Gender Trouble
Encyclopedia
Gender Trouble by Judith Butler
is a highly influential book in academic feminism
and queer theory
. It is also the book credited with creating the seminal notion of gender performativity
. It is considered to be one of the canonical texts of queer theory and postmodern/poststructural feminism.
: the supposition that there exists an identity
and a subject that requires representation in politics and language
. For Butler, "women" and "woman
" are fraught categories, complicated by class
, ethnicity, sexuality
, and other facets of identity. Moreover, the universality presumed by these terms parallels the assumed universality of the patriarchy
, and erases the particularity of oppression
in distinct times and places. Butler thus eschews identity politics
in favor of a new, coalitional feminism that critiques the basis of identity and gender.
She begins her critique of identity and gender by challenging her readers' assumptions about the distinction often made between sex
and gender
. (In this distinction, sex is biological
while gender is culturally constructed.) In the first place, Butler argues, this distinction introduces a split into the supposedly unified subject of feminism, and in the second place, the distinction proves false. Sexed bodies cannot signify without gender, and the apparent existence of sex prior to discourse
and cultural imposition is merely an effect of the functioning of gender. That is, both sex and gender are constructed.
Butler next examines the work of Simone de Beauvoir
and Luce Irigaray
in order to explore the relationship between power and categories of sex and gender. For Beauvoir, women constitute a lack against which men establish their identity; for Irigaray, this dialectic
belongs to a "signifying economy" that excludes the representation of women altogether because it employs phallocentric language. However, as Butler notes, both Beauvoir and Irigaray assume that there exists a female "self-identical being" in need of representation, and their arguments hide the impossibility of "being" a gender at all.
Instead, in her introduction of the central idea of Gender Trouble, Butler argues that gender is performative: no identity exists behind the acts that supposedly "express" gender, and these acts constitute—rather than express—the illusion of the stable gender identity. Furthermore, if the appearance of “being” a gender is thus an effect of culturally influenced acts, then there exists no solid, universal gender: constituted through the practice of performance, the gender "woman" (like the gender "man") remains contingent and open to interpretation and "resignification." In this way, Butler provides an opening for subversive action. She calls for gender trouble, for people to trouble the categories of gender through performance.
’s anthropological structuralism
, in which the incest taboo
necessitates a kinship structure governed by the exchange of women; Joan Riviere
’s psychoanalytic description of “womanliness as a masquerade” that hides masculine identification and therefore also conceals a desire for another woman; and Sigmund Freud
’s psychoanalytic explanation of mourning and melancholia, in which loss prompts the ego to incorporate attributes of the lost loved one—in which, in other words, cathexis
becomes identification. (Both Riviere and Freud center their texts on the Oedipal story (see Oedipus
and Oedipus complex
, a classic example of the incest taboo.) In the course of examining these three accounts of gender identification, Butler extends them in order to emphasize the productive or performative aspects of gender. With Lévi-Strauss, she suggests that incest is “a pervasive cultural fantasy” and that the presence of the taboo generates these desires; with Riviere, she states that mimicry and masquerade form the “essence” of gender; with Freud, she asserts that “gender identification is a kind of melancholia in which the sex of the prohibited object is internalized as a prohibition” (63) and therefore that “same-sexed gender identification” (e.g., the identification of the boy with the masculine gender) depends on an unresolved (but simultaneously forgotten) homosexual cathexis (with the father, not the mother, of the Oedipal myth). For Butler, “heterosexual melancholy is culturally instituted as the price of stable gender identities” (70) and for heterosexuality to remain stable, it demands the notion of homosexuality, which remains prohibited but necessarily within the bounds of culture. Finally, Butler points again to the productivity of the incest taboo, a law which generates—and also regulates—approved heterosexuality and subversive homosexuality, neither of which exists before the law.
:
In response to the work of Jacques Lacan
that posited a paternal Symbolic order and a repression of the "feminine" required for language and culture, Julia Kristeva added women back into the narrative by claiming that poetic language—the "semiotic" —was a surfacing of the maternal body in writing, uncontrolled by the paternal logos
. For Kristeva, poetic writing and maternity
are the sole culturally permissible ways for women to return to the maternal body that bore them, and female homosexuality is an impossibility, a near psychosis
. Butler takes on the arguments of Kristeva, claiming that Kristeva's insistence on a "maternal" that somehow precedes culture and on poetry as a return to the maternal body is an essentialist trap: "Kristeva conceptualizes this maternal instinct as having an ontological status prior to the paternal law, but she fails to consider the way in which that very law might well be the cause of the very desire it is said to repress" (90). Butler argues the notion of "maternity" as the long-lost haven for females is a social construction. Butler invokes Foucault's arguments in The History of Sexuality
to posit that in fact the notion that maternity precedes or defines women is itself a product of discourse. Thus perhaps repression produces the object that it comes to deny; that is, the paternal law (the symbolic) invents a notion of "feminine" that it then "represses."
ii. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity:
Here Butler dismantles part of Foucault's critical introduction to the journals he published of the hermaphrodite Herculine Barbin
, who lived in France during the 19th century and eventually committed suicide when s/he was forced to live as a man by the authorities. In his introduction to the journals Foucault writes of Herculine's early days, when she was able to live her gender or "sex" as she saw fit as a "happy limbo of nonidentity" (94). Butler reads such a statement as romanticism on Foucault's part, claiming that Foucault's proclamation a blissful identity "prior" to cultural inscription contradicts his work in The History of Sexuality
, in which he posits that the idea of a "real" or "true" or "originary" sexual identity is an illusion, in other words that "sex" is not the solution to the repressive system of power but part of that system itself. Butler instead places Barbin's early day not in a "happy limbo" but along a larger trajectory, always part of a larger network of social control. She suggests finally that Foucault's surprising deviation from his ideas on repression in the introduction might be a sort of "confessional moment," or vindication of Foucault's own homosexuality of which he rarely spoke and on which he permitted himself only once to be interviewed.
iii. Monique Wittig
: Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex:
Here Butler traces Wittig's thinking about lesbianism as the one recourse to the constructed notion of sex. The notion of "sex" is always coded as female, according to Wittig, a way to designate the non-male through an absence. Women, thus reduced to "sex," cannot escape carrying sex as a burden. Wittig argues that even the naming of the body parts creates a fiction and constructs the features themselves, fragmenting what was really once "whole." Language, repeated over time, "produces reality-effects that are eventually misperceived as 'facts" (115).
iv. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions:
Butler begins by questioning the notion that "the body" itself is a natural entity that "admits no genealogy," a usual given without explanation: "How are the contours of the body clearly marked as the taken-for-granted ground or surface upon which gender signification are inscribed, a mere facticity devoid of value, prior to significance?" (129). Building on the thinking of Mary Douglas
outlined in her Purity and Danger, Butler claims that the boundaries of the body have been drawn to instate certain taboos about limits and possibilities of exchange. Thus the hegemonic and homophobic press has read the pollution of the body that AIDS
brings about as corresponding to the pollution of the homosexual's sexual activity, in particular his crossing the forbidden bodily boundary of the perineum. In other words, Butler's claim is that "the body is itself a consequence of taboos that render that body discrete by virtue of its stable boundaries" (133). Butler proposes the practice of drag
as a way to destabilize the exteriority/interiority binary, finally to poke fun at the notion that there is an "original" gender, and to demonstrate playfully to the audience, through an exaggeration, that all gender is in fact scripted, rehearsed, and performed.
All page numbers are from the first edition: Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, Routledge, 1990).
Judith Butler
Judith Butler is an American post-structuralist philosopher, who has contributed to the fields of feminism, queer theory, political philosophy, and ethics. She is a professor in the Rhetoric and Comparative Literature departments at the University of California, Berkeley.Butler received her Ph.D...
is a highly influential book in academic feminism
Feminism
Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...
and queer theory
Queer theory
Queer theory is a field of critical theory that emerged in the early 1990s out of the fields of LGBT studies and feminist studies. Queer theory includes both queer readings of texts and the theorisation of 'queerness' itself...
. It is also the book credited with creating the seminal notion of gender performativity
Gender performativity
Gender Performativity is a term created by post-structuralist feminist philosopher Judith Butler in her 1990 book Gender Trouble. In it, Butler characterizes gender as the effect of reiterated acting, one that produces the effect of a static or normal gender while obscuring the contradiction and...
. It is considered to be one of the canonical texts of queer theory and postmodern/poststructural feminism.
Chapter 1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire
Butler begins Gender Trouble with an attack on one of the central assumptions of feminist theoryFeminist theory
Feminist theory is the extension of feminism into theoretical, or philosophical discourse, it aims to understand the nature of gender inequality...
: the supposition that there exists an identity
Gender identity
A gender identity is the way in which an individual self-identifies with a gender category, for example, as being either a man or a woman, or in some cases being neither, which can be distinct from biological sex. Basic gender identity is usually formed by age three and is extremely difficult to...
and a subject that requires representation in politics and language
Language
Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
. For Butler, "women" and "woman
Woman
A woman , pl: women is a female human. The term woman is usually reserved for an adult, with the term girl being the usual term for a female child or adolescent...
" are fraught categories, complicated by class
Social class
Social classes are economic or cultural arrangements of groups in society. Class is an essential object of analysis for sociologists, political scientists, economists, anthropologists and social historians. In the social sciences, social class is often discussed in terms of 'social stratification'...
, ethnicity, sexuality
Human sexuality
Human sexuality is the awareness of gender differences, and the capacity to have erotic experiences and responses. Human sexuality can also be described as the way someone is sexually attracted to another person whether it is to opposite sexes , to the same sex , to either sexes , or not being...
, and other facets of identity. Moreover, the universality presumed by these terms parallels the assumed universality of the patriarchy
Patriarchy
Patriarchy is a social system in which the role of the male as the primary authority figure is central to social organization, and where fathers hold authority over women, children, and property. It implies the institutions of male rule and privilege, and entails female subordination...
, and erases the particularity of oppression
Oppression
Oppression is the exercise of authority or power in a burdensome, cruel, or unjust manner. It can also be defined as an act or instance of oppressing, the state of being oppressed, and the feeling of being heavily burdened, mentally or physically, by troubles, adverse conditions, and...
in distinct times and places. Butler thus eschews identity politics
Identity politics
Identity politics are political arguments that focus upon the self interest and perspectives of self-identified social interest groups and ways in which people's politics may be shaped by aspects of their identity through race, class, religion, sexual orientation or traditional dominance...
in favor of a new, coalitional feminism that critiques the basis of identity and gender.
She begins her critique of identity and gender by challenging her readers' assumptions about the distinction often made between sex
Sex
In biology, sex is a process of combining and mixing genetic traits, often resulting in the specialization of organisms into a male or female variety . Sexual reproduction involves combining specialized cells to form offspring that inherit traits from both parents...
and gender
Gender
Gender is a range of characteristics used to distinguish between males and females, particularly in the cases of men and women and the masculine and feminine attributes assigned to them. Depending on the context, the discriminating characteristics vary from sex to social role to gender identity...
. (In this distinction, sex is biological
Biological process
A biological process is a process of a living organism. Biological processes are made up of any number of chemical reactions or other events that results in a transformation....
while gender is culturally constructed.) In the first place, Butler argues, this distinction introduces a split into the supposedly unified subject of feminism, and in the second place, the distinction proves false. Sexed bodies cannot signify without gender, and the apparent existence of sex prior to discourse
Discourse
Discourse generally refers to "written or spoken communication". The following are three more specific definitions:...
and cultural imposition is merely an effect of the functioning of gender. That is, both sex and gender are constructed.
Butler next examines the work of Simone de Beauvoir
Simone de Beauvoir
Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir, often shortened to Simone de Beauvoir , was a French existentialist philosopher, public intellectual, and social theorist. She wrote novels, essays, biographies, an autobiography in several volumes, and monographs on philosophy, politics, and...
and Luce Irigaray
Luce Irigaray
Luce Irigaray is a Belgian feminist, philosopher, linguist, psychoanalyst, sociologist and cultural theorist. She is best known for her works Speculum of the Other Woman and This Sex Which Is Not One .-Biography:...
in order to explore the relationship between power and categories of sex and gender. For Beauvoir, women constitute a lack against which men establish their identity; for Irigaray, this dialectic
Dialectic
Dialectic is a method of argument for resolving disagreement that has been central to Indic and European philosophy since antiquity. The word dialectic originated in Ancient Greece, and was made popular by Plato in the Socratic dialogues...
belongs to a "signifying economy" that excludes the representation of women altogether because it employs phallocentric language. However, as Butler notes, both Beauvoir and Irigaray assume that there exists a female "self-identical being" in need of representation, and their arguments hide the impossibility of "being" a gender at all.
Instead, in her introduction of the central idea of Gender Trouble, Butler argues that gender is performative: no identity exists behind the acts that supposedly "express" gender, and these acts constitute—rather than express—the illusion of the stable gender identity. Furthermore, if the appearance of “being” a gender is thus an effect of culturally influenced acts, then there exists no solid, universal gender: constituted through the practice of performance, the gender "woman" (like the gender "man") remains contingent and open to interpretation and "resignification." In this way, Butler provides an opening for subversive action. She calls for gender trouble, for people to trouble the categories of gender through performance.
Chapter 2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix
In the second chapter of Gender Trouble, Butler takes up another commonplace of feminist theory, the patriarchy. She notes that feminists have frequently made recourse to the supposed pre-patriarchal state of culture as a model upon which to base a new, non-oppressive society. For this reason, accounts of the original transformation of sex into gender by means of the incest taboo have proven particularly useful to feminists. Butler revisits three of the most popular: Claude Lévi-StraussClaude Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French anthropologist and ethnologist, and has been called, along with James George Frazer, the "father of modern anthropology"....
’s anthropological structuralism
Structuralism
Structuralism originated in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague and Moscow schools of linguistics. Just as structural linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in linguistics, structuralism...
, in which the incest taboo
Incest taboo
An Incest taboo is any cultural rule or norm that prohibits practices of sexual relations between relatives. All human cultures have norms regarding who is considered suitable and unsuitable sexual and/or marriage partners, and usually certain close relatives are excluded as possible partners...
necessitates a kinship structure governed by the exchange of women; Joan Riviere
Joan Riviere
Joan Hodgson Riviere was a British psychoanalyst, who was both Freud's earliest translator and an influential writer on her own account.-Life and career:...
’s psychoanalytic description of “womanliness as a masquerade” that hides masculine identification and therefore also conceals a desire for another woman; and Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
’s psychoanalytic explanation of mourning and melancholia, in which loss prompts the ego to incorporate attributes of the lost loved one—in which, in other words, cathexis
Cathexis
In psychoanalysis, cathexis is defined as the process of investment of mental or emotional energy in a person, object, or idea. The Greek term cathexis was chosen by James Strachey to render the German term Besetzung in his translation of Sigmund Freud's complete works. For Freud, cathexis is...
becomes identification. (Both Riviere and Freud center their texts on the Oedipal story (see Oedipus
Oedipus
Oedipus was a mythical Greek king of Thebes. He fulfilled a prophecy that said he would kill his father and marry his mother, and thus brought disaster on his city and family...
and Oedipus complex
Oedipus complex
In psychoanalytic theory, the term Oedipus complex denotes the emotions and ideas that the mind keeps in the unconscious, via dynamic repression, that concentrate upon a boy’s desire to sexually possess his mother, and kill his father...
, a classic example of the incest taboo.) In the course of examining these three accounts of gender identification, Butler extends them in order to emphasize the productive or performative aspects of gender. With Lévi-Strauss, she suggests that incest is “a pervasive cultural fantasy” and that the presence of the taboo generates these desires; with Riviere, she states that mimicry and masquerade form the “essence” of gender; with Freud, she asserts that “gender identification is a kind of melancholia in which the sex of the prohibited object is internalized as a prohibition” (63) and therefore that “same-sexed gender identification” (e.g., the identification of the boy with the masculine gender) depends on an unresolved (but simultaneously forgotten) homosexual cathexis (with the father, not the mother, of the Oedipal myth). For Butler, “heterosexual melancholy is culturally instituted as the price of stable gender identities” (70) and for heterosexuality to remain stable, it demands the notion of homosexuality, which remains prohibited but necessarily within the bounds of culture. Finally, Butler points again to the productivity of the incest taboo, a law which generates—and also regulates—approved heterosexuality and subversive homosexuality, neither of which exists before the law.
Chapter 3. Subversive Bodily Acts
i. The Body Politics of Julia KristevaJulia Kristeva
Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, psychoanalyst, sociologist, feminist, and, most recently, novelist, who has lived in France since the mid-1960s. She is now a Professor at the University Paris Diderot...
:
In response to the work of Jacques Lacan
Jacques Lacan
Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who made prominent contributions to psychoanalysis and philosophy, and has been called "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud". Giving yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, Lacan influenced France's...
that posited a paternal Symbolic order and a repression of the "feminine" required for language and culture, Julia Kristeva added women back into the narrative by claiming that poetic language—the "semiotic" —was a surfacing of the maternal body in writing, uncontrolled by the paternal logos
Logos
' is an important term in philosophy, psychology, rhetoric and religion. Originally a word meaning "a ground", "a plea", "an opinion", "an expectation", "word," "speech," "account," "reason," it became a technical term in philosophy, beginning with Heraclitus ' is an important term in...
. For Kristeva, poetic writing and maternity
Maternity
Maternity or motherhood is the social and legal acknowledgment of the parental relationship between a mother and her child.It is specially related with the protection of the baby and the mother within and after the childbirth.-See also:...
are the sole culturally permissible ways for women to return to the maternal body that bore them, and female homosexuality is an impossibility, a near psychosis
Psychosis
Psychosis means abnormal condition of the mind, and is a generic psychiatric term for a mental state often described as involving a "loss of contact with reality"...
. Butler takes on the arguments of Kristeva, claiming that Kristeva's insistence on a "maternal" that somehow precedes culture and on poetry as a return to the maternal body is an essentialist trap: "Kristeva conceptualizes this maternal instinct as having an ontological status prior to the paternal law, but she fails to consider the way in which that very law might well be the cause of the very desire it is said to repress" (90). Butler argues the notion of "maternity" as the long-lost haven for females is a social construction. Butler invokes Foucault's arguments in The History of Sexuality
The History of Sexuality
The History of Sexuality is a three-volume series of books by French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault written between 1976 and 1984...
to posit that in fact the notion that maternity precedes or defines women is itself a product of discourse. Thus perhaps repression produces the object that it comes to deny; that is, the paternal law (the symbolic) invents a notion of "feminine" that it then "represses."
ii. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity:
Here Butler dismantles part of Foucault's critical introduction to the journals he published of the hermaphrodite Herculine Barbin
Herculine Barbin
Herculine Barbin was a French intersex person who was treated as a female at birth but was later redesignated a male after an affair and physical examination.-Biography:...
, who lived in France during the 19th century and eventually committed suicide when s/he was forced to live as a man by the authorities. In his introduction to the journals Foucault writes of Herculine's early days, when she was able to live her gender or "sex" as she saw fit as a "happy limbo of nonidentity" (94). Butler reads such a statement as romanticism on Foucault's part, claiming that Foucault's proclamation a blissful identity "prior" to cultural inscription contradicts his work in The History of Sexuality
The History of Sexuality
The History of Sexuality is a three-volume series of books by French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault written between 1976 and 1984...
, in which he posits that the idea of a "real" or "true" or "originary" sexual identity is an illusion, in other words that "sex" is not the solution to the repressive system of power but part of that system itself. Butler instead places Barbin's early day not in a "happy limbo" but along a larger trajectory, always part of a larger network of social control. She suggests finally that Foucault's surprising deviation from his ideas on repression in the introduction might be a sort of "confessional moment," or vindication of Foucault's own homosexuality of which he rarely spoke and on which he permitted himself only once to be interviewed.
iii. Monique Wittig
Monique Wittig
Monique Wittig was a French author and feminist theorist who wrote about overcoming socially enforced gender roles and who coined the phrase "heterosexual contract". She published her first novel, L'Opoponax, in 1964...
: Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex:
Here Butler traces Wittig's thinking about lesbianism as the one recourse to the constructed notion of sex. The notion of "sex" is always coded as female, according to Wittig, a way to designate the non-male through an absence. Women, thus reduced to "sex," cannot escape carrying sex as a burden. Wittig argues that even the naming of the body parts creates a fiction and constructs the features themselves, fragmenting what was really once "whole." Language, repeated over time, "produces reality-effects that are eventually misperceived as 'facts" (115).
iv. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions:
Butler begins by questioning the notion that "the body" itself is a natural entity that "admits no genealogy," a usual given without explanation: "How are the contours of the body clearly marked as the taken-for-granted ground or surface upon which gender signification are inscribed, a mere facticity devoid of value, prior to significance?" (129). Building on the thinking of Mary Douglas
Mary Douglas
Dame Mary Douglas, DBE, FBA was a British anthropologist, known for her writings on human culture and symbolism....
outlined in her Purity and Danger, Butler claims that the boundaries of the body have been drawn to instate certain taboos about limits and possibilities of exchange. Thus the hegemonic and homophobic press has read the pollution of the body that AIDS
AIDS
Acquired immune deficiency syndrome or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome is a disease of the human immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus...
brings about as corresponding to the pollution of the homosexual's sexual activity, in particular his crossing the forbidden bodily boundary of the perineum. In other words, Butler's claim is that "the body is itself a consequence of taboos that render that body discrete by virtue of its stable boundaries" (133). Butler proposes the practice of drag
Drag (clothing)
Drag is used for any clothing carrying symbolic significance but usually referring to the clothing associated with one gender role when worn by a person of another gender. The origin of the term "drag" is unknown, but it may have originated in Polari, a gay street argot in England in the early...
as a way to destabilize the exteriority/interiority binary, finally to poke fun at the notion that there is an "original" gender, and to demonstrate playfully to the audience, through an exaggeration, that all gender is in fact scripted, rehearsed, and performed.
Conclusion: From Parody to Politics
Here Butler attempts to construct a feminism (via the politics of jurido-discursive power) from which the gendered pronoun has been removed or not presumed to be a reasonable category. She claims that even the binary of subject/object, which forms the basic assumption for feminist practices - "we, 'women,' must become subjects and not objects" - is a hegemonic and artificial division. The notion of a subject, instead, is for her formed through repetition, through a "practice of signification" (144). Butler offers parody (for example, the practice of drag) as a way to destabilize and make apparent the invisible assumptions about gender identity and the inhabitability of such "ontological locales" (146) as gender. By redeploying those practices of identity and exposing as always failed the attempts to "become" one's gender, Butler believes that a positive, transformative politics can emerge.All page numbers are from the first edition: Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, Routledge, 1990).
See also
- Undoing GenderUndoing GenderUndoing Gender is a book written by Judith Butler. It was published in 2004 by Routledge. Undoing Gender examines gender, sex, psychoanalysis and the medical treatment of intersex people...
- Queer theoryQueer theoryQueer theory is a field of critical theory that emerged in the early 1990s out of the fields of LGBT studies and feminist studies. Queer theory includes both queer readings of texts and the theorisation of 'queerness' itself...
- Feminist philosophyFeminist philosophyFeminist philosophy refers to philosophy approached from a feminist perspective. Feminist philosophy involves both attempts to use the methods of philosophy to further the cause of the feminist movements, and attempts to criticise or re-evaluate the ideas of traditional philosophy from within a...
- Poststructuralism
- Third-wave feminismThird-wave feminismThird-wave feminism is a term identified with several diverse strains of feminist activity and study whose exact boundaries in the historiography of feminism are a subject of debate, but often marked as beginning in the 1980s and continuing to the present...
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