The Question of Gender

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?

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).

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 Historical Studies, Miguel A. Cabrera
3. Out of Their Orbit: Celebrities and Eccentrics in Nineteenth-Century France, Mary Louise Roberts
4. Historicially Speaking: Gender and Citizenship in Colonial India, Mrinalini Sinha
5. Gender and the Figure of the 'Moderate Muslim': Feminism in the Twenty-first Century, Elora Shehabuddin
6. A Double-Edged Sword: Sexual Democracy, Gender Norms, and Racialized Rhetoric, Éric Fassin
Part III: Seeing the Question
7. Seeing beyond the Norm: Interpreting Gender in the Visual Arts, Mary D. Sheriff
8. Unlikely Couplings: The Gendering of Print Technology in the French Fin-de-Siècle, Janis Bergman-Carton
9. Screening the Avant-Garde Face, Mary Ann Doane
Part IV: Body and Sexuality in Question
10. The Sexual Schema: Transposition and Transgenderism in Phenomenology of Perception, Gayle Salamon
11. Foucault and Feminism's Prodigal Children, Lynne Huffer
12. From the 'Useful' to the 'Impossible' in Joan W. Scott, Elizabeth Weed
Thinking in Time: An Epilogue on Ethics and Politics, Wendy Brown
Contributors
Index