Gender

“Gender” is difficult. Like the terms with which it most often travels (“race,” “sex,” and “sexuality”), gender is a complex and contested concept that, although used quite widely and more and more frequently in both academic and nonacademic contexts, means significantly different things to different people and across different institutional locations. Does it name an essential part of what it means to be a (particular) human being, a fundamental attribute that directs our sense of self and our outward presentation of that self, and that guides our interactions with others, especially our sexual attractions, encounters, and relationships? Does that description underestimate our agency, failing to allow for the possibility that we direct, guide, and perform gender, or that at the very least gender is malleable and fluid enough that our presentation of “it” is a combination of willfulness and inheritance (whether from the biological or the social/cultural or both)? And if much of the feminist scholarship produced by women of color over the past forty years has encouraged an intersectional approach to power, knowledge, embodiment, and subjectivity, what tools and collaborations are most conducive to approaching gender not monologically but as mutually constitutive with other categories of difference?