A generation after the publication of Joan W. Scott's influential essay, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," this volume explores the current uses of the term-and the ongoing influence of Scott's agenda-setting work in history and other disciplines. 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 women's 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 21st century? Leading scholars from history, philosophy, literature, art history, and other fields examine how gender has translated into their own disciplinary perspectives.

Gender as a category of analysis in the 21st century

About the Author

Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature and Co-director of the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. Her books include Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity; Undoing Gender; and Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?

Elizabeth Weed is Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University and Director of the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. She is editor of Coming to Terms: Feminism/Theory/Politics and editor (with Naomi Schor) of Feminism Meets Queer Theory (IUP, 1997) and The Essential Difference (IUP, 1994).

Reviews

The scholarship and the writing here is engaging and imaginative (see in particular Gayle Salamon's paper on transgenderism and Merleau-Ponty), and there is a keen sense of what's at stake in a field that seems to have, in Joan W. Scott's words, only paradoxes to offer.51.2 2014

* COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES *

[T]he book sheds light on the continued power of feminist scholarship following poststructuralism. It provides many models of engaged, provocative, critical, and careful writing that constitute feminist scholarship at its best.

The Question of Gender collects cutting-edge research by some of the most prominent contemporary feminist scholars.

* Women's Studies Quarterly *

[The editors] provide fresh analyses of the state of gender studies and the dynamic theories of 'sexual difference' as proposed, tested, and critiqued by Joan Wallach Scott.

* American Historical Review *



Book Information
ISBN 9780253223241
Author Judith Butler
Format Paperback
Page Count 336
Imprint Indiana University Press
Publisher Indiana University Press
Weight(grams) 476g