The Reordering of Empire, the Great Forgetting, and the American Invention of Gender

Vrushali Patil, Florida International University

The twentieth century saw a profound transformation in imperial formations, as the United States displaced Britain as global imperial hegemon. In this paper, I situate the post-World War II invention of gender in the United States within this imperial shift. I argue that while the US is the inheritor of particularly British strategies of sex-gender-sexual imperiality, it also produced new strategies, particularly through its dominant position within post-war international organizations and global structures of knowledge production. Within this context, I first discuss how the birth of the gender concept in the US builds on older imperial histories, while denying them, a phenomenon I term the great forgetting. I further track the globalization of the gender concept through the US’s dominant position within international organizations and structures of knowledge production. I argue that the emergence and ascendance of the gender concept in the later part of the twentieth century and early part of the twenty-first is a case study in the US-specific exercise of imperial power and hegemony.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 90. Gender and Queer Theory: Discourses