Gender: A History of the Category, 1980s to the Present

Since the 1980s, the defining category of gender history – i.e. gender – has been firmly linked by scholars to the notion of historical variability and instability.  And, yet, the field has also generated a critique that, in striking contrast to the definitional matrix of gender as "variable," "fluid," and "contradictory" posits its work in academic literature of the 1990s and 2000s as "fixing" and "reifying" of the very heteronormative oppositional binary it was supposed to deconstruct.  The question that I derive from this ongoing controversy is how a pioneering discipline formed around poststructuralist presumptions of instability of cultural form could reify the cultural terms under its critical analysis.  To answer this question, I will undertake a history of the gender category from the 1980s to the present and will investigate its formative definitional and interpretive limitations through examples from scholarship on 20th Century European and Russian history.  My particular focus is a lasting scholarly presumption of heterosexual subjectivity as an unwavering oppositional binary, the notion, which I argue, continues to inform definitional and interpretive parameters of the present day gender category.  An exploration of historical and theoretical ways of conceptualizing heterosexual subjectivity, sexual difference, and gender forms other than along opposition-bound imperatives is at the center of this paper.