2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

This roundtable brings together authors and editors of the Oxford Handbook of American Women’s and Gender History (OUP, 2017) to discuss gendered power, American states, and the cultural construction of authority. Five of the Handbook’s 30 authors will draw from their experiences synthesizing the purchase of gender on state structures and discourses from multiple perspectives across five centuries.

Women’s history began as a challenge to the idea that the male was universal. As it developed, women’s history birthed multiple challenges to the universality of the female—from race, gender, transnationalism, and transgender studies. The field’s history is one of constant breaking apart of categories, emphasizing how dynamic each of these historical groupings was in debates over governance, hierarchy, and state power. Roundtable participants will address what gender as a tool of historical analysis looks like in contact zones between and within states, honed by several generations of scholars thinking intersectionally and transnationally.

Participants will first speak to their expertise on key questions: How have states reinforced gendered power? In what ways have other institutions, including families, churches, and overlapping colonial projects, contested or strengthened state influence on gendered power? They will then evaluate the ways that the transnational perspective’s challenge to state-based histories and the intersectional challenge to gender binaries produce new trajectories in women’s history. Each participant will highlight unexpected discoveries that emerge about race-making, imperialism, religious movements, marriage, or the slippery mobilization of “brotherhood” and “sisterhood” when we put gender and diverse women’s experiences at the center of inquiry.