 What is gender? Why and how does it matter?
Gender is everywhere. For most of us, it structures almost everything about almost every daily interaction, from our choice of words to the tone and body language that we use. It affects our choices of friends and partners, our role in our families, the work that we do, and how much, or whether, we are paid for it. And it operates at a thousand different levels, from the broadest institutions of law to the smallest, most private details of our selves and relationships. For some people this might feel so normal that it disappears into the background; for the rest of us, especially those of us who are queer or otherwise at odds with our local mainstreams, gender can feel omnipresent, suffocating.
At the same time, gender is nowhere. Since the English word “gender” began to take on its modern meaning sometime in the mid-1950’s—roughly, as a feature of human social organization, loosely connected to “sex” but importantly distinct from it—scholars, from the queerest of queer theorists to the most heteronormative voices in what was once called “sexology,” have spent lifetimes trying to pin it down. For something so central to so many lives, gender is notoriously ephemeral, hard to define.
Part of the problem is that, depending on where you go, “gender” changes radically. In a gay bar in Rio de Janeiro; in a primary school classroom in Jodhpur; in a rural farming town outside of Knoxville; what gender is, which rules govern it, and who occupies which roles within it may have little or nothing in common. This becomes even more clear if we travel in time. Not only does gender change, sometimes it disappears altogether—particularly if we look outside the lens of Western-centric, colonial thinking. “Gender” is an English word, and it doesn’t necessarily translate, even as the impacts of Anglophone cultural imperialism are felt globally.
The “Gender Justice” project works towards gender expansion and liberation. But if gender is so many things—if it is everything, and nothing, everywhere and nowhere—then where do we start?
In our section on Oxford Intersections, “What is gender? Why and how does it matter?” we start wherever we can. We think there are answers; we think theory can help; but even as we seek answers, we refuse to declare the question answered. Instead, we seek perspectives. If gender is that many things, then we need as many tools as we can find, as many dimensions as we can see, as many places, spaces, and peoples as we can think with.
This means a diversity of methodology. We’ve already published articles from law, philosophy, literary theory, and music studies, and we currently have work from biology, sociology, history, and dance theory on the way—to name just a few.
It means a diversity of geography and culture. We seek especially to raise the voices of those from the global South. One piece already published examines resistance to hetero-colonialism among the Mapuche people, an Indigenous group from what is now called Chile and Argentina. Another investigates the role of the law in shaping gendered subjectivity in India.
It means a diversity of generations, and of relationship to the academy. We are publishing work from emerita and from graduate students; from tenured faculty and from independent scholars. We recognize that academic status and prestige can point to some forms of wisdom, but it ignores others. We seek that wisdom wherever we can find it.
And it means putting folks in conversation with one another across these divisions, even when we don’t speak the same (disciplinary, cultural, generational, even literal) language. It means learning from each other, even when we disagree. It means refusing to elide these differences, even if that’s messy. We resist the urge to translate, to force agreement, to give a single answer.
If there is “gender trouble”—if gender is trouble—then our task as scholars is, as Donna Haraway taught us, to stay with that trouble, and to see what it can teach us.
If you’re interested in getting involved with Oxford Intersections: Gender Justice, let us know.
Featured image by Florian Olivo via Unsplash. Public domain.
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 Why the West’s critics speak a Western moral language
For many critics, the West is uniquely responsible for colonialism, racism, oppression, and exploitation. America, in particular, is portrayed as a society built upon these injustices. Many of these critics were themselves raised in the West and educated in its schools and universities.
Whatever one thinks of such critiques, there is something profoundly ironic about them: many of the moral standards used to judge Western civilization are themselves products of the Western tradition. The demand for justice and human rights, the insistence that the powerful must answer for their actions, the refusal to accept that might makes right—these ideas have a distinct history. That history is complex, drawing on classical philosophy, biblical religion, Roman law, and the Christian tradition. An important, though often overlooked, stream in this history is the Calvinist tradition—a subject explored more fully in the second edition of my Calvinism: A Very Short Introduction.
John Calvin is not who most people think of when they think about ideas of justice, equality, and human dignity. He is more commonly associated with predestination, austerity, and the execution of Michael Servetus. Yet the Reformed tradition Calvin helped shape contributed ideas whose consequences reached far beyond anything he could have anticipated—and perhaps beyond some things he would have welcomed. Those ideas helped nurture forms of political liberty and moral accountability that many of his modern critics now exercise, whether they recognize their origins or not.
Consider first the profound equality Calvin placed at the center of his understanding of humanity. Because all people are created in God’s image and belong uniquely to him, Calvin insisted that no human being could ultimately be reduced to a mere possession of another. His discussions of slavery and servitude in his expositions of Exodus and Deuteronomy are among the clearest expressions of this conviction. While later generations would identify tensions between Calvin’s theological convictions and the institution of slavery as it existed in his own age, his writings nevertheless rejected the reduction of human beings to property and emphasized the obligations owed by those who exercised authority. Before God, the nobleman and the beggar stand on identical ground. Human dignity does not depend upon wealth, status, or power. These were not merely theological abstractions; they were principles whose implications later generations would develop in ways Calvin himself could scarcely have imagined.
Second, Calvin helped reshape political thought by reinforcing the conviction that rulers themselves are subject to moral judgment. He did not invent resistance theory—medieval thinkers had long wrestled with tyranny—but the Reformed tradition became one of its most influential vehicles. In the final (1559) edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin argued that rulers who command what is contrary to God relinquish their authority. French Huguenots, Dutch rebels, Scottish Protestants, English parliamentarians, and American revolutionaries all drew, in varying degrees, upon political arguments developed within the Calvinist tradition. The enduring principle was simple: power is never its own justification.
Third, Calvin revived a prophetic tradition of moral criticism. The biblical prophets denounced corruption, exploitation, and injustice among the powerful. Calvin adopted their posture with striking boldness. At a time when monarchs increasingly claimed sacred authority, he did not hesitate to rebuke rulers for their corruption. In a lecture on Jeremiah, he lamented that “kings are ashamed to appear humane and turn all their labors towards exercising tyranny.” In another, he complained “great kings draw human blood and do not care at all when many people perish because of them.” Such criticisms expressed Calvin’s conviction that no ruler stands above moral scrutiny. Calvin repeatedly lamented the suffering of the poor and condemned those who exploited them. Through generations of Reformed preaching and political thought, this prophetic impulse was carried far beyond sixteenth-century Geneva. It would echo through later movements that challenged entrenched authority, from campaigns against slavery to the civil rights movement and beyond.
The irony, then, becomes clearer. The critics are, of course, right to point to injustices like inequality, racism, and exploitation. These are enduring features of human societies, and the West has hardly been immune to them. Yet many of the moral concepts used to expose these failures were themselves nurtured within the Western tradition. Indeed, one of the West’s distinguishing characteristics has been its extraordinary capacity for self-criticism. America and the broader Western tradition have produced intellectual, religious, legal, and political traditions that have repeatedly exposed, criticized, and sought to reform the very injustices that exist within their own societies.
Part of that capacity arose from Calvin’s realistic assessment of human nature, his conviction that people are prone to sin and self-interest. Influenced in part by this conviction, Western political institutions increasingly sought to restrain power rather than trust it. Constitutional limits, divided authority, the rule of law, and institutional accountability were not designed to eliminate injustice altogether. They endeavored to create durable mechanisms through which injustice could be challenged and corrected. In so doing, these institutions have helped many Western societies become among the freest, most prosperous, and most legally protective in history.
None of this is evidence of either the West’s perfection or its unique immorality. It is, rather, evidence that the Western tradition has bequeathed to the modern world a moral imagination capable not only of exposing injustice but also of imagining and pursuing reform. Many of the West’s fiercest critics remain heirs to the very moral tradition that furnished them with the language through which they now judge it. That, perhaps, is one of the Western tradition’s most remarkable legacies.
Feature image: Palestine solidarity protest in Berlin. Photo by Hossam el-Hamalawy. CC-BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
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 Abraham Lincoln and the election of 1860 [timeline]
The presidential election of 1860 was, in the words of eminent Civil War scholar James McPherson, “undeniably the most important – and pivotal – in all of American History.” But the election, which culminated with the election of Abraham Lincoln after a chaotic campaign which saw parties disintegrate, dark horses flourish, and secessionists plot the undoing of the republic itself,
Explore the timeline below to follow along on some of the key moments in the nation’s most momentous campaign.
Featured image credit: Photo by Naomi August on Unsplash.
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 The right-wing revolution is guaranteed to continue long past Trump
Analysts are taking the pulse of the MAGA movement, seeking to understand whether it can sustain its momentum without its godfather, Donald Trump. In fact, the right-wing movement energetically was rolling along in the early 2010s, before the MAGA label emerged and while Trump was starring in The Apprentice.
In the late 2000s, a group of right-wing thinkers broke off from traditional free-market conservatives and the small-government Tea Party movement. They developed instead a new focus on social issues and organized a careful, often unseen, movement to drive change by gaining power over key political institutions. Donald Trump had little—if anything—to do with the genesis of this movement, but he was extraordinarily successful in riding it to the presidency, driving historic changes in what government does and how it does it.
Trump might slowly fade from the political scene and national commentators might debate whether MAGA still lives. But the right-wing idea factory is continuing to work, especially in state and local governments. It is generating a large and ongoing collection of issues, guaranteeing that right-wing ideas will continue to live on through an ongoing campaign for political power and influence.
Here are some of the reasons why.
- The money pipeline is open wider. Until recently, donors had to obey strict contribution limits to candidates. Political parties could collect piles of cash, but they couldn’t coordinate their advertising with the candidates. In a June 30 decision, the US Supreme Court ruled that donors could funnel money to the parties and the parties, in turn, could spend as much as they liked in direct coordination with candidates. That decision effectively blew off contribution ceilings. At least for the time being, that gives Republicans a huge advantage, since the party has more than $100 million more in the bank than Democrats. This will give the right-wing tremendous additional fuel for its ideas.
- Transgender bans get the green light. Idaho and West Virginia have both enacted bans against transgender players on women’s and girls’ sports teams. The Supreme Court ruled that the states could indeed establish such bans. That’s sure to ignite more debates in more states about where they can draw the line on LGBTQ+ rights. The Court didn’t decide whether it was permissible for states to specifically allow transgender individuals to compete on the teams. That issue is sure to come before the Court, along with more tussles about how far the states can go in dealing with LGBTQ+ rights.
- Religion creeps into the classroom. In 2022, the Supreme Court ruled that a Washington state school board was wrong in disciplining a former football coach, who knelt in postgame prayer in the middle of the field. That set off a scramble throughout the country to push religion into other school programs. Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas require local schools to display the Ten Commandments in classrooms. Texas went even further by building Bible study into the curriculum, beginning with Noah’s Ark in the first grade and David and Goliath in second grade. How far will they be able to go?
- State policy upsets traditional higher education policies. Florida is leading a broad revolution against what colleges and universities teach and how they are run. Gender studies programs are gone. So are DEI initiatives. A “back to the classics” movement has sprung up in a bid to push out what the right-wing sees as the “woke” bias in the classroom. Tenured professors undergo new, tough, regular reviews. Undocumented students are blocked from enrolling. Similar initiatives are rolling out across the country, led by Ohio, Tennessee, and Texas, all designed to uproot what are viewed as powerful liberal forces in higher education.
- The fight to prohibit abortion is red-hot. Medications, not surgical procedures, account for nearly two-thirds of all abortions in the US. That compares with just a third in 2014, and it scrambles the efforts from the right to shut down abortions. When abortions take place in a clinic, it’s relatively easy to end them: close the clinic. But medication-induced abortions are far more difficult to prevent. Women can obtain a prescription and take the drugs at home. Some physicians prescribe the drugs remotely and mail them to patients, and that makes it possible to circumvent abortion bans in 41 states. Louisiana indicted a New York doctor for mail-order abortion medications, and a Texas judge fined a physician $100,000 for, the judge said, prescribing pills to a Dallas-area woman. New York countered that its “shield law” protected the doctor. The US Supreme Court might have overturned Roe v. Wade, but the abortion battles in the states are far from over.
- Policy leaders are campaigning to make all public employees at-will. The Trump administration won a big victory with the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. Slaughter, in which the Court ruled that the president could fire members of independent regulatory commissions. The administration followed the Court’s decision with a new regulation that would allow agency heads to fire employees if they didn’t meet “suitability and fitness” standards, as the officials chose to define them. The Trump administration says the changes are necessary to make public employees more accountable. In fact, they push accountability from effectiveness in administering the law to loyalty to the president. The decisions might seem subtle, but they are very likely to shift the balance of powers within the nation’s democratic system, in favor of the president at the expense of the Congress.
The list could easily go on—and Trump has had little to do with most of them. They are only loosely connected with the national MAGA movement, but they all have long legs in the states. And, put together, they point to why the right-wing idea factory will continue to anchor a big movement in American politics.
Feature image: Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash.
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 Gender Justice in these times
I have long admired the example of the late Paul Farmer, MD and anthropologist. He founded Zanmi Lasante (Partners in Health), a global network of community health providers in areas of the world ravaged by social and natural disasters such as poverty, racial, class, gender-based inequality, underdeveloped or war-destroyed public infrastructure, and political violence. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tracy Kidder titled his 2003 biography of Farmer Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World (NY: Random House). The phrase “mountains beyond mountains” comes, according to Kidder, from a Haitian proverb, “dèyè mòn gen mòn“, translated as “beyond mountains there are mountains”. As a hiker during my graduate school days on the Central Coast of California, I know the feeling well of gutting out a long uphill switchback, hoping that this was the last leg of the climb, only to see before me another long uphill track—a mountain beyond the mountain I thought I had ascended.
Teaching, researching, and writing about gender—about what gender relations could be in a just world if we put the work into imagining that just world into existence—feels a lot like scrabbling uphill over dangerous terrain only to find mountains beyond the mountains we have already scaled. Especially now, in the current political climate featuring anti “gender ideology” sentiment—willful misunderstandings of what should by now, in the 21st century, be noncontroversial assertions of basic human dignity for women and gender-nonconforming persons of all races, classes, faiths, sexualities, and ethnicities—the paths upward seem strewn with careening boulders.
A decade ago, I wrote an essay comparing queer feminist scholarly endeavors to the task encountered by a feminine counterpart of Sisyphus, using the feminine ending Sisyphe to set her apart from her more famous brother. Sisyphe, unlike Camus’ stoic existentialist Sisyphus, is not happy. She is understandably angry about having to continually roll a rock, made up of the sediment of ages of conscious and unconscious injustices and indignities, up a hill while attending to the already difficult everyday tasks of living. The upshot of this effort, nevertheless, is that Sisyphe has very strong arms. She handles the rock with one hand while doing the bulk of the often-unacknowledged care work of generations with the other.
Ten years after writing about Sisyphe’s strong arms, I realize that my original analogy is underdeveloped. For starters, Sisyphe is not singular. She has many siblings of many genders who move those boulders with strength, resilience, and collective ingenuity. And the boulder of the Greek myth is too contained and controlled to fit the moment. The image of an all-powerful and punitive god manifesting a daily boulder to torture Sisyphus/Sisyphe is too staid, too dignified for what we are experiencing now. In place of the figure of Zeus, modern day Sisyphes must contend with dozens of chaotic, vengeful, and comically incompetent Wile E. Coyotes hurling rocks off cliffs scattershot. It doesn’t help that we can laugh at the bathetic antics of the ranting figure behind the rock. The boulders still do damage to those in their path.
That’s what researching, writing, and teaching about gender often feels like today. Consider the self-satirizing example of a professor in the U.S. being told that he can’t teach a canonical work by Plato in a philosophy class because to read Aristophanes’ speech from circa 400 BCE is to promote “gender ideology” in 2026 CE. The rocks are falling every which way, and it is going to take a large, global community to keep them from crushing the communities, institutions, and principles we cultivate in order to make a better, if not perfect world for ourselves and our global siblings.
Gender Justice, a new topic featured in Oxford Intersections, is one such gathering of Sisyphes—a community of scholars, thinkers, and practitioners who continue the work of rigorous inquiry and analysis of systems of power that derail the quest for livable lives, with dignity and purpose, for all persons across the globe regardless of gender, sexuality, nation, race, disability, social class, faith, and other social markers that are leveraged to produce inequality rather than just relations. Divided into twelve sections like the hours of (an analogue) clock or the months in a year, Gender Justice draws together experts and community-based knowledge workers to provide reasoned and researched work on gender from a wide range of disciplines and interdisciplines: from philosophy, technology studies, politics, law, environmental studies, economics, creative arts, health and mental health, family studies, comparative religion, and intersectional queer and feminist studies. The module is ambitious in its aims but curated carefully to provide readers, researchers, and scholars access to reliable, ethical, and intellectually rigorous insights into the complex and dynamic field of gender studies. We are not hubristic enough to believe that Gender Justice will change the world by mere fact of its publication in June 2026, but we do have hope—a virtue much needed in these times—that the resources it provides will prove useful to the multifaceted conglomeration of thinkers and dreamers who continue to do the work of striving for a world that is more livable, more humane, and more just for all. We’ve got the next mountain, together.
Featured image by hdbernd via Unsplash.
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