Chapter 1: Introduction

Kathy Davis & Mary Evans & Judith Lorber

Introduction The Handbook of Gender and Women's Studies is first and foremost an indication of the coming of age of academic work on women and the meaning of gender in the twenty-first century. This area of study, born out of second-wave feminism, has initiated and enabled the rethinking and the rewriting of previously taken-for-granted understandings of gender and its place in the social and the symbolic world. As this handbook demonstrates, no discipline in the university curriculum remains untouched by the intervention of thinking about gender. This process, accomplished in the past forty years, has overturned previous certainties about the fixed order and meaning of gender. As the chapters in this collection demonstrate, there is no subject or context which cannot be seen differently when examined through the lens of ‘gender thinking.’ Although no author in this handbook would claim to represent the consensus of this new understanding of the ...

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