New Books In Gender Studies

Antoinette Burton's Gender History: A Very Short Introduction introduces the field of gender history--its origins, development, reception, recalibrations, and frictions. It offers a set of working definitions of gender as a descriptive category and as a category of historical analysis, tracing the emergence, usage, and applicability of these entwined subjects across a range of times and places since the 1970s. Inevitably political, gender history has taken aim at the broader field of historical narrative by asking who counts as a historical subject, what difference gender makes, and how attention to it subverts reigning assumptions of what power, culture, economics, and identity have been in the past--and what they are today. The book explores how gender analysis has changed interpretations of the histories of slavery, capitalism, migration, and empire. As a field, gender history has been extraordinarily influential in shaping several generations of scholars and students. The fact that its early emphasis on t