Beyond ‘Crisis’ in Understanding Gender Transformation

Abstract

Since the late 1980s, historians have described certain eras as marked by ‘crisis’ in the production of gender norms. At the outset, the concept of ‘gender crisis’ proved useful for understanding changes in normative cultural systems. The rhetorical trope of crisis distinguished key turning points in the construction of gender and helped to shape a coherent narrative centred on moments of breakdown and reconstruction. Unfortunately, however, the concept of ‘gender crisis’ has now outlived its usefulness; it has lost its analytic purchase. This article reviews the notion in modern, American and European historiography, then critiques its usefulness as an analytic concept. ‘Gender crisis’ has been overworked to the point of semantic collapse. It has been so reified as to foreshorten analysis, and it conceptualises masculinity as a fixed set of essentialised norms. Finally, ‘gender crisis’ describes subjectivity and its relation to normative systems in overly binary and mechanistic terms. Using the case study of postwar French masculinity, the author proposes the alternative concept of ‘gender damage’ as a way to understand periods of transformation in gender. The term ‘gender damage’ moves beyond a mechanistic notion of interaction with normative systems in order to incorporate such emotions as frustration, humiliation and confusion in our thinking of human subjectivity. In addition, the term forces us to specify exactly which gender norms are being reconfigured in some way. ‘Damage’ is by nature specific and local because it does not totalise catastrophe in the same way as does ‘crisis’.