Gender as a Category of Analysis in Development and Environmental History

Bibliographic Data

ID8965720
AuthorsSara Pursley (0000-0001-6871-7030, New York University, corresponding author)
Year2016
Volume48
Issue3
Pages555-560
Publication date2016-07-06
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueInternational Journal Middle East Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0020-7438 • E-ISSN: 1471-6380
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0020743816000490
OpenAlexW2470486270
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited17

In 2010, reflecting on her landmark 1986 article “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” Joan Scott wondered whether, since the original article's publication, the category of gender had “lost its critical edge.” She noted how it had often come to refer simply to the roles assigned to “women” and “men,” while those categories themselves were assumed to be determined by biological “sex” and thus stable and self-explanatory. In other words, the gender/sex binary persisted “despite a generation of scholarship aimed at deconstructing that opposition.” Scott proposed that gender as an analytical category continues to be useful today only if it is “taken as an invitation to think critically about how the meanings of sexed bodies are produced in relation to one another, how these meanings are deployed and changed.”

Binary opposition · Epistemology · Gender history · Opposition (politics · Political science · Politics · Relation (database · Scholarship · Sociology · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy

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