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The women’s movement of the mid-20th century, often referred to as “second wave feminism,” sparked a generation of academics to write about society’s “Other” (to use the language of feminist theorist Simone de Beauvoir). Scholars like Barbara Welter, Nancy Cott, and Carol Smith-Rosenberg wrote histories of women--histories that reflected and were informed by the ideology of the times. In 1973, British historian Sheila Rowthbaum noted that her “book comes very directly from a political movement.”

One of the first academic journals devoted to the academic exploration of gendered issues, the founding of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society reflected the success of the feminist movement in legitimizing the study of women’s history. In their first editorial, Signs’ editors wrote that, “Scholarship about women is not new…what is novel is the amount of intellectual energy men and women are now spending on such scholarship and the consciousness that often frames their efforts.” The newness emerged from the feminist project, a project that legitimized womanhood and in doing so legitimized the academic exploration of their identities.

But as the crest of second wave feminism withdrew, some feminist scholars began expanding their work beyond the binary of de Beauvoir’s binary definition of Man as “the positive and the neuter” and woman as “the negative.”

Judith Butler, in her first chapter of Gender Trouble, addresses the argument of “women” not being the strict subject of feminism. Butler suggests that the “presumed universality and unity of the subject of feminism is effectively undermined by the constraints of the representational discourse in which it functions.” In other words, assigning a subject to feminism is exclusionary and fails to serve its purpose. While many feminists believe that feminism should focus on a feminine identity, others argue that the concentration of a feminine identity fails to be inclusive. Butler agrees by saying that the subject of feminism is, in fact, not definite.

Butler also discusses this by outlining the way in which feminists have made distinctions between sex and gender. Oftentimes, gender is linked to sex in that gender falls as its dependent, and many critiques have attempted to separate the two by saying sex refers to the science behind one’s body while gender refers to the social/cultural construction of one’s body. Butler challenges this notion by stating, “If gender is the cultural meanings that the sexed body assumes, then a gender cannot be said to follow from a sex in any one way.”. By separating gender and sex, one separates gender from the body, which is an issue because sex may be influenced by gender and gender may be impacted by sex. Butler argues that the formation of gender is complex, and she believes that gender is performed and produced via acts. In order to be inclusive to all women, the separation of gender and sex cannot be.

Scholars like Butler shifted “feminist” analyses toward “queer” analyses--scholarship that questioned the very categories that feminist scholarship often shored up. Joan Scott’s 1992 article “The Evidence of Experience” is an example of early queer scholarship. Scott, pulling from poststructural theories and critiques of history, asked her readers to reconsider the ways in history itself is told. “The challenge to normative history has been described, in terms of conventional historical understandings of evidence, as an enlargement to the picture, a correction to oversights resulting from inaccurate or incomplete vision…,” Scott wrote. This “challenge to normative history” was, among other things, the feminist project of women’s history--of writing stories of women that would act as “an enlargement to the picture.” But Scott asked historians to think beyond the limits of “history,” to recognize that “experience” is “always contested, always political, ” to “take as their project not the reproduction and transmission of knowledge said to be arrived at through experience, but the analysis of the production of that knowledge itself.” Scott’s work represents an important theoretical shift, from feminist histories of Other to queer historical analyses of the very formation of the gendered categories that make up our lives (see: Leila Rupp, John D'Emilio).