Continuing with Concepts: Categorical Imaginings and Possibilities for Reinvention

Abstract

This chapter considers how gender is put to work, as a category of analysis, by the contributors to this collection. The analysis is informed by the work of Eve Sedgwick and Andrea Chu; both point to the playfulness of gender, and the productivity that is associated with the inability to determine the work that gender does, whether one is contemplating gender in relation to taxonomies (Sedgwick) or ontologies (Chu). Following on from this, Sedgwick and Chu urge readers to resist the temptation to order gender. Rather, their focus is on an appreciation of just how gender is made and unmade; its fungibility and its naivet. The authors in the collection underscore the challenges of mobilizing gender as a category of analysis. Some also point to the capacity for invention that is associated with gender's continuous remaking. Even as it is being dismissed or erased, the capacity of gender to reinsert, reimagine and assert itself is evidenced throughout this collection. Gender often has a precarious relationship to higher education,but the contours of that relationship will not be disciplined. Ain't that grand.