Gender and Communication: Problemizations, Methodologies, Intersections

Gender/Feminist/Women’s Studies, as well as Gay, Lesbian and Queer Studies, and also some already well established scientific areas in academic curricula, of which Cultural Studies and the Communication Sciences themselves provide for prominent examples, all have emerged from the classic domains of the Social and Human Sciences. This emergence does not amount, however, to mere disciplinary specialization compelled by the real specificity of its objects that gradually have gotten more and more differentiated and clear-cut. The disciplinary fragmentation in question here is a thematic and methodological one, as it constructs problematizations rather than clear-cut objects, and emphasizes intersections rather than separatisms, therefore acquiring an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary character, in a sense in which interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity are not reduced to mere mechanical cooperation between established disciplines, but rather have forged critical categories that, all the while, provide for a decisive, although unacknowledged, contribution to their renovation, whilst their gatekeeping practices cannot but simplistically and wrongfully detect disciplinary transgression. Nonetheless, the new inter- and transdisciplines relentlessly strive in the invention of persuasive contexts that aim at applying their own situated knowledges beyond their original settings, thus confronting a little understandable resistance, also arising from the Communication Sciences themselves, that frequently commits them to a precarious status of disparagement, if not outright dismissal, which, moreover, is not always avowed, but that to a large extent explains their still fragile formal establishment at national level, in spite of their already solid development in what regards practitioners, publications, theses, research projects and courses. In a certain way, both the hardships that they face and the horizons that open up to them are no different from the ones that were already present to Communication Sciences in their inception and that ultimately allowed for the particular status that furthered their development, more than hampered it.