{"id":8894,"date":"2017-07-18T08:00:19","date_gmt":"2017-07-18T08:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/?p=8894"},"modified":"2017-07-17T15:04:26","modified_gmt":"2017-07-17T15:04:26","slug":"how-womens-colleges-construct-gender","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/2017\/07\/18\/how-womens-colleges-construct-gender\/","title":{"rendered":"How Women\u2019s Colleges Construct Gender"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n Megan Nanney and David Brunsma\u00a0, <\/span>“Moving Beyond Cis-terhood: Determining Gender through Transgender Admittance Policies at U.S. Women\u2019s Colleges,” Gender & Society<\/em>,<\/a><\/span> 2017<\/span><\/div>\n
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Graduation ceremony at Smith College. Photo by cogito ergo imago, Flickr CC<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The emergence of women\u2019s colleges in the U.S. was an important historical challenge to ideas about women\u2019s intellectual inferiority to men. While the number of women\u2019s colleges has declined significantly in the last half century, in 2014 there were still approximately 50 women\u2019s colleges in operation. Recently, with the increased visibility of transgender identities, women\u2019s colleges face a dilemma: How do they determine who counts as a woman? <\/span><\/p>\n

<\/div> Researchers\u00a0<\/span>Megan Nanney<\/span><\/a> and <\/span>David Brunsma<\/span><\/a>\u00a0investigated how women\u2019s colleges determine students\u2019 genders through an analysis of student newspapers and nine trans admittance policies at women\u2019s colleges in the U.S. Through their analysis, they demonstrate how women\u2019s colleges are not only structured by<\/em> gender, they play an active role in actually\u00a0constructing<\/em> gender.\u00a0 Women\u2019s colleges are not only structured by<\/em> gender, they play an active role in actually\u00a0constructing<\/em> gender.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Within the student newspapers examined, the debate between inclusion and tradition was apparent. Actors within the colleges balanced the need to stay true to their values and missions related to creating a \u201ccommunity of women,\u201d while also recognizing gender as a social construct and wanting to be inclusive of non-normative gender identities. The analysis of admittance policies revealed a wide range of criteria for determining a student\u2019s gender based on biological sex, legal documentation, and identity. For instance, a student who was assigned female sex at birth but now identifies as genderqueer was included at some colleges, but excluded from others. <\/span><\/p>\n

So, while all of the colleges were actively constructing what it means to be a woman, definitions did not always align between the schools. This misalignment highlights that womanhood itself is constructed, and the ways the category of “woman” is applied is, according to the researchers, “neither static nor natural.”\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Megan Nanney and David Brunsma\u00a0, “Moving Beyond Cis-terhood: Determining Gender through Transgender Admittance Policies at U.S. Women\u2019s Colleges,” Gender & Society, 2017 The emergence of women\u2019s colleges in the U.S. was an important historical challenge to ideas about women\u2019s intellectual inferiority to men. While the number of women\u2019s colleges has declined significantly in the last […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1957,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,55,13],"tags":[14907,37335,36199,37332,306,29448],"class_list":["post-8894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-gender","category-inequality","tag-sociology-of-culture","tag-gender","tag-genderqueer","tag-inequality","tag-transgender","tag-womens-colleges"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1957"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8894"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8894\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8897,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8894\/revisions\/8897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}