User:Metroblum/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Gender studies

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
(Briefly explain why you chose it, why it matters, and what your preliminary impression of it was.)

I am majoring in Gender Studies, so I wanted to see whether the Wikipedia page was comprehensive. Gender Studies is an area of study that several people write off as having a lack of nuance, so it is crucial that Wikipedia (a source upon which so many people rely) has a comprehensive article to help begin to educate people. My preliminary assumption of the article is that is focuses heavily on specific aspects of gender studies that I would not necessarily put at the forefront of the topic. Similarly, it seems like it neglects to mention other crucial elements of the field.

Evaluate the article
(Compose a detailed evaluation of the article here, considering each of the key aspects listed above. Consider the guiding questions, and check out the examples of what a useful Wikipedia article evaluation looks like.)

The lead section does not provide a description of the article's major sections. I think that it does not focus enough on the intersection of gender studies and sexuality studies, and it barely mentions queer studies at the end of the overview section. Because sexuality studies is not mentioned, Michel Foucault is not mentioned, who is crucial to the study of gender studies.

The article doesn't mention that the field of gender studies has been heavily dominated by cisgender white women, which hurts its reliability. I also think that the absence of Kimberle Crenshaw hurts the article, since her introduction of intersectionality has helped increase representation within the field of gender studies.

The article's content is disproportionately spent discussing psychoanalysis, which is not the primary aspect of gender studies. Similarly, the article devotes a section to Gender in Asia and Polynesia, which, again, is not what I know to be a major tenet of the field of gender studies. Lastly, the article does not focus on the different waves of feminism or crucial feminist philosophers (for example, Catharine MacKinnon), both of which I think are crucial to the history of gender studies.

Although the tone seems to be neutral, since the article does not mention intersectionality, it seems to be talking about gender studies as primarily cisgender studies.

The citation links work and the author of this article ensured that the sources supported their claims. Most of the authors listed are white and many of them are cited several times. Each source seems to be peer reviewed, which makes me think that they are reliable.

The article is not noticeably well-written and this writing style makes the content less accessible. I think the sections devoted to the article should have been more prominent to the topic and reflective of modern day Introduction to Gender Studies classes.

The "Talk" section is scathing. Several Wikipedia contributors are unhappy with the lack of diversity and poor writing quality. The article is rated as C-Class by WikiProject Vital Articles and is part of three WikiProjects.

As I mentioned above, Wikipedia discusses this topic from a less diverse lens than we use when we discussed it in class. The article makes gender studies seem almost one-dimensional and needs much updating.