Gender Before the Gender Turn

The “gender turn” in feminist thought describes the 1980s shift from a focus on women within male-dominated systems of power to poststructural theories of subject formation. But how did gender become available for feminist thought in the first place? Following recent work that emphasizes the assembled nature of feminist genealogies (Hemmings 2011; Wiegman 2012), this essay treats gender as a cultural object in order to trace its entry into feminism. An origin of gender as a category of person well known to transgender studies lies in the psychomedical treatment of intersex and transgender patients in mid-century American clinics. Yet by tracking the term, we also find a plurality of uses of gender that influenced feminist discourse, including the (technically mistaken) substitution of gender for sex. Radical intellectuals exploring vocabularies for anti-essentialist and anti-racist thought already experimented with gender before the gender turn.