Gender History and Its Discontents: From Feminist Tool to Postmodern Challenge

In the 1980s, gender emerged as a category that serviced feminism while also illuminating other modes of identity formation. Scholars revisited race and class through its lens and explored sexuality with new nuance. By teasing gender apart from what was intertwined with it, historians of homosexuality, queerness, and transsexuality could reveal its constructed conflation with sexuality over time. They insisted that sex and gender are not part and parcel, though deviant and normalized conceptions of both have mutually shaped each other, especially since the rise of sexology in the twentieth century.

Much work in the history of sexuality followed Michel Foucault’s explication of power disseminated through sexual repression. Foucault and others revealed sexuality—and the male and female body—as historical constructs. By 1990, philosopher Denise Riley suggested the category ‘woman’ had a ‘peculiar temporality,’ while Thomas Laqueur and Cynthia Eagle Russett showed how agents of ‘Science’ shaped seemingly natural anatomic categories. As Jeffrey Weeks posited ‘playing sexual roles,’ Judith Butler asked if being female was a ‘natural fact’ or a ‘cultural performance.’ She concluded that naturalness is constituted through ‘discursively constrained performative acts,’ challenging phallogocentrism and compulsory heterosexuality as default modes.

While ‘woman’—her representations, sexuality, and body—was destabilized, systematic study of normative masculinity remained underdeveloped by the early 1990s. A reluctance stemmed from gender history’s feminist origins focused on the invisible female. Critics warned masculinity studies merely repackaged male-centred history, often promoted by white men with little stake in changing the status quo. Proponents, like Michael Kimmel, argued that exposing gendered power dynamics served feminism by revealing how unawareness perpetuates inequality. Constructs of manhood are shown to empower selectively but also pressure and constrain men.

Since the mid-1990s, studies on manhood formation from antiquity to the present reveal it as a patriarchal and historical process. As Konstantin Dierks notes, gender has become part of the standard analytical apparatus in many monographs—a integration less consistently achieved in women’s history itself. Probing the cultural construction of sexual difference allows historians to decenter the masculine subject, question transparent institutions, and find hidden meanings that empower those previously cast as historical victims.

Yet these interpretive possibilities also render history a daunting enterprise. Postmodernism unlocked theoretical shackles but cautioned against imposing meaning on the past. Historians now must problematize what seemed transparent about experience, identity, and agency. Many historians of women’s liberation, who based herstory on empirically knowable experience, became disenchanted. In 1991, Joan Wallach Scott challenged the authority of ‘experience’ itself, viewing it as a linguistic event bound by established meanings, raising questions about understanding a subject’s self-conception.

Post-cultural turn, historians confront difficult questions: Can we understand how aboriginal, subaltern, or non-Western women made sense of their gendered pasts without shared Western categories? Experience is hard to capture even in a subject’s own words; when filtered through others, it becomes further distorted. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak famously pondered if the subaltern—like the widow practicing sati—could be represented in Western discourse at all, arguing the colonial subject is always constituted as ‘Other.’ This points to Western historical procedures as an insurmountable problem for feminist history.

The rise of multiculturalism and post-structural critique has particularized and problematized historical women’s experiences. However, older popularizers of women’s history worry this fragments the original intent to unite women through a collective struggle. Greater awareness of difference has led to a coreless, fragmented feeling in the field. Some fear the unifying function is excised and gender theory has stripped women’s history of its feminist force, turning women’s plight into a means to understand nationhood or imperialism rather than an end in itself.

Kathleen Canning argues gender has facilitated broader identity interrogations without sacrificing feminist aims, redefining inquiry’s terms. Yet political and generational rifts persist, evident in debates over naming university departments ‘Women’s’ or ‘Gender’ Studies. Many historians of women’s liberation defend a history that brings real, not just symbolic, women out of the shadows to highlight shared human struggles. Younger historians, while appreciating recovery, increasingly seek truths that may seem tangential to women themselves.

Joan Wallach Scott anticipated this confrontation, insisting politics and gender history are not antithetical to recovering the female subject. She hoped gender history would retain its radical politics, with postmodern theory reradicalizing it for future generations. Perhaps gender analysis’s most revolutionary effect has been on historical practice overall, serving as a generative force for the new cultural history. Early French feminists and women’s historians made suppositions about social construction that may have pioneered the questioning of fixed identity.

Debates over theory, method, and praxis echo historian Mary Beard’s early attempt to create an inclusive tradition. Though she borrowed academic concepts, she believed her nascent gender history had to be practiced outside the academy by women themselves. While gender is now largely an academic tool, its origins are tied to a broader feminist movement. The tension between recovering experience and explaining the mechanisms that shape it will continue to define the histories of women and gender.