Written by Angelina Castrucci
The study of empire has long grappled with gender’s analytical utility, sparking debates over its conceptual and methodological significance. While feminist scholars have highlighted gender’s role in shaping imperial social organisation, its usefulness as a rigid analytical category is increasingly contested. This article moves beyond reaffirming gender’s historiographical relevance to critically reassess its limitations. It argues for reimagining gender as a dynamic, contingent question of analysis rather than a fixed framework. To support this argument, the article will first examine gender’s historiographical foundations and its role in colonial power structures and lived experiences. It will then critique the limitations of treating gender as a fixed framework, particularly its universalist and Western-centric biases. Finally, it will propose rethinking gender as a dynamic historical question, affirming its continued but reimagined utility in imperial histories.
Gender as a Necessary Analytical Category in Imperial Historiography
The recognition of gender as a historical category emerged alongside feminist efforts to legitimise women historians and reshape social history. Joan Scott frames this as a late twentieth-century shift beyond descriptive approaches, positioning gender as a complex analytical tool. Mrinalini Sinha similarly argues that “each aspect of reality is gendered,” necessitating a critical reassessment of supposedly neutral methodologies. Rather than simply integrating into existing paradigms, feminist scholars developed new frameworks that challenged traditional historiography and introduced alternative epistemologies rooted in feminist theory. In imperial histories, gender has been particularly instrumental in reframing androcentric narratives. The 1990s “gender turn” in Chinese imperial historiography exemplifies this shift, as scholars critically challenged nationalist and Marxist narratives that had long reduced women to simplistic binaries of victims or liberated modern subjects. Instead, gender became a crucial lens for examining power dynamics and social structures, demonstrating its value as a locally grounded and adaptable category of analysis. In this way, gender did not merely supplement existing approaches but provided a foundation for reimagining historiographical inquiry.
Gender opened transformative avenues for understanding empire, elucidating the many ways in which power relations were constructed and represented in colonial society. As a relation of power, gender permeated all aspects of colonial realities: it shaped identities, regulated social relations, and legitimised colonial rule. This is evident in Kathleen Wilson’s analysis of ideological frameworks like the cult of sensibility and Enlightenment theories of progress, which positioned gender as central to Britain’s imperial mission, framing compassion, benevolence, and bifurcated gender roles as markers of progress and civilisation. Wilson’s use of judicial and legal sources reveals how gendered social orders were imposed to reinforce British superiority and consolidate dominion, framing British gender norms as universal standards. Thus, gender both legitimised imperial rule and shaped mechanisms of control, serving as a vital analytical category for analysing the consolidation and operation of colonial power.
Gender offers a vital lens for examining the identities of both colonisers and the colonised, shaping masculinity, femininity, and national identity while exposing the complexities of lived experience. Intersecting with race and class, gender identities—whether ascribed or adopted—were situational, commodified, and contingent. As Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, European imperialism reduced humanity to “the figure of the settler-colonial white man,” constructing a heroic masculinity that justified domination while marginalising women and colonised men. This hierarchy is evident in the British portrayal of the “manly Englishman” versus the “effeminate Bengali” to legitimise intervention. However, these constructs were dynamic, evolving through colonial encounters. Bengali nationalism, for instance, reinterpreted Victorian ideals like “domestic science” to forge new identities, such as the “new woman,” blending colonial domesticity with mytho-religious aspirations. Bhabanicharan Bandyopadhyay’s Kalikata Kamalalaya illustrates how gendered frameworks shaped hybrid, often contradictory, modern selfhoods in the imperial context. By tracing gender’s intersections with other identities, historians have highlighted its role in revealing the reciprocal processes of identity formation in empire.
The Limits of Categorising Gender: Universalism and Westocentric Bias
The limitations of gender as an analytical category stem from its paradoxical universalisation. While scholars such as Joan Scott and Philippa Levine have advocated for the contextual and non-generalised study of gender, their treatment often assumes its existence as an a priori construct, failing to interrogate its own historicity. This contradiction stems from late twentieth-century Western feminist movements, scholarship and worldviews which framed gender as both socially constructed and a lens for analysis. This epistemological rigidity reduces the dynamic and complex lived experiences into static models for the sake of theoretical clarity. Kathleen Wilson’s analysis of British colonial dominion highlights this tension, as her exploration of gender often subsumes diverse experiences into a homogenised framework, reducing variability and obscuring lived realities. While Wilson acknowledges distinctions between British middle-class and working women, as well as between them and colonised women, she fails to meaningfully incorporate these complexities, reducing the intersectional nuances of femininity to a unified subjectivity rather than recognising their diverse, contradictory experiences. Such uncritical applications of gender as an analytical category risk perpetuating the homogenising frameworks they seek to critique, particularly when addressing the intersections of class, race, and gender in imperial contexts.
Furthermore, gender as an analytical category inherently reflects Westocentric biases, relying on the binary classification of oppositional-sexed bodies as the basis for societal organisation. This framework, rooted in Western patriarchal traditions, assumes that all societies operate through a binary male/female system, disregarding alternative forms. Even Scott’s 2010 revision of her foundational 1999 essay, while advocating for a critical examination of gender, reinforces the fixation on binary sexed bodies. Oyeronke Oyěwùmí counters this by highlighting non-Western societies, such as the Yoruba, where social organisation is based on seniority rather than biological distinctions, challenging the ethnocentric assumptions embedded in Western feminist scholarship. Wilson’s reference to “other patriarchies” exemplifies the problem of assuming pre-colonial societies operated like Western systems, despite little evidence to support this. She ascribes meaning and relational dynamics through a Western lens, reflecting what Boydston might call a failure to “labour” gender as a concept. This failure to critically interrogate Western epistemological frameworks perpetuates their treatment as universal normative truths, replicating the very hegemonic structures they seek to critique by imposing alien conceptual models onto non-Western “Others.” As such, gender operates as an imperial project, shaping both colonial domination and academic methodologies.
Towards New Conceptual Approaches: Gender as a Question of Analysis
Destabilising gender as an analytical category challenges the core of much feminist scholarship. Yet, embracing this instability enhances rather than diminishes gender’s value in historical inquiry. It advocates for a fragmented, non-linear approach that captures the asymmetries, multiplicities, and polyrhythmic interplay of intersecting experiences. Drawing on Elsa Barkley Brown’s musical analogy, this reconceptualisation contrasts the “classical scores” of Western knowledge, which impose silence and linearity, with the “gumbo ya-ya” of African-American storytelling—where voices overlap, interact, and diverge. Such an approach acknowledges the historian’s present self and its influence on writing, while striving to avoid rewriting the past to conform to contemporary frameworks. Jane Haggis’s history of British women missionaries in nineteenth-century South India exemplifies this shift. Unlike Rosalind O’Hanlon’s reductive view of these women as “partners in empire,” Haggis highlights the complexities of their identities. Through critical archival study and a post-structuralist method, Haggis moves beyond traditional dualisms, showing that missionary women’s agency is shaped by metropolitan trajectories. By engaging with the fragmented and contingent nature of gender, this approach confronts the challenge of embracing, not rejecting, difference, crafting a “gumbo ya-ya” of gender and empire resisting linearity.
Gender as a category of analysis must be critically rejected, challenging its presumed universality and confronting its historical construction within Western epistemologies. As noted by Boydston, as “gender construction as defined by the current category of analysis in the form employed by so many western historians did not occur,” then “only by a break with the categorical vision” can scholars move beyond fixed frameworks to treat gender as a context-specific phenomenon. This shift necessitates focusing on the processes of gendering, not as predetermined frameworks but as dynamics actively sought—embracing multiplicity and fluidity, and approaching sources as open-ended inquiries rooted in local contexts. Afsaneh Najmabadi’s work demonstrates how historians may unintentionally reinforce the binaries they aim to challenge. She questions whether focusing on men and women re-naturalises gender, perpetuating heteronormativity. Her research into Iranian modernity shows how earlier work marginalised sexuality and reinforced gender binaries, leading to skewed narratives. Recognising her own role in reinforcing these binaries, Najmabadi reevaluated sources to uncover subjectivities beyond binary categorisation. Gender must not be taken for granted but critically interrogated to assess its presence and relevance. This approach reframes gender as a dynamic analytical process, grounded in ever-evolving, open-ended inquiry.
Gender emerged as a pivotal category of analysis within feminist historiography, both to establish the legitimacy of the field and to uncover the deeply gendered nature of imperial realities. While it reshaped the study of empire by exposing its influence on power, hierarchies, and identities, its transformative potential has been limited by its use as a fixed, universal category, often reinforcing the Western-centric, binary frameworks it sought to critique. To fully realise the critical utility of gender, it must not be assumed but reimagined as an active interrogation, one which reflects the multifaceted fluidity of historical contingency.
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