Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis
E244855
"Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis" is a landmark 1986 essay by historian Joan W. Scott that theorizes gender as a primary and indispensable analytical category for understanding historical processes and power relations.
All labels observed (1)
| Label | Occurrences |
|---|---|
| Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis canonical | 1 |
How this entity was disambiguated
This entity first appeared as the object of triple T2228127 — resolving that mention is where its identity was fixed. The disambiguator weighed these candidate entities and picked the highlighted one (or “None”, minting a new entity). This is how homonymy is resolved: the same surface form can point to different entities.
NED1
Entity disambiguation (via context triple)
gpt-5-mini-2025-08-07
Target entity: Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis Context triple: [Joan W. Scott, notableWork, Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis]
-
A.
Women, Race, & Class
Women, Race, & Class is a groundbreaking feminist text by Angela Davis that examines the intertwined histories of gender, race, and class oppression in the United States.
-
B.
Woman in the Nineteenth Century
Woman in the Nineteenth Century is an 1845 book by Margaret Fuller that is considered a foundational feminist text advocating for women’s intellectual, social, and political equality.
-
C.
The Politics of History
The Politics of History is a critical work of historiography by Howard Zinn that challenges traditional narratives and argues for a politically engaged, socially conscious approach to writing and teaching history.
-
D.
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality is Sigmund Freud’s foundational 1905 work that outlines his psychoanalytic theories of psychosexual development, infantile sexuality, and the structure of sexual drives.
-
E.
Tapestries of Life: Women's Work, Women's Consciousness, and the Meaning of Daily Experience
Tapestries of Life: Women's Work, Women's Consciousness, and the Meaning of Daily Experience is a feminist study that explores how women’s everyday labor and lived experiences shape their identities, political awareness, and social realities.
- F. None of above. chosen
- G. Unsure - the case is ambiguous/there is not enough information to decide.
NED2
Entity disambiguation (via description)
gpt-5-mini-2025-08-07
Target entity: Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis Target entity description: "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis" is a landmark 1986 essay by historian Joan W. Scott that theorizes gender as a primary and indispensable analytical category for understanding historical processes and power relations.
-
A.
Women, Race, & Class
Women, Race, & Class is a groundbreaking feminist text by Angela Davis that examines the intertwined histories of gender, race, and class oppression in the United States.
-
B.
Woman in the Nineteenth Century
Woman in the Nineteenth Century is an 1845 book by Margaret Fuller that is considered a foundational feminist text advocating for women’s intellectual, social, and political equality.
-
C.
The Politics of History
The Politics of History is a critical work of historiography by Howard Zinn that challenges traditional narratives and argues for a politically engaged, socially conscious approach to writing and teaching history.
-
D.
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality is Sigmund Freud’s foundational 1905 work that outlines his psychoanalytic theories of psychosexual development, infantile sexuality, and the structure of sexual drives.
-
E.
Tapestries of Life: Women's Work, Women's Consciousness, and the Meaning of Daily Experience
Tapestries of Life: Women's Work, Women's Consciousness, and the Meaning of Daily Experience is a feminist study that explores how women’s everyday labor and lived experiences shape their identities, political awareness, and social realities.
- F. None of above. chosen
Statements (41)
| Predicate | Object |
|---|---|
| instanceOf |
feminist theory text
ⓘ
scholarly essay ⓘ |
| argues |
gender is a primary field within which or by means of which power is articulated
ⓘ
gender is a useful category for historical analysis ⓘ gender is socially constructed rather than biologically determined ⓘ gender organizes social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes ⓘ historians must analyze the production of gendered meanings ⓘ |
| author |
Joan W. Scott
ⓘ
Joan W. Scott ⓘ
surface form:
Joan Wallach Scott
|
| contribution |
challenged traditional empiricist approaches to women’s history
ⓘ
influenced the development of gender history as a subfield ⓘ reframed gender as an analytical category rather than a synonym for women ⓘ |
| critiques |
additive approaches that simply insert women into existing histories
ⓘ
essentialist notions of women and men ⓘ |
| describes |
gender as a constitutive element of social relationships
ⓘ
gender as a primary way of signifying relationships of power ⓘ |
| discipline |
feminist theory
ⓘ
gender studies ⓘ history ⓘ |
| historicalSignificance |
key text in the shift from women’s history to gender history
ⓘ
landmark essay in the theorization of gender ⓘ |
| impact |
became a foundational text in gender studies
ⓘ
shaped debates on the relationship between gender and power ⓘ widely cited in feminist scholarship ⓘ |
| language | English ⓘ |
| mainConcept |
gender as a category of analysis
ⓘ
historical methodology ⓘ power relations ⓘ social construction of gender ⓘ |
| methodologicalOrientation |
interpretive
ⓘ
theoretical ⓘ |
| proposes | gender as a primary way of signifying power relations ⓘ |
| publicationYear | 1986 ⓘ |
| theoreticalInfluence |
Michel Foucault
ⓘ
feminist historiography ⓘ poststructuralism ⓘ |
| topic |
feminist historiography
ⓘ
gender ⓘ historical analysis ⓘ power ⓘ theory of difference ⓘ |
How these facts were elicited
The pipeline generated the facts above by prompting gpt-5.1 with this entity's name + description and the instruction below.
Instruction
You are a knowledge base construction expert. Given a subject entity and a description of it, return factual statements that you know for the subject as a JSON list of dictionaries(triples), where keys must be "subject", "predicate" and "object". The number of facts may be very high, between 25 to 50 or more, for very popular subjects. For less popular subjects, the number of facts can be very low, like 5 or 10. # Requirements - If you don't know the subject at all, return an empty list. - If the subject is not a named entity, return an empty list. - Include at least one triple where predicate is "instanceOf". - Do not get too wordy. - Separate several objects into multiple triples with one object.
Input
Subject: Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis Description of subject: "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis" is a landmark 1986 essay by historian Joan W. Scott that theorizes gender as a primary and indispensable analytical category for understanding historical processes and power relations.
Referenced by (1)
Full triples — surface form annotated when it differs from this entity's canonical label.