts cannot define what “gender” even means.

Perhaps hands-on publishing experience isn’t what students need. Perhaps the problem is the focus, the over importance given to the field itself.

The need for full-time philosophers and thinkers is very small. Meanwhile, airlines are hurting for mechanics and technicians, and medical institutions predict America will have tens of thousands too few doctors in the coming decades.

MORE: Oxford professors support feminist who believes biological sex matters

IMAGE: Medusa Journal/Mississippi University for Women

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