ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book describes the complexities of the relations between gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity and other socially-constructed divisions. Gender is an aspect of our identities as women and men, its significance varies across space and time, as does its very constitution and meaning, but we do not see this as reducing the materiality of these divisions in the daily lives of women across the globe. Increasingly feminist scholars have come to recognise that there are multiple ways of doing gender', of being male and female, masculine and feminine that are more or less appropriate, more or less socially sanctioned in particular spaces and at different times. As feminists had long pointed out, western enlightenment knowledge, with its liberal assumption of a disembodied, rational and universal point of view, in fact reflected a very particular set of ideas about power and knowledge, about truth and humanity.
