Antoinette Burton argues that gender history is hiding in plain sight at work everywhere we
look. This volume introduces the field of gender history--its origins development reception
recalibrations and frictions. It offers a set of working definitions of gender as a
descriptive category and as a category of historical analysis tracing the emergence usage
and applicability of these entwined subjects across a range of times and places since the
1970s. Inevitably political gender history has taken aim at the broader field of historical
narrative by asking who counts as a historical subject what difference gender makes and how
attention to it subverts reigning assumptions of what power culture economics and identity
have been in the past--and what they are today. The book explores how gender analysis has
changed interpretations of the histories of slavery capitalism migration and empire. As a
field gender history has been extraordinarily influential in shaping several generations of
scholars and students. The fact that its early emphasis on the relationship between masculinity
and femininity was part of a larger set of challenges to universal history by poststructuralism
postmodernism and postcolonialism positions it at the heart of some of the most fractious
intellectual debates of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. And as part of
the movement toward gender equality that is key to modern western progress gender history has
been caught up in the culture wars that continue to shape post-global society. What is
intriguing and ultimately defining about gender history is the way that the centrality of
gender so important for revealing how identity is structured in and through regimes of power
has been unable to hold its own over the half century of the field's own history. The practice
of gender history has always run up against the forces of race class and sexuality that
challenge the singularity of gender itself as an explanatory category of historical analysis.
That powerful unruly tension is at the heart of this Very Short Introduction .
