Hello all,

I'm preparing gender studies and at the moment I'm at this topic "Autonomy Vs Integration". As suggested by most of the Seniors on this website, I also referred to multiple sources to study topics, and turns out, this particular topic is taken in two completely different contexts by various authors.

One of them is very famous "Sir Hammad Haider" from Officers Academy. Who took it in scholarly context that whether the Women's studies should be autonomous having a separate department or should it be integrated with mainstream disciplines.

On the other hand, there are several Authors who study this debate in Gender Studies in the context of status of women that whether women are autonomous and eligible to take actions and decisions on their own.

Which one is correct?

Thank you so much,

P.S. I tried positing all the links that are contradictory to one another but I got error that says I'm not eligible to post links

I've prepared this topic and am fairly certain it refers to the debate on whether women studies should be integrated into other disciplines as a sub-field or should be maintained as an autonomous discipline in universities.

I don't understand how "female autonomy" would fit into this topic since its an entirely separate concept altogether. What would be the integration stance if we were to consider it under the autonomy vs. integration debate? Female autonomy basically means that women have the right and capability to make decisions regarding their own selves and weigh in on matters and important policy decisions which, directly or indirectly, impact them. I suppose you can see the debate from the perspective of GAD (Gender and Development-Empowerment) and WID (Women in development-Integration.) approaches. In WID it was argued that women have different economic and social problems which must be addressed at a base level and be given separate care in developmental studies (especially in developing countries). The GAD was a later approach starting in the 1990s which wanted to focus more on empowerment, equality and giving women self-autonomy. So the autonomy vs. integration debate can be looked at from this perspective as well but this is a separate topic in itself in the course outline. Hence I'm fairly certain this is not what the autonomy vs. integration topic refers to and instead is simply a debate on whether women studies should be its own subject or not.

I would also like to point out that this topic is very relevant for this year as in Dec 2018 the Hungarian government has banned gender studies as an autonomous department in its universities.

Thank you, Sir. All my doubts are clear now.

Glad I could help.