ABSTRACT
Gender and its attendant inequalities had proved impressively malleable, adapting to new circumstances rather than withering away in response to demands for change. National liberation movements, which often fought colonial rule with a promise to bring about a lasting improvement in gender relations, fared no better under feminist scrutiny. Social constructionist “readings” of gender, for example, rely upon the eye as much as most forms of literacy. Different ways of framing the relationship of space to time generate different types of questions, with major consequences for the study of gender. The social relations that make gender visible, visual, turn out to be drenched in history, time discipline, and duration. Gender studies maintains an investment in counting just as finely calibrated as the annual reports issued by institutions whose abuses feminists have worked so hard to expose.
