Butler, Judith and Elizabeth Weed, eds. The Question of Gender: Joan W. Scott’s Critical Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011.

 

Twenty-five years after Joan Scott published her groundbreaking article, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” scholars from multiple disciplines reflect on the ways in which Scott’s bold questions have informed their work. The essays in this volume cut across vectors of race, class, sexuality, religion, colonialism, and citizenship while treading the globe from India to France to ground diverse case studies. By contextualizing Scott’s questions within their own research, thirteen scholars from history, literature, and philosophy illustrate the dynamic uses of gender. They conclude that gender’s analytical uses are as myriad and complex as the hierarchies of power that it intersects. This thought-provoking volume confirms the continuous critical and creative potential of gender as a “question” of analysis.

Katie Jarvis

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. Historically 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

 

 

 

 

---

---