Bauer's History

F or the past month I have been teaching a course on antiquity, and one thing that strikes me the most is the question of gender orientations in different parts of the world during roughly the same era. In this post I therefore which to show to example of how two different cultures arranged gender and in the end show how these connects to gender theory at large as well as what these organisations may say about our own time. But first some remarks about gender in history writing in general can be in place.  When it comes to history, the subject is often the history of the elites which to a large degree can be connected to historians focus on texts. In a society where the division of labour makes it hard to achieve overall literacy, it is mainly two groups during the classical era that stands out as being able to write. The first is the social elites, whom needs to write to both conduct political work and their trades. A second, lesser known group, that was able to write was slaves. ...

 Throughout the last years there have been a tremendous amount of philosophical work on gender and the issue of why queer have invoked such resistance. I would in particularly recommend Jason Stanleys how fascism works on this issue, as well as the writings of Judith Butler on "who's afraid of gender". Whilst this entry is an attempt to discuss gender as political intervention, the work previously mentioned is as also well worth a read and takes a different point of departure than my own. Let's start with something obvious: gender-relations are clearly intertwined with those of power. The perhaps most interesting such example is the writings of Connell who launched the theory of masculine hegemonies. In the writing of Connell it becomes clear that bodily politics have created a norm of masculinity which few men live up to but still have an interested in maintaining, since the position of the ideal man is never obtainable by women. Thereby, by making society in the wor...

As the nation states started to fully arise in early modern times, so also did a conceived need to monitor it's citizens. One example of this need to monitor was legislation on excess, where one of the first laws from 1775 states that women from the lower classes were prohibited from wearing a wide arrange of garments done in velvet. A part from functioning as a way to keep Swedish money within the country, it also functioned as a way to keep people in place . The social stratas thus become bound to a form of performance, where everyone should act ording to their class-position in their expression, rather than allowing transgressions. In my previous post, gender 101, I discussed how gender works as a performance. In this post I will however also discuss how gender is undone by people within the trans and queer-community, and how this will invoke a fear of gender-transgression.  German picturing of ideal "people uniforms"  in 1908. Picture from Wikipedia .  Even though we ...

 For the past months a debate raged hard in Sweden. The catalysmic event was that the Sweden parliament was going to vote on simplyfing a the process of doing a judicial change of gender and lowering the age-limit to 16. The right-wing populist, followed by the christian right, made a call for their supporters to gather under a banner which aimed to stop this legislation from being passed. A call that however not suceeded since the parliament finally, after hours of debate, managed to passed the bill.  As a historian of sexuality I closely followed this debate, as filled with scientific errors it was. However, one of the right-wings MEP asked the following question: when are you woman? A question, that though aiming at ridiculing the supporters of the bill actually pin-points what many gender historians have asked themselves. It also shows the need to educate on what exactly gender theory is, and how it operates. A task which is not simple, nor have a clear-cut answer. In this...