Tutor: Rebecca Earle

Seminar Questions

• 1. What is ‘gender’? Is this truly a useful category of historical analysis? What does the concept contribute to a study of sexuality? What does it contribute to the study of history?
  2. How different is Judith Butler’s view of gender from that of Scott? Compare it with Hall’s view of (cultural) identity. What use (if any) can historians make of Butler’s interpretation of gender identity as a performance? Do you find either approach intelligible?
  3. Describe Laqueur’s thesis about the move from a ‘one-sex’ to a ‘two-sex’ model. Is sexuality any more fixed than gender identity?
  4. Explain Foucault’s view of the relationship between knowledge and power. What role does desire play in Foucault’s vision?

Core reading

Please Read at least TWO of the following:

Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge (London, 1990), especially Chapter 1: ‘Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire’, and pp. 134-41: ‘From Interiority to Gender Performatives’.

Foucault, Michael, The History of Sexuality (New York, 1973), vol. 1, part 1: We ‘Other Victorians’, and Chapter 1: ‘The Incitement to Discourse’.

Hall, Stuart, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathon Rutherford (London, 1990).

Laqueur, Thomas, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, 1990), Introduction.

Scott, Joan, Gender and the Politics of History, Columbia University Press (1988), chapter 2: ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’. (Also in American Historical Review, vol. 91:5 (1986).)

Further reading:

Chojnacki, Stanley, Women and Men in Renaissance Venice: Twelve Essays on Patrician Society (Baltimore, 2000)

Flather, Amanda, Gender and Space in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 2007)

Gowing, Laura, Gender Relations in Early Modern England (Harlow, 2012)

Heijden, Manon van der, Women and Crime in Early Modern Holland, trans. David McKay (Leiden, 2016)

Karras, Ruth Mazo, From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe (Philadelphia, 2003)

King, Helen, The One-Sex Body on Trial: The Classical and Early Modern Evidence (Farnham, 2013)

Lidman, Satu, Gender, Violence and Attitudes: Lessons from Early Modern Europe, trans. Eva Malkki (London, 2018)

Meade, T.A., and M.E. Wiesner-Hanks, eds, A Companion to Global Gender History, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 2020) [Especially Chapters 11-22]

Miller, Naomi J., and Naomi Yavneh, Gender and Early Modern Constructions of Childhood (Burlington, VT, 2011).

Moulton, Mo, '"Both Your Sexes": A Non-Binary Approach to Gender History, Trans Studies and the Making of the Self in Modern Britain', History Workshop Journal 95 (2023).

Munns, Jessica, and Penny Richards, Gender, Power and Privilege in Early Modern Europe (Harlow, 2003)

Muravyeva, Marianna G., and Raisa Maria Toivo, eds, Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (New York, 2013)

Poska, Allyson M., Jane Couchman, and Katherine A. McIver, eds, The Ashgate Research Companion to Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (London, 2016)

Rocke, Michael, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (New York, 1996)

Van Gent, Jacqueline, and Susan Broomhall, eds, Governing Masculinities in the Early Modern Period: Regulating Selves and Others (London, 2011)