oa Genderstudies in de opleidingen Antropologie in Nederland

The article contains three paragraphs. The first section is a historical retrospective. After reminding the audience to the content of the discipline and its specific methods, we describe how the efforts to include women’s worlds as a subject of study became slowly accepted at the various universities and how, thereafter, due to theoretical developments, ‘women studies’ turned into gender studies.

In a next paragraph, we give an overview of the actual gender courses and the way gender is mainstreamed in the anthropological curricula. Only in two out of five departments, gender is still a compulsory course, while in most other courses gender is considered to be mainstreamed. In reality, gender is often wrongly or improperly treated; many colleagues still equal gender and women, that is studies about women for women, or neglect the theoretical contributions of feminist anthropology.

In a last paragraph, we pay attention to the present student population and their perception on ‘feminism’ and/or gender studies. Students may enter a gender course believing women’s emancipation is completed in European societies while much is still to be gained with immigrant or Muslim women. We then discuss what it does for students to receive education from a gender perspective. We conclude that gender in higher education still needs a dual policy: an intersectional gender perspective should become an integrated part of the whole curriculum, and it must explicitly be addressed in separate courses by gender specialists. However, while gender specialists were appointed at all existing institutes in the past, most of these specialists have other teaching obligations and/or were not replaced after retirement. Nevertheless, many marvellous researches concerning gender and anthropology have resulted in exiting theoretical insights. The Netherlands Association for Gender Studies and Feminist Anthropology (LOVA) has also already existed for 37 years, and is still very much alive due to the efforts of gender specialists and a new generation of students.