40 years ago, historian Joan Scott published "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis" in The American Historical Review and with it strengthened the formation of gender history within Anglo-American academia. Scott and others argued for seeing gender as a social and cultural construct and to historically analyze how social constructions of gender shape hierarchies and power structures in connection with social constructions of race, class, and sexuality. Gender history, at its onset, was thus not 'merely' the study of men and women but a perspective through which all processes and relations could be understood.
In 2010, Scott returned to her article's arguments to critique the way gender history proceeded from 1986 onwards, Scott observed that rather than using gender as a conceptual framework, scholars often used it to describe "women" and "men" as stable, obvious categories rather than interrogating the construction of those categories themselves. In 2010, Scott asked whether gender was "Still a Useful Category of Analysis?"
In 2025, the political right worldwide has intensified its positions on gender. The president of the United States has issued orders that recognize only two "immutably fixed sexes" (male and female), curtailing protections around diversity in legal, institutional and ideological terms. Gender-based violence, in the form of intimate partner violence, femicide, sexual violence, continues to occur worldwide. Research infrastructure, the type of which Joan Scott and her contemporaries established, faces funding cuts for projects that study gender identities, intersectionality, and/or women's health. Gender, thus, is a threatened category of historical analysis and a necessary one to trace current developments.
This course begins with an historiographical overview of Gender History as a tradition of critical, historical inquiry. This means, we will explore the foundations of the approach, its debates and tensions as articulated by scholars around the world. We will consider what questions Gender History seeks to address and how. The course follows to identify methodological problems of gender history. As far as gender history seeks to challenge traditional historical narratives that takes the Anglo/European male as a universal historical subject it faces unique challenges in source availability and interpretation. The course concludes with the study and practice of approaches to deal with these problems.
Students will submit assignments in accordance with their study guidelines and may do so in either English or German.
- Kursleiter*in: Dr. Riley Linebaugh