The Question of Gender: Joan W. Scott’s Critical Feminism

A generation after the first publication of Joan W. Scott’s influential essay, Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis, this volume explores the current uses and valences of the term–and the ongoing influence of Scott’s work in history and other disciplines. Leading scholars from history, philosophy, literature, art history, and other fields examine how gender has translated into their own disciplinary perspectives. How has the study of gender, independently or in conjunction with other axes of difference such as race, class, and sexuality, inflected existing fields of study and created new ones? To what extent has this concept modified or been modified by related paradigms such as womens’ and queer studies? With what discursive politics does the term engage, and with what effects? In what settings, and through what kinds of operations and transformations, can gender remain a useful category in the twenty-first century?