A History of 'Gender'
| Autor: | Joanne Meyerowitz |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2008 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | The American Historical Review. 113:1346-1356 |
| ISSN: | 1937-5239 0002-8762 |
| DOI: | 10.1086/ahr.113.5.1346 |
| Popis: | SCHOLARLY ARTICLES TEND TO HAVE LIMITED SHELF LIVES, but twenty years on, Joan Scott's "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis" has no discernible date of expiration. A cursory Google search leads to dozens of syllabi that feature it as required reading, and the figures from JSTOR attest to its durable popularity. Of all the American Historical Review articles on JSTOR, Scott's has had by far the most traffic. Since JSTOR first began posting scholarly articles online in 1997, users have accessed "Gender" more than 38,000 times and printed more than 25,000 copies. For the past five years, it has consistently ranked in the top spot as the most frequently viewed and most frequently printed of JSTOR's AHR articles.1 What elevates one article above the rest? What creates the reputation that makes an article required reading for more than twenty years? In part, it may be a matter of architecture. Scott built "Gender" with an artful use of argument. In one brief essay, she managed to summarize the advent of gender history, provide critiques of earlier theories of women's subordination, introduce historians to deconstructionist methods, and lay out an agenda for future historical studies. But as we all know, academic reputation rests on more than compellingly structured argument, even when the argument is displayed well in a top-tier scholarly journal.2 For historians, the surest way to explain a text is to place it in historical context. Thus, a short history of "Gender" the article might help us assess its rise to prominence and its influence within the field of U.S. history. And an even shorter history of "gender" the concept might suggest the article's longer-lasting contribution to American social thought. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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