Gender Theory in Troubled Times

by Kathleen Lennon, Rachel Alsop

Theorizing gender is more urgent and highly political than ever before. These are times, in many countries, of increased visibility of women in public life and high-profile campaigns against sexual violence and harassment. Challenges to fixed, traditional gender norms have paved the way for the recognition of gay marriage and gender recognition acts allowing people to change the gender assigned to them at birth. Yet these are also times of religious and political backlash by the alt right, the demonization of the very term ‘gender’ and a renewed embrace of the ‘naturalness’ of gendered difference as ordained by God or Science. 
 
A follow-up to the authors’ 2002 text,  Theorizing Gender , this timely and necessary intervention revisits gender theory for contemporary times. Refusing a singular ‘truth about gender’, the authors explore the multiple strands which go into making our gendered identities, in the context of materialist and intersectional perspectives interwoven with phenomenological and performative ones. The resulting critical overview will be a welcome and invaluable guide for students and scholars of gender across the social sciences and humanities.

Genres: Gender, Feminism

304 pages, Hardcover

Published February 10, 2020

Reviews

[Sari Hellara Hernández · Rating 3 out of 5]

(3.5) I read this book for a course called “Theorizing Gender and Intersectionality” alongside other articles. It is a great introductory academic reading for the minor “Gender and diversity” I’m pursuing. I have a lot of issues with the paradoxically oversimplification and overcomplexification of trans and gnc identities in the chapter “Making sense of our (gendered) selves”. I am against the forceful attempt to understand peoples’ identities because it somehow aims to rationalize them (which is ethnocentric and lacks relativism). On the other hand, I found the chapter on Intersectionality particularly enlightening because it underlines different perspectives on the concept or rather the term.

[James Critchley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This theory on gender perfectly puts forward the case for an inclusive feminism, which is based on a collective effort to see past the binary nature of the mainstream, which ultimately, entraps us all.

[Zeena Kalina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent textbook for the topic of gender, with its own views. The section on intersectionality is especially well developed.