Study Gender Studies at Otago

Introduction

Hi everyone, I’m Chris Brickell. I’m involved in the Gender Studies programme here at Otago, and today we’re going to tell you a little bit about our programme, the kind of topics and subjects that we look at, and a wee bit about the kind of skills that you might develop by doing a Gender Studies major or minor with us.

So Gender Studies is a discipline in the humanities and social sciences that looks at the patterns of social life – the way that being male or female or intersex or gender diverse impacts the kind of lives that we lead.

So today I’m going to pass over to one of our students, Ahi, who’s going to tell you a little bit about the kind of topics she’s found most interesting in the Gender Studies programme.

What is Gender Studies

For me, what I think is really interesting about Gender Studies is that it’s about equality, and it’s about learning about ourselves and our… how we interact with people and connections between people.

Yeah, fantastic. So we spend a lot of time working through issues that really impact a lot of us on a day-to-day basis. So we look at things like work, our work lives, family, shopping, sexuality, leisure, media – those kind of things that we engage with, we engage with often.

We also look a bit at crime. Do you want to say a little bit about that, Ahi, too?

Gender, Crime and Justice

Um, so there’s a paper that I’ve done already that’s, um, Gender, Crime and Justice. And that paper is really interesting because it synthesises, um, an intersectional approach, looking at race and class and ethnicity and gender and how those all interact to kind of affect people who are both victims of crime and perpetrate crime.

So this is a really good point – a place where our Gender Studies major/minor intersects with a Criminology minor here at Otago, and those two things fit together really nicely.

Sexuality

Another area that we look at is sexuality, across both historical and social contexts, in New Zealand and internationally.

So you’ll be familiar with terms such as takatāpui, perhaps, which is an overall umbrella term around Māori sexuality and sexual identity.

We also look at newer ideas such as pansexuality, as well as older ideas – petrosexuality – something that we might think of as omnipresent and everywhere, but actually has a very particular set of historical and political connections. So we’re really interested in the way that happens.

Skills

Just to talk a little bit about some of the skills that you will learn in Gender Studies – we’re really interested in what are known in the marketplace as soft skills. Things like empathy, teamwork, collegiality – those kind of things that will stand you in good stead in a range of different occupations in government, private sector, and non-governmental sectors.

So we give you a broad education in people, social issues, that will train you up really well in terms of a range of kind of opportunities.

So if you’re interested in Gender Studies, come and let us know. Be in touch and we can tell you a bit more about it.

Thanks everyone.