Gender Goes Global: The Writing of Transnational Histories

These books put gender, intimacy, and the body at the center of the remaking of the world by colonialism, imperialism, and nation-making from the early modern period onward. They do so in very different ways: four are monographs with single authors and two are edited collections; two reckon with particular embodied practices; two examine the place of women in colonization and exploration; and two deal with the gendered history of marriages and intimacies across supposed racial lines. Each of these books is broadly transnational in approach, but not in the same way: some compare two places; some study a region; two range widely over the colonial world; and one treats a nation as a site of circulating national politics. With varying degrees of comprehensiveness and purpose, these books address North America, the Caribbean, India, China, northern Africa, Britain, the south Atlantic, and the Pacific. The authors here are historians, anthropologists, and literary scholars. They draw on and contribute to a range of scholarly literatures, including the new social history of empire, what is generally dubbed "early American history," and the history of the body and of fashion. The extent to which these studies engage with women's or gender history as a specific genre varies: some speak squarely from within its debates, while others sit at the edges and draw selectively from them.

What each of these books does is track gendered and embodied lives, ideas, and politics across and between national borders, presumed cultural divisions, and units of scholarly inquiry. These histories cumulatively demonstrate the possibility of thinking about gender in global ways, and suggest some of the means by which this may be accomplished. The imprint of feminist scholarship on recent histories of imperial and colonial worlds has been unavoidable, even for those who might well have preferred otherwise.¹ Gender, women, and the body have likewise played a relatively significant role in the arguments that have been made for transnational histories throughout the last decade.² Where gender fits in the related-and increasingly institutionalized-field of world history is less clear. As Merry Wiesner-Hanks has recently argued, "gender" and "global" history largely function separately, two historiographies apart.³ In this context, Linda Colley's The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History is remarkable not simply for its confidant virtuosity, but also for its wedding of the genres of women's and world history through the time-tested technique of biography.⁴

The books discussed here show us some of the other ways in which the optics of the global can be brought productively together with the categories embraced by feminist historians in the last decade or so: women, gender, the body, and intimacy. Patty O'Brien's The Pacific Muse uses "the stereotype of exotic femininity" as a "portal into the Pacific past" (5). In doing so, O'Brien puts...