Skip to Main Content
Libraries Indiana University Bloomington

Gender Studies

The study of gender as a fundamental category of social and cultural analysis.

Librarian for Media Studies, Gender Studies, & Philosophy

Profile Photo
nicholae cline
they/them
Contact:
Herman B Wells Library
Media Services
Indiana University Libraries
812.855.8065

Land Acknowledgment & Resource Guide

Indiana University and the city of Bloomington occupy lands of enduring historical and cultural significance, and that for some was, is, and will always be home, to a number of Indigenous groups, including the Myaamiaki (Miami), Lënape (Delaware), Saawanwa (Shawnee), kiikaapoa (Kickapoo), and Neshnabé/Bodwéwadmik (Potawatomi) peoples. We honor and acknowledge the ancestral and contemporary caretakers of this place, as well as our nonhuman spirits, elders, and guides, offer gratitude for being held and nourished by the land, and recognize the inherent sovereignty and resilience of all Native communities who have survived and still thrive to this day on Turtle Island in spite of the systemic subjugation, dispossession, and genocide that constitute the ongoing reality of settler-colonialism.

We encourage all, settlers and guests alike, to look beyond acknowledgement and engage with local Indigenous communities while also cultivating thoughtful relations of reciprocity with the sacred land you live on, as well as the many vibrant beings with whom you share it. 

Further Resources & Reading

If you'd like to learn more about the practice and history of indigenous land acknowledgments, consult the resources below. You can also navigate to our full resource guide.

Preliminary Resources

Guides & Toolkits

Critical Takes

To learn more about the tribes, nations, and communities with ties to this land colonially known as the state of Indiana, check out their websites and consider supporting them in an ongoing way however you can:

Myaamiaki (Miami)

Lënape (Delaware)

Saawanwa (Shawnee)

Kiikaapoa (Kickapoo)

Neshnabé/Bodwéwadmik (Potawatomi)

About

Welcome to the Gender Studies subject guide for Indiana University Bloomington

We're glad you're here. This guide contains information and resources pertaining to the field of gender studies. Here you'll find featured content, new titles, helpful resources and services for scholars, instructional support information, research tips, and curated, subject-specific resources for performing research in gender studies. You will also find a list of campus & community resources for women and LGBTQ+ people.

The subject specialist and collection manager for this area is nicholae cline. If you would like to contact them, please use the profile box located on the left-hand side of this page. If you would like to request a purchase for our collections, you can use this form.

About Gender Studies

The study of gender as a fundamental category of social and cultural analysis, while also considering the intersection of gender with other substantive categories of identity, including sexuality, race, religion, class, disability, and nationality. Gender studies encourages scholars to think beyond common sense accounts of gender to examine its complex construction in a range of historical epochs, cultural arenas, and global processes. The field of gender studies utilizes a wide variety of innovative approaches and methodologies, broad in reach, yet unified through a critical angle of vision.

To learn more about the IU Department of Gender Studies, visit their website.

Featured | Spotlight on Sex Work

March is Women's History Month and conversations surrounding the history of women and trans+ femme rights wouldn't be complete without discussing the stigma and discrimination of the sex work industry. Sex work has often been considered "the oldest profession" and has been an active profession (legal or not) for centuries. Despite its active part of our communities, sex work has continuously been seen through a negative lens claiming sex workers have no agency and only do the work because they've been manipulated or coerced against their will. While there are absolutely dangerous situations in sex work—and sex trafficking is a real issue—it's time to see sex work for what it really is: a job.

Sex work is also an active area of research and scholarly discourse, particularly within gender and sexuality studies. This guide helps illuminate and contextualize the many cultural, critical, and scholarly threads surrounding sex workers and their experiences, exploring different perspectives of sex work and how to change the narrative of sex work to be more explicitly feminist and equitable.

 

A group of sex workers share the most challenging aspects of their jobs. (2021)

Sex Work Organizations & Networks:

Resources for Further Exploration:

Next Steps
If you'd like to engage more deeply with Women's History Month, units across the Libraries have created a number of interrelated resources and features to provide more holistic coverage of this commemoration. You'll find those, below:

Scholarly Articles:

 

Journals to Explore:

 

Databases:

Further Reading:

 

Movies:

Featured | Transfeminine Worlds: Works by Trans Women & Other Femme Folks

Introduction
In recognition of Women's* History Month in March, we have curated a selection of materials and resources from our collections to honor the contributions of transgender women across the arts, from fiction and poetry, to feature films and documentaries, to podcasts. We have also put together a sampling of important transgender studies texts, to help ground an understanding of transgender identity and embodiment.

As an introduction to this feature, we have also created a playlist of music by transwomen and other artists who explore and embody femininity outside of cisnormative conceptions of gender. In this extensive, genre-spanning mix, you'll find a variety of musical styles and sounds, including hip hop, electronic, ambient, heavy metal, and punk, among others. To learn more about this, feel free to explore some of the resources we used to make the playlist:

*Note: Trans women are women. For the purposes of this feature, we have chosen to center feminine expression and embodiment, and so include contributions from artists and scholars who identify as women, whether cisgender or transgender, as well as nonbinary and genderqueer individuals who are femme, femme-of-center, or who identify with or perform femininity in some way. For more on these concepts, check out this article from the ACLU ("Trans Women are Women") or explore some of the resources from this feature on "The Metaphysics of Gender" from the Philosophy Research Guide.

Beyond the Playlist
As with many of these national commemorations, one month is never enough to fully honor and celebrate the history and culture of marginalized communities, let alone heal the legacies (and ongoing reality) of harm and systemic oppression they've experienced. We recognize that resisting and rejecting (trans)misogyny and cisheteropatriarchy cannot be manifested simply through resource lists and guides, however important and well-intentioned, and that justice and liberation for women, expansively defined, and all who challenge and live outside of binary gender is the work of generations. We are, nevertheless, committed to doing what we can to work towards a different, more equitable and caring future.

If you'd like to engage more deeply with Women's History Month, units across the Libraries have created a number of interrelated resources and features to provide more holistic coverage of this commemoration. You'll find those, below:

Anthologies

Collections

Scholarly Texts

Essays

Other Nonfiction

Feature Films

Documentaries

Documentary Series

Short Films

Other Media Resources

Able to play on: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, itch.io, Steam, Epic Games Store

Able to play on: itch.io

Able to play on: itch.io

Able to play on: PlayStation 4/5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Steam

Coming soon to play on: Steam

Able to play on: freegames.org

Featured | Spotlight on Disability Studies

A group of activists, including Judy Heumann (center, with yellow stockings) protest for the enforcement of Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, in April of 1977Throughout history, communities of disabled, neurodiverse, crip, and sick people have been overlooked and oversimplified in academic conversations. Disability activism and political movements carved out a space for addressing ableism in research and academia; as a result, disability studies has emerged. Disability studies is an interdisciplinary field that explores disabled identities in the humanities and social sciences. For this spotlight on disability studies, we include neurodiverse, crip, and sick identities in our definition of disability. 

To read more about disability language and the use of "crip," enjoy this article by Dean Strauss: "Queer Crips: Reclaiming Language," and Brittany Wong's Huffington Post article "It's Perfectly OK to call a Disabled Person 'Disabled,' And Here's Why."

We also recommend the following resources that helped with this feature:

Resources for Further Exploration
A selection of articles, online compilations, and other resources relevant to disability studies

Next Steps
The following features also cover topics of disability studies:

Image Description: A group of activists, including Judy Heumann (center, with yellow stockings) protest for the enforcement of Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, in April of 1977. Later that month, the protesters would occupy a federal building in San Francisco in protest in a sit-in that lasted more than 25 days. Photo by Wally McNamee / CORBIS / via Getty Images

Journals

Journal Articles

Databases

Study Resources

New Titles in Gender Studies

Medieval Women and War

For the first time, Sophie Harwood uses the Old French tradition as a lens through which to examine women and warfare from the 12th to the 14th centuries. The result is a skilled analysis of gender roles in the medieval era, and a heightened awareness of how important literary texts are to our understanding of the historical period in which they circulated. Structured around five pivotal female types - women cited as causes for violence, women as victims of violence, women as ancillaries to warriors, women as warriors themselves, and women as political influences - this important book unpicks gendered boundaries to shed new light on the social, political and military structures of warfare as well as adding nuance to current debates on womanhood in the middle ages.

Like a Boy but Not a Boy

A revelatory book about gender, mental illness, parenting, mortality, bike mechanics, work, class, and the task of living in a body. Inquisitive and expansive, Like a Boy but Not a Boy explores author andrea bennett's experiences with gender expectations, being a non-binary parent, and the sometimes funny and sometimes difficult task of living in a body. The book's fourteen essays also delve incisively into the interconnected themes of mental illness, mortality, creative work, class, and bike mechanics (apparently you can learn a lot about yourself through trueing a wheel). With thoughtfulness and acute observation, andrea bennett reveals intimate truths about the human experience, whether one is outside the gender binary or not.

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History

Lesbian Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History- Critical Readings is an authoritative four-volume survey of the seminal essays on the subject from the last half century. It traces both the intellectual arc and larger theoretical implications of the field, including Queer Theory, which emerged from this scholarship in the early 1990s. Edited by Michael Bronski, a world-renowned, leading scholar in the field, the four volumes cover theory, the pre-modern period, the modern era and contemporary times. This is an essential resource for all scholars interested in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender history and LGBT studies more generally.

Gender Variances and Sexual Diversity in the Caribbean

Gender Variances and Sexual Diversity in the Caribbean: Perspectives, Histories, Experiences is a collection of critical perspectives on fundamental questions of how sexual orientation and gender in Jamaica and the wider Caribbean are conceived, studied, discoursed and experienced. Bringing together and updating existing and in-progress scholarly work on minority genders and sexualities in the region, this collection seeks to provide a fresh set of lenses through which to examine the issues affecting people in the Caribbean who fall outside the traditional binary categories of heterosexual males or heterosexual females.

Gender Politics at Home and Abroad

Hyaeweol Choi examines the formation of modern gender relations in Korea from a transnational perspective. Diverging from a conventional understanding of 'secularization' as a defining feature of modernity, Choi argues that Protestant Christianity, introduced to Korea in the late nineteenth century, was crucial in shaping modern gender ideology, reforming domestic practices and claiming new space for women in the public sphere. By placing gender and religion at the center of the analysis, Choi shows that the development of modern gender relations was rooted in the transnational experience of Koreans and not in a simple nexus of the colonizer and the colonized.

Feminist Connections

Feminist Connections: Rhetoric and Activism across Time, Space, and Place reconsiders feminist rhetorical strategies as linked, intergenerational, and surprisingly consistent despite the emergence of new forms of media and intersectional considerations. Contributors to this volume highlight continuities in feminist rhetorical practices that are often invisible to scholars, obscured by time, new media, and wildly different cultural, political, and social contexts. Thus, this collection takes a nonchronological approach to the study of feminist rhetoric, grouping chapters by rhetorical practice rather than time, content, or choice of media.

Feminism Backwards

Feminism Backwards is part memoir, part documentary. A founding member of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement Rosita Sweetman gleefully recalls the triumphs – and the tribulations – of trying to drag a reluctant Ireland into the 20th Century, crucially, re-appraising Chains or Change the IWLM’s famous pamphlet, detailing what life was like for women in 1970s Ireland - appalling.
Feminism Backwards is also a howl of despair at how women have been treated worldwide down through the centuries, and how misogyny and sexual repression got such a stranglehold on Ireland.

The Double X Economy

In The Double X Economy, Scott argues on the strength of hard data and on-the-ground experience that removing those barriers to women's success is a win for everyone, regardless of gender. As Scott takes us from the streets of Accra, where sex trafficking is widespread, to American business schools, where women are routinely patronized, the pervasiveness of the Double X Economy becomes glaringly obvious. But Scott believes that this rampant problem can be solved. She proposes concrete actions and urges her readers to rise up and join the global movement for women's economic empowerment that is gaining momentum by the day.

Disability and the Victorians

Disability and the Victorians brings together in one collection a range of topics, perspectives and experiences from the Victorian era that present a unique overview of the development and impact of attitudes and interventions towards those with impairments during this time. The collection also considers how the legacies of these actions can be seen to have continued throughout the twentieth century right up to the present day. Subjects addressed include deafness, blindness, language delay, substance dependency, imperialism and the representation of disabled characters in popular fiction. These varied topics illustrate how common themes can be found in how Victorian philanthropists and administrators responded to those under their care.

A Cultural History of Marriage

How have ideas of marriage evolved in Western culture? How has its influence changed, and been shaped by its social and cultural conditions? In a work that spans 2,500 years, these ambitious questions are addressed by 48 experts, each contributing their overview of a theme applied to a period in history. The volumes describe the role of marriage, its contributions to society, and how it engages with matters of religion, law, society and love.

All Gender Studies Guides

Contributors' Notes

Brett Hoffman (they/them) - Arts & Humanities Library Assistant, 2019-'21

Wendy Lee Spaček (she/her) - Arts & Humanities Library Assistant, 2019-'21

McLain Chadsey (he/him) - Arts & Humanities Library Assistant, 2021-'22

Jo Otremba (they/them) - Arts & Humanities Library Assistant, 2022-present

Sarah Vitelli (she/her) - Arts & Humanities Library Assistant, 2023-present