Gender studies is an interdisciplinary field of inquiry increasingly prominent since the second half of the 1980s. It arose from and is closely tied to women's studies and also gay, lesbian, and men's studies. Starting with the premise that the gender of an individual does not flow naturally or inevitably from her or is anatomical sex, gender studies analyses the way gender identity is constructed in literature and in society, for both women and men. Conventional Women's studies focused exclusively on women and women's writing.
Gender studies turns away from this exclusive focus on women and women's writing, and examines the way "masculinity" and "femininity" come to have certain meanings at a particular place and time. It stresses the necessary inter-relatedness of there meanings what is considered typically masculine in a given society depends in part on being different from what is feminine, and that is feminine or not being masculine. Gender studies also points out that what is considered gender-neutral or "universal" is often, in fact, implicitly male and exclusive of the female. Ironically, some feminists have worried that gender studies itself, by rejecting the polemical, compensatory attention to woman characteristic of women's studies, may run the risk of slipping back into a bias that favours men.
