W. Acker Summary

In 2011 Acker reflected on her career and how her research questions have changed over the years. When she started in the late 1960s, she explored why women are less ambitious than men. Being influenced by feminist movement her research question moved to higher education and why it is hostile to women, whereas in the recent years she has focused on the question who ‘the women’ in higher education are.
Acker’s reflection captures the changes in the ways in which gender has been conceptualized in research and moreover how the way in which gender is conceptualized in return shapes research. When she started her career in the late 1960s, the field of gender studies drew extensively on sex and gender role theories. They assert that gender is an …show more content…
In addition, while all boys and girls should be educated ‘for all their major adult roles – as parents, spouses, workers, and creatures of leisure’, there is also a need to ‘stop restricting and lowering the occupational goals of girls’. Finally, men should be encouraged to be ‘more articulate about themselves as males’ and attention should be paid to the experiences of men who had found happiness in marrying a professional woman (Rossi, 1965: …show more content…
In her famous passage about gender Butler ([1990] 1999: 45) asserts that gender is ‘the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being’. In this line of thought, gender is perceived to have an appearance of substance, while it is, in fact, a performance constituted by repeated acts. As gender identities are constructed through repeated acts, the logical conclusion is that there are neither essential gender traits nor gender identities (for more detailed discussion see section [//]). Instead, it is the constant repetition that gives an impression of