Gender, Considered Feminist Reflections Across the US Social Sciences

This book gathers reflections from 15 US based feminist social scientists about gender – as orienting framework, as one aspect of an intersectional approach, as a feature of intellectual identity, and as a problematic construct. Gender as an analytic, dynamic concept has had an important impact within and across social sciences in the past several decades. That impact for some arose in dialogue with interdisciplinary women’s studies, and was sometimes troubled both in women’s studies and in relation to other interdisciplines and disciplines. As a new generation of gender scholars embarks on their careers in social science, Fenstermaker and Stewart's collection provides scholars an opportunity to reflect on the course of different disciplinary histories and autobiographies, as well as illuminate individual scholarly craft and disciplinary direction as our understanding of gender has unfolded over time. The volume will also represent one kind of collective wisdom to inspire younger scholars.

1. Opening Doors for the Insurgent; Elizabeth R. Cole.

2. Stuck in the Paradigm with You: Transfeminist Reflections on the Uses of History and the Spaces of Contradiction; Finn Enke.

3. Reflections on History, Gender, (and Beyoncé?): Intersectionality and Interdisciplinarity, Past and Future; Ruth Feldstein.

4. Theorizing Gender, Power, and Gendered Institutions: Sexual Harassment and Resistance to Feminist Activism; Mary Hawkesworth.

5. The Power of Class; the Gender of Power; Alice Kessler-Harris.

6. Racializing Patriarchy: Lessons from Police Brutality; Sherry. B. Ortner.

7. From Neoclassicism to Heterodoxy: The Making of a Feminist Economist; Joyce P. Jacobsen.

8. Engaging a Collaborative Practice: Reflections on Feminist/Critical Disability Studies by Two Psychologists; Stacey L. Coffman-Rosen. & Joan M. Ostrove.

9. Economics, Considered; Julie A. Nelson.

10. What is, Could be, and Should be: Historical Feminist Theory and Contemporary Political Psychology; Virginia Sapiro.

11. Gendered Organizations: Fifty Years and Counting; Patricia Yancey Martin.

12. The Feminist Ethnography of Untested Assumptions: Traveling with Assisted Reproductive Technologies across the Muslim Middle East; Marcia C. Inhorn.

13. From “Gender Difference” to “Doing Gender” to “Gender and Structural Power in Psychological Science"; Stephanie A. Shields.

14. Stewardship of Intersectionality: A Complex Proposition; Ange-Marie Hancock Alfaro.

Sarah Fenstermaker is Research Professor Emerita at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA.

 Abigail Stewart is Sandra Schwartz Tangri Distinguished University Professor of Psychology and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, USA.