On the international stage, gender is everywhere. Political analysts and politicians pore over the “gender-gap” in attempts (sometimes futile) to design ways of pitching campaigns to win the women’s vote while still holding onto the men’s. One of the most significant movements of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Islamic fundamentalism, builds its appeal in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia on the basis of an intense anti-Western rhetoric, buttressed by the imposition of severe restrictions on women’s freedom. Fundamentalist movements within other world religions, including Hinduism, Judaism, and Christianity, lay out sharply distinctive paths for male and female adherents. There is today a widespread market for girls and women from many of the world’s poorest countries to work as forced laborers outside their homelands, as sexual commodities for procurers from some of the richest countries, and as subjects for pornography on internet sites worldwide. Recent protests against the World Trade Organization zeroed in on the exploitative strategies of industrialists who profit from the use of primarily women and girls as sweatshop laborers in Southeast Asia, Latin America and hidden in the back alleys of European and North American cities. Finally, as we discovered when attending the international Women’s World Conference in Kampala, Uganda, in 2002, feminist opposition to women’s oppression is by no means centered in Europe and North America. In Uganda, not only does the main national university have a whole building devoted to “the department of women and gender studies” (while few universities in the West accord women’s studies departmental status or even separate offices), but a major division of the government bureaucracy is the Ministry of Gender, Labour, and Social Development. The prominence of gender in historical scholarship matches its visibility on the world political stage. Almost twenty years ago Joan Wallach Scott argued in the pages of the American Historical Review that history was enacted on the “field of gender.” Scott defined gender there as “a social category imposed on a sexed body,” and stated, in a line that has since been quoted by scholars in many fields, that “gender is a primary way of signifying relations of power.”1 She was indebted, as she noted in the article’s many footnotes, to the pioneering work of scholars before her who were
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