Gender and Sexuality in History

Gender Theory

This is a brief guide to the history of gender and sexuality with a focus in theory.

What's on This Page by Topic

Anthologies and Readers

Feminist Epistemologies

Feminism (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's 2013 TEDxEuston talk "We should all be feminists."

We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Call Number: O'Neill Stacks HQ1206 .A35 2015
This personal, eloquently-argued essay-offers readers a unique definition of feminism for the twenty-first century, one rooted in inclusion and awareness.

Feminism, Identity, and the Third World (Uma Narayan)

Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third-World Feminism by Uma Narayan
ISBN: 9781135025069
Dislocating Cultures takes aim at the related notions of nation, identity, and tradition to show how Western and Third World scholars have misrepresented Third World cultures and feminist agendas. Drawing attention to the political forces that have spawned, shaped, and perpetuated these misrepresentations since colonial times, Uma Narayan inspects the underlying problems which "culture" poses for the respect of difference and cross-cultural understanding.

Feminism and Blackness (bell hooks)

Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black by bell hooks
ISBN: 9781138821729
In childhood, bell hooks was taught that "talking back" meant speaking as an equal to an authority figure and daring to disagree and/or have an opinion. In this collection of personal and theoretical essays, hooks reflects on her signature issues of racism and feminism, politics and pedagogy.

bell hooks at The New School in 2014 with "Are You Still a Slave? Liberating the Black Female Body."

Feminism and the Decolonial (Talpade Mohanty)

Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity by Chandra Talpade Mohanty
ISBN: 0822330105
Publication Date: 2003-02-28
Bringing together classic and new writings of the trailblazing feminist theorist Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders addresses some of the most pressing and complex issues facing contemporary feminism. Forging vital links between daily life and collective action and between theory and pedagogy, Mohanty has been at the vanguard of Third World and international feminist thought and activism for nearly two decades.

Interview with Chandra Talpade Mohanty from 2019 with VIDC on "feminist activism and solidarity across borders."

Feminism and the Second Sex (Simone de Beauvoir)

Clips of Simone de Beauvoir from a 1967 interview discussing feminism and the Second Sex.

The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir; Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (translators)
Call Number: O'Neill Stacks HQ1208 .B352 2010
ISBN: 9780307265562
Simone de Beauvoir’s masterpiece weaves together history, philosophy, economics, biology, and a host of other disciplines to analyze the Western notion of “woman” and to explore the power of sexuality.

Feminism and Sociobiology (Donna Haraway)

Simians, Cyborgs, and Women by Donna J. Haraway
Simians, Cyborgs and Women is a powerful collection of ten essays written between 1978 and 1989. Although on the surface, simians, cyborgs and women may seem an odd threesome, Haraway describes their profound link as "creatures" which have had a great destabilizing place in Western evolutionary technology and biology.

Donna Haraway in 2017 at the SAn Francisco Art Institute on "Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene."

Feminism and the Subaltern (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak)

The The Beatrice Bain Research Group's Annual Keynote Talk with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on "Situating Feminism" from 2010.

The Spivak Reader by Gayatri Spivak; Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean (eds.)
Call Number: O'Neill Stacks HM101 .S7733 1996
Among the foremost feminist critics to have emerged to international eminence over the last fifteen years, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has relentlessly challenged the high ground of established theoretical discourse in literary and cultural studies. Although her rigorous reading of various authors has often rendered her work difficult terrain for those unfamiliar with poststructuralism, this collection makes significant strides in explicating Spivak's complicated theories of reading.

Feminism, Gender, and Racism (Angela Davis)

Angela Davis in 2018 interview with Channel 4 News on feminism, communism and being a Black Panther during the civil rights movement.

Women, Race, and Class by Angela Y. Davis
A powerful study of the women's liberation movement in the U.S., from abolitionist days to the present, that demonstrates how it has always been hampered by the racist and classist biases of its leaders.

Gender Difference (Luce Irigaray)

Luce Irigaray: Key Writings by Luce Irigaray
Call Number: O'Neill Stacks B2430.I71 I75 2004
From her early ground-breaking work on linguistics to her later revolutionary work on the ethics of sexual difference, Irigaray has positioned herself as one of the essential thinkers of our time.

Gender Variability (Jack Halberstam)

Jack Halberstam's 2017 talk "Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Guide to Gender Variance"

Female Masculinity by Jack Halberstam
Call Number: O'Neill Stacks HQ75.5 .H33 2018
In this quintessential work of queer theory, Jack Halberstam takes aim at the protected status of male masculinity and shows that female masculinity has offered a distinct alternative to it for well over two centuries.

Gender as a Category of Analysis (Joan W. Scott)

Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis by Joan W. Scott
The American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (December 1986): 1053-1075.
The connection between gender and grammar is discussed. The implications of using gender as a category of historical analysis are explored.

Joan Wallach Scott's 2013 talk at the WoodrowWilsonCenter on "Secularism and Gender Equality."

Gender as Performance (Judith Butler)

Judith Butler briefly describing how "Your Behavior Creates Your Gender" in 2011.

Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity by Judith P. Butler
Call Number: O'Neill Stacks HQ1154 .B88 2006
Arguing that traditional feminism is wrong to look to a natural, 'essential' notion of the female, or indeed of sex or gender, Butler starts by questioning the category 'woman' and continues in this vein with examinations of 'the masculine' and 'the feminine'. Best known however, but also most often misinterpreted, is Butler's concept of gender as a reiterated social performance rather than the expression of a prior reality.

Gender in an African Sense (Oyèrónḱẹ Oyěwùmí)

Conversation at Rhodes University with Prof Magubane and Prof Oyèrónḱẹ Oyěwùmí on "Gender and Motherhood" on 21 June 2016.

The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses by Oyèrónḱẹ Oyěwùmí
Call Number: JSTOR
"The "woman question", this book asserts, is a Western one, and not a proper lens for viewing African society. A work that rethinks gender as a Western contruction, The Invention of Women offers a new way of understanding both Yoruban and Western cultures."

Intersectionality (Kimberlé Crenshaw)

Kimberlé Crenshaw's 2016 WOW keynote "On Intersectionality."

Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis by Cho, Sumi ; Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams ; Mccall, Leslie
Article from Signs. Intersectional insights and frameworks are put into practice in a multitude of highly contested, complex, and unpredictable ways. We group such engagements with intersectionality into three loosely defined sets of practices: applications of an intersectional framework or investigations of intersectional dynamics; debates about the scope and content of intersectionality as a theoretical and methodological paradigm; and political interventions employing an intersectional lens.

Queerness as Borderland (Gloria Anzaldúa)

Borderlands / La Frontera by Gloria Anzaldúa
Call Number: O'Neill Stacks PS3551.N95 B6 2012
Remaps our understanding of what a "border" is, presenting it not as a simple divide between here and there, us and them, but as a psychic, social, and cultural terrain that we inhabit, and that inhabits all of us.

Queerness and the Closet (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick)

Epistemology of the Closet by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Working from classic texts of European and American writers--including Melville, James, Nietzsche, Proust, and Wilde--Sedgwick analyzes a turn-of-the-century historical moment in which sexual orientation became as important a demarcation of personhood as gender had been for centuries. In her preface to this updated edition Sedgwick places the book both personally and historically, looking specifically at the horror of the first wave of the AIDS epidemic and its influence on the text.

Gender and the Media (Rosalind Gill)

Gender and the Media by Rosalind Gill
Call Number: O'Neill Stacks P96 .S45 G56 2007
Offers a criticalintroduction to the study of gender in the media, and an up-to-dateassessment of the key issues and debates.

Queerness and Trans Identity (Riki Wilchins)

The 2009 "The MANgina Monologues (A One Trans Show)" starring Riki Wilchins from 2009.

Read my Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender by Riki Wilchins
Call Number: O'Neill Stacks HQ77.8.W55 A3 1997

Masculinities (Todd W. Reeser)

Masculinities in Theory by Todd W. Reeser
Call Number: O'Neill Stacks BF175.5 .M37 R44 2010
Masculinities in Theory is a clear, concise, andcomprehensive introduction to the field of masculinity studies froma humanities perspective. Serves as a much-needed introduction to the field for students and scholars of cultural studies, literature, art, film ,communication, history, and gender studies.

Sex (Michel Foucault)

The History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault; Robert Hurley (translator)
Michel Foucult offers an iconoclastic exploration of why we feel compelled to continually analyze and discuss sex, and of the social and mental mechanisms of power that cause us to direct the questions of what we are to what our sexuality is.

O'Neill Library

Bapst Library

Burns Library

Educational Resource Center

Law Library

Social Work Library

Theology & Ministry Library

O'Connor Library

Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies

Gender and Sexuality in History

Gender Theory

What's on This Page by Topic

Anthologies and Readers

Feminist Epistemologies

Feminism (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)

Feminism, Identity, and the Third World (Uma Narayan)

Feminism and Blackness (bell hooks)

Feminism and the Decolonial (Talpade Mohanty)

Feminism and the Second Sex (Simone de Beauvoir)

Feminism and Sociobiology (Donna Haraway)

Feminism and the Subaltern (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak)

Feminism, Gender, and Racism (Angela Davis)

Gender Difference (Luce Irigaray)

Gender Variability (Jack Halberstam)

Gender as a Category of Analysis (Joan W. Scott)

Gender as Performance (Judith Butler)

Gender in an African Sense (Oyèrónḱẹ Oyěwùmí)

Intersectionality (Kimberlé Crenshaw)

Queerness as Borderland (Gloria Anzaldúa)

Queerness and the Closet (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick)

Gender and the Media (Rosalind Gill)

Queerness and Trans Identity (Riki Wilchins)

Masculinities (Todd W. Reeser)

Sex (Michel Foucault)