Can you speak about the kinds of challenges the field, or you personally, have encountered vis-a-vis the broader fields of gender, Middle East Studies and traditional disciplines? Also Read: “Shifting Approaches to Women and Gender in Labor, Politics and Society,” MER issue 300, Fall 2021. I think it would be fair to say that many of us on this roundtable had our formative experiences at a point in time when gender studies did not exist. In 1995, gender was incorporated into official policy documents with an infrastructure of gender training, gender planning and gender mainstreaming. In North America, many people associate gender studies with post-structuralism and discourses about the fluidity of gender.