Joan Scott's Defining Gender

Joan Scott, I think, chooses not to really define gender. She did provide various definitions, like the dictionary definition of gender which she included in her article, "Gender: A Useful Category,” and she also brought in other scholarly works to discuss their definitions. However, she also used her own ideas and those of other scholars to convey how problematic defining gender actually is. She said that “gender” and “women” were sometimes even used as meaning the same thing, even though “gender” should involve both men and women (1056). In her other article, “Unanswered Questions,” she also explained how definitions of gender have changed and how the term “gender” does not even exist in other languages because it is not universally looked at or understood in the way that Americans understand it (1426). In addition, the term has been established more recently and therefore cannot be historically examined with the ideas that we have created in reference to gender. The way gender has been described in these articles is very complex, but I think Scott basically wanted to convey that gender is a recent term created to study the relationship and roles of men and women throughout history. Gender, however, has been constructed and altered to actually do a variety of things, such as fail to distinguish biology and culture in reference to gender, and also separate men and women preventing scholars from paying attention to roles of both men and women together. In addition, Scott emphasized that individuals need to practice awareness and question historical sources that both include and exclude the relationship between men and women and its impact on history in order to figure out what information is being presented and why it is being presented in a certain way. By thinking critically, we can help produce scholarship that is more inclusive to demonstrate that individuals all held some sort of power throughout history and by illustrating women’s roles, we are fighting against the constructed normative that men are more important in history or more interesting to discuss than women were.