GENDER AND COLONIALISM: EXPANSION OR MARGINALIZATION?

Hardly two decades old, historians of gender and colonialism might well claim to have invented a whole new field of scholarship: gender and colonialism specialists draw as much of their intellectual inspiration from each other as they do from the nation- or region-bound fields in which they research and teach. As the field of gender and colonialism has developed and expanded, it has been faced with two significant challenges. One is whether the concerns of gender and colonial history have affected the concerns of older fields in history, such as economic, political, labour, and military histories; recent assessments of imperial history suggest that gender is considered a marginal category of analysis. Another challenge is how to define and study gender and colonialism so that it does not replicate the inequalities and hierarchies of colonialism, so that we study colonizing and colonized societies in equal measure.