Gender as a Category of Analysis in Development and Environmental History
In 2010, reflecting on her landmark 1986 article "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," Joan Scott wondered whether, since the original article's publication, the category of gender had "lost its critical edge." She noted how it had often come to refer simply to the roles assigned to "women" and "men," while those categories themselves were assumed to be determined by biological "sex" and thus stable and self explanatory. In other words, the gender/sex binary persisted "despite a generation of scholarship aimed at deconstructing that opposition." Scott proposed that gender as an analytical category continues to be useful today only if it is "taken as an invitation to think critically about how the meanings of sexed bodies are produced in relation to one another, how these meanings are deployed and changed."
International Journal of Middle East Studies