ABSTRACT
Over the last 20 years, academic discourse changed the vocabulary it used to talk about men and women as subjects for study. Gender replaced sex as the way to describe differences and similarities between men and women, re ecting new notions concerning the social and cultural construction of physical and psychological attributes. The old lexicon of sex differences, sex discrimination, and sex equity gave way to consideration of inter-and intra-cultural variation; a new emphasis emerged concerning the historicity of what earlier had been labeled sex roles and sexual identity. These shifts produced a focus on elasticity in considering what it means to be a man or woman, with repeated reminders by feminist academics to avoid “essentialism” (that is, seeing men or women as inherently and universally possessing a speci ed set of attributes).*
As postmodernism, poststructuralism, and postcolonialism-three distinct intellectual developments with different trajectories and markedly different consequencesspread within the academy, debates have emerged about whether any stable meaning could be attributed to the words female and male. At the same time, scholars introduced new elds of study around human sexuality. Changing perspectives on gender and sexuality resulted in masculinity studies, along with more widespread research and teaching about gay and lesbian history and literature. This movement-which was fueled by societal efforts to gain equity for women, gays, lesbians, and trans-sexual and transgendered individuals-led to new college courses, concentrations, and majors and, at some institutions, the reconstitution of women’s studies programs as gender studies or gender and sexuality programs. Within the humanities, a “linguistic turn” characterized the academic eld of history, and an “historical turn,” language and literature. Within the social sciences, these changes were more muted but gradually made inroads, especially in marking the salience of language and ideology to human activity. This is not to say that these trends came to dominate these elds. They were, and remain, highly contested in many respects.
