When historians explore the evolution of ‘modern’ ideas of gender, the eighteenth century is usually seen as the time when changes start to accelerate. Certainly from its last decades onwards femi­ninity is a busy category, performing, in Mary Poovey’s useful formulation, a great deal of ‘ideological work’ in western culture, involved in the making and […]

In the opening pages of ‘Femininity’, the fifth of his New Introductory Lectures (1933), Sigmund Freud poses the ‘riddle of the nature of femininity’ as an unresolved question that ‘people have knocked their heads against’ throughout human history. Commiserating with one sex and winding up the other, Freud goes on, tongue-in-cheek, to separate and gender […]

As an even more fundamental example of how gender has become a contested term, consider the work of the French writer Monique Wittig. Wittig combines the roles of radical feminist theorist and novelist and her work has been principally concerned with prob­lems of gender and language. At first sight her ideas seem to be sharply […]

As much as any single figure could, Stoller put the distinction between sex and gender on the map for writers and researchers in the humanities and the social sciences. But if his basic ideas quickly became commonplace, they were also soon being used in ways that he could not have anticipated. With the tremendous revival […]

No one knows precisely when and where gender was initially used to refer to the social and cultural aspects of sexual difference, but it is clear that the term was already current in sexology by the early 1960s. For example, gender does not figure in Alex Comfort’s post-war overview of Sexual Behaviour in Society (1950) […]

Despite sometimes sounding as if they were mere cliches, little more than the superannuated jargon of interpersonal relations, phrases like gender role or gender identity are in fact relatively new. Before the Second World War they didn’t exist and other closely connected expressions — such as gender-bender — did not appear until the early 1980s. […]

‘Gender’ is now one of the busiest, most restless terms in the English language, a word that crops up everywhere, yet whose uses seem to be forever changing, always on the move, producing new and often surprising inflections of meaning. We talk about gender roles, worry about the gender gap, question whether our ideas are […]

Gender is a vast and expanding subject; in this book we have tried to guide our readers through what seem to us to be some of the most important debates and issues, especially as they impact on culture and representation. Although it is impossible to give a comprehensive treatment of all the cultural and historical […]

The New Critical Idiom is a series of introductory books which seeks to extend the lexicon of literary terms, in order to address the radical changes which have taken place in the study of literature during the last decades of the twentieth century. The aim is to provide clear, well-illustrated accounts of the full range […]

Second edition The concept of gender continues to be a central issue in literary and cultural studies, with a significance that crosses disciplinary boundaries and provokes lively debate. In this fully revised and updated second edition, David Glover and Cora Kaplan offer a lucid and illuminating introduction to ‘gender’ and its implications, including: • an […]