Gender Meets World History: Family and Political Regency

• Autores: Maria Sjöberg
• Localización: Entremons: UPF Journal of World History, ISSN-e 2014-5217, Nº. 8, 2016, págs. 3-25
• Idioma: catalán
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• Resumen

  • n the last decades, history has taken different turns. In particular gender perspectives have been adopted and elaborated in almost every research area of history, though not thatmuch in world history. For instance, the articles published in the Journal of World Historybetween2001 and 2013 show a general pattern of considerable gender blindness (with a few but important exceptions). The following article discusses several explanations as to why world history neglects gender perspectives. Firstly, one reason might be that world history, although not unfamiliar with cultural aspects and methodologies, has a strong tradition in materialism, while gender historians mostly work with cultural perspectives. Secondly, the article argues that gender historians are interested in underlining how complicated gender relations were in the past and thus they do not fit that well into more generalized world history approaches. Thirdly, genderhistorians do much research on women in local contexts in their own countries, which, of course, is of minor interest for scholars in world history. Fourthly, one might say that there is no lack of gender in world history –almost every society in the past has had a gender order that discriminated against women in comparison with men. What is lacking is a consciousness of this structure. Fifthly, the idea that most women in history have lived their lives in families and families do not play a crucial role in world history might prevent thorough research on this matter. In order to clarify that gender often worked as a structuring principle in human societies, the article concludes with an overview of similarities of the significance that gender had in almost all early modern political regencies. Dynastic thinking was established all over the world, and was everywhere built upon imagined family and kinship,being at the same time engendered with superior masculinity and subordinated femininity. It might be beneficial to take this worldwide structure into account in research on world history.