Gender and Sexuality History

Cover Image from Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (University of California Press, 2004).
Cover Image from Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (University of California Press, 2004).

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Gender and sexuality studies is a lively field of historical inquiry that has transformed historical research in the past few decades. The liberationist struggles of the 1960s and 70s inaugurated critiques of sexism, patriarchal power, and heteronormativity that initially focused on recovering lost voices and suppressed experiences. Scholars now also seek explanations. Across rubrics such as women’s history, gay and lesbian histories, masculinity studies, histories of sexualities, gender history (including transgender), scholars problematize how categories and identities are constructed within matrices of power and meaning systems. At the same time, we ask what disrupts their apparent fixity and what encourages change. In the History Department, specialists in this field are trained in specific national, regional, and imperial histories. We are experts in distinct languages, cultures, and time periods.