Professor Healey discusses new minor in Gender Studies

Posted by admin on Feb 2, 2010 in News | 0 comments

In September 2009, Trinity Western University welcomed the arrival of many new first-year students, as well as a new minor in gender studies.

Robynne Healey, history professor at TWU and one of the founders of the Gender Studies Institute, explained how this new minor started and what it could mean for students.

Healey stated how 35 faculty members, who included gender in some aspect of their research, formed this new gender-focused institute two years ago.
“We [as the founding scholars] recognized that when we started the Gender Studies Institute that there were enough of us who had an interest in Gender Studies that we would have a good collection of courses,” said Healey.

From there it just seemed to carry out into a multi-disciplinary minor that would boast courses from computing science to religious studies with the only mandatory course being feminist philosophy. Students are able to customize this new minor to suit their personal goals, making it complimentary to several majors.

Healey’s personal motivation for helping this minor come to life was her philosophy that “understanding gendered lives helps us to understand what it means to be human. Recognizing and appreciating the spectrum of masculinities and femininities – as opposed to a single, encompassing masculinity or femininity – and the ways that these ideas have been constructed (this is my perspective as an historian) is part of understanding the world in which we live.

Healey explained that if someone who is interested in development work takes a minor in gender studies, they would be able to understand the role of gender, and therefore the structural framework of different countries and the Western perception of gender.

Essentially, an understanding of gender construction allows one to understand the construction of culture; thus making gender studies a worthwhile study for many disciplines.