Abstract

Taken from the terminology of grammar, gender has become an indispensable category of transdisciplinary analysis and has emerged as a high-impact factor in the ongoing struggle for equality and justice. The following essay traces the career and the changing implications of the term from its early usage in the US American women’s movement and in women’s studies of the 1960s and 1970s via its complex redefinitions through gender theory in the 1980s and 1990s to the current recognition of gender as an agent as well as an effect of globalization. Yet, the argument does not claim a general narrative of progress. Instead, it stresses the critical interventions by women of color who insisted on the weight of “race” and class and inserted a postcolonial perspective. Critically discussing the constraining effects of including gender into the agendas of global institutions and NGOs, the essay concludes that while globalization has enabled emancipatory local gender policies, it has, at the same time, tended to counteract their sustainable success.