If you spend much time in office meetings or college classrooms, you’ve likely run into Gender Guy. He’s an alpha male and a liberal, and he likes to talk about gender issues—in the workplace, in society, in the book you’re reading, wherever. He pontificates and patronizes; he interrupts and shouts down. He makes the rest of the room endure his pissing matches with men less enlightened, or with those who share his general opinions but oblige his desire to quibble over details, loudly and at length.

Gender Guy’s assumed expertise might come from overly simplified connections he makes between gender and race, or class, or sexual identity, or religion. It might be based on the fact that, as an intelligent and well-spoken man, he’s by definition an expert on everything. Or perhaps he thinks he understands gender because the word—unlike, say, “women”—suggests a subject that deals not with one gender’s concrete realities so much as, more abstractly, with the relationship between two.

This last point in particular interests historian Alice Kessler-Harris. Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Kessler-Harris considers the consequences for her own discipline when, starting in the early 1990s, gender history began to take over the ground previously held by women’s history (subscription required). She allows that “gender is a tempting and powerful framework”:

Far more inclusive than the category of women, [gender] raises questions not so much about what women did or did not do, but about how the organization or relationships between men and women established priorities and motivates social and political action. While the history of women can be accused of lacking objectivity—of having a feminist purpose—that of gender suggests a more distanced stance… The idea of “gender” frees young scholars (male and female) to seek out the ways that historical change is related to the shape and deployment of male/female relations.

And yet, something is lost:

Gender obscures as much as it reveals… [I suspect] that in seeing the experiences of men and women as relational, we overlook the particular ways in which women—immigrants, African-Americans, Asians, Chicanas—engaged their worlds… We lose the power of the individual to shed a different light—sometimes a liminal light—on historical processes.

In short, Kessler-Harris worries that abstracting “women” into “gender” can have the effect of silencing the voices of actual women—a danger not limited to the rarefied world of historians. The tension between analyzing gender relations and highlighting female voices is an old one, and it’s as broadly relevant as ever. While Gender Guy’s opinions may be impeccably feminist, how helpful is this if the abstraction “gender” gives him cover to go on and on, preventing the women in the room from getting a word in?

—Steve Thorngate 

Last fall, the college tenure process at Barnard College turned participatory—for the worse, argue Dan Rabinowitz and Ronen Shamir for Academe, the magazine of the American Association of University Professors. When up for tenure, Arab American anthropologist Nadia El-Haj faced both the scrutiny of the college and of the public. Online petitions were posted for and against her in an attempt to democratize the process.

The final decision remained Barnard’s, and the school ultimately granted El-Haj tenure. But the petitions intruded inappropriately into an academic decision, write Rabinowitz and Shamir. “Science is not a form of participatory democracy to be determined by majority opinion,” the Israeli scholars write. Tenure should be determined by the quality of scholarship, not by politics.

The transgression that sparked protest against El-Haj, as the Academe authors put it, was “writing on Israel while Arab.” (El-Haj's first book, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society, examines the relationship between archaeology and Zionist nation building.) El-Haj’s work seemed to upset American Jewry most. The uproar was symptomatic of “an intellectual climate that, at least from afar, looks increasingly oppressive." Academic institutions, Rabinowitz and Shamir insist, must not fall prey to hegemonic ideologies that manipulate or repress knowledge to suit their political agendas.

—Lisa Gulya

Image by WalkingGeek, licensed by Creative Commons.