Международный научно-образовательный электронный журнал

Results
While a full meta-analysis of all articles published in the nine gender conferences 
spanning two decades is beyond the scope of this paper, we reviewed all competing 
papers and special sessions to look for broad topic trends as our pasts provide insights 
into our future can. The first Gender Conference in 1991 saw the first burst of interest 
and excitement about the concept of gender in relation to consumer behavior. Many of 
the topics covered at that first conference, such as technology, identity, gender roles, 
and male/female differences in key marketing variables, were still in the 2008 
conference papers. What has changed in the 18 years since the founding conference is 
the distribution of contributions to these topics. In her foreword to the 1996 
proceedings, Janeen Arnold Costa called for an extension of our notions of gender to 
include homosexuality and international perspectives. She found the papers at this 
conference more challenging because, by and large, they moved away from the simple 
societal dichotomy of male and female.
Discussion
The articles presented in this special issue make it clear that the negotiation of 
gender roles, whether male or female, is a current concern in gender studies. The 
emphasis on masculinity as mentioned above can be seen as a positive development, 
pointing to the shift of gender issues towards a more centralized and mainstream 
position. Furthermore, gender is a two-sided coin, since constructions of masculinity 
and what it means to be male inevitably generate and constitute constructions of 
femininity and what it means to be female. In addition to this shift towards a central 
foundation in gender studies, the contributions in this special issue also map the 
changing theoretical domain of gender studies towards post-structuralist theories. The 
political imperative that emerges from this shift is to emphasize the construction of 

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gender and to shed light not only on the challenges men and women face in their 
struggle with the dominant discourses to construct a coherent identity, but also on the 
Uncovering implications of these embedded normative forces They are, within 
neoliberal discourses of choice and free will.