Approaches: Gender - historiography and key thinkers

Susan Stryker

• Pioneer of interdisciplinary ‘transgender studies’

• 2006 ‘(De)Subjugated Knowledges’ introduction

• Focuses on denaturalising normative assumptions between gendered characteristics

• re-articulation of subjectivity-body-social role connections

Kimberle Crenshaw

• ‘Mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of colour’ 1991

• Case studies on rape and battery demonstrate the failure to address the specific needs of women of colour

• the essentialised subjects of feminism and race activists limit who they can understand and help

  • sometimes contradict each other in ways that stop anything useful getting done in favour of keeping a theoretical model neat

Joan Scott

• ‘Gender: a useful category of historical analysis’ 1986

• Argues that ‘women’ studied successfully as a subject, but not so much ‘gender’ as a historical process

• Thus one that changes by time and place, historicised rather than naturalised

• Political and social history not integrated fields

• Need for scholarship on masculinity, and colonialism

K. Harvey and A. Shepard

• ‘What have historians done with masculinity'? Reflections on five centuries of British history c. 1500-1900’ 2005

• Looking at field’s recent growth since J. Tosh 1994 ‘What should historians do with masculinity?’

• More comprehensive understanding of gendered systems or the covert return of Great Man history?

• R. W. Connell’s framework of hegemonic and subordinate masculinities: is the latter in rebellion or independent?

• Stresses importance of contexts and intersectionality

K. Canning & S. O. Rose

• ‘Gender, Citizenship, and Subjectivity: some Historical and Theoretical Considerations’ 2001

• Separates ‘citizenship’ into practice and status

• Gender marks which people with the status get to participate in the practice (or vice versa?)

• Rejects idea of a private, apolitical sphere

Gail Hershatter

• ‘Disquiet in the house of gender’ 2012

• Communist China case studies

• Critical of the unquestioning self importance of gender studies, ignoring circumstantial specifics in favour of dramatic models

Pat Thane

• ‘The history of the Gender Division of Labour in Britain: reflections on “herstory” in accounting: the first eighty years’ 1992

• Nineteenth century strengthening of gender boundaries in labour due to a growing middle class which didn’t need whole family in waged work

• ‘reserve labour force’ model fails to explain complex, often inefficient, gendering

• Failure of overarching theories to explain patriarchy and capitalism’s interactions

Sarah Knott

• ‘Theorising and historicising mothering’s many labours’ 2020

• ‘motherhood’, as a biological relationship, status, and type of labour, should be separated and historicised

• ‘othermothering’ to refer to community de facto parenting as needed

• ‘shadow mothers’ and ‘care chains’ worked to ease mothering of elite families

• ‘delegated mothering’ a paid relationship

• Economic, technological, educational shaping factors

• Not yet much pushing the gendered limits of mothering

J. M. Bennett

• ‘“History that stands still”: Women’s work in the European Past’ - a review surveying perspectives on women’s economic independence and social status pub. 1985/6

• Feminists eager to find a lost equality that can be reclaimed

  • eg. early modern capitalism took economic activity out of the house, and kept women in it to control the labour market

• historiographical preference for change