Global Trends: Gender Studies in Europe and the US

Abstract

The new interpretive turn in gender studies is disseminated and discussed particularly in North American scholarly journals, and is situated at the intersection between the historiographies of family, women and gender (including men’s studies) and world history. This has displaced in the direction of ‘world’ or ‘global history’ a practice of writing European history which has traditionally privileged circumscribed, ‘particular’ areas of enquiry, located within the boundaries of communities, regions and nations. To avoid becoming passive latecomers in a new master narrative, where imbalances of power and unequal distribution of academic, linguistic and financial resources tend to marginalize large areas of the world, the tradition of women’s history/gender historiography should seek to develop transcultural cooperation with critical historiographies in non-Western areas, with the aim of constructing an ecumenical narrative of world history.