{"title":"Gender Before the Gender Turn","authors":"A. Wilson","doi":"10.1353/dia.2021.0001","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The “gender turn” in feminist thought describes the 1980s shift from a focus on women within male-dominated systems of power to poststructural theories of subject formation. But how did gender become available for feminist thought in the first place? Following recent work that emphasizes the assembled nature of feminist genealogies (Hemmings 2011; Wiegman 2012), this essay treats gender as a cultural object in order to trace its entry into feminism. An origin of gender as a category of person well known to transgender studies lies in the psychomedical treatment of intersex and transgender patients in mid-century American clinics. Yet by tracking the term, we also find a plurality of uses of gender that influenced feminist discourse, including the (technically mistaken) substitution of gender for sex. Radical intellectuals exploring vocabularies for anti-essentialist and anti-racist thought already experimented with gender before the gender turn.","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2000,"publicationDate":"2022-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"2","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2021.0001","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERARY THEORY & CRITICISM","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 2
Abstract
Abstract:The “gender turn” in feminist thought describes the 1980s shift from a focus on women within male-dominated systems of power to poststructural theories of subject formation. But how did gender become available for feminist thought in the first place? Following recent work that emphasizes the assembled nature of feminist genealogies (Hemmings 2011; Wiegman 2012), this essay treats gender as a cultural object in order to trace its entry into feminism. An origin of gender as a category of person well known to transgender studies lies in the psychomedical treatment of intersex and transgender patients in mid-century American clinics. Yet by tracking the term, we also find a plurality of uses of gender that influenced feminist discourse, including the (technically mistaken) substitution of gender for sex. Radical intellectuals exploring vocabularies for anti-essentialist and anti-racist thought already experimented with gender before the gender turn.
期刊介绍:
For over thirty years, diacritics has been an exceptional and influential forum for scholars writing on the problems of literary criticism. Each issue features articles in which contributors compare and analyze books on particular theoretical works and develop their own positions on the theses, methods, and theoretical implications of those works.