The Question of Gender: Joan W. Scott}}}s Critical Feminism [Paperback]

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 termand 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 differencesuch as race, class, and sexualityinflected 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

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 includeGender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity; Undoing Gender;andFrames 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 ofComing to Terms: Feminism/Theory/Politicsand editor (with Naomi Schor) ofFeminism Meets Queer Theory(IUP, 1997) andThe Essential Difference(IUP, 1994).

Introduction,Judith Butler and Elizabeth Weed

Part I: Reading Joan Wallach Scott
1. Speaking Up, Talking Back: Joan Scott's Critical Feminism,Judith Butler

Part II: The Case of History
2. Language, Experience, and Identity: Joan W. Scott and the Theoretical Challenge to Historil#9