Revisioning Gender

This comprehensive handbook attempts to summarize the state of gender studies not only by examining the crucial research of the past decade, but by encouraging thinking about how the questions central to studying gender have themselves changed. Building on the work started by the contributors to this volume's predecessor, (Analyzing Gender, Sage 1987), editors Myra Marx Ferree, Judith Lorber, and Beth B. Hess reflect on the advances of gender scholarship during the past decade with its emphasis on all levels of social structure from the most macro to the most individual. Revisioning Gender is a step, albeit a tentative one, toward constructing a new analytical approach for the social sciences, one that calls into question disciplinary boundaries and the specific agendas that may be entailed within them. The editors, and the contributors to this important volume, illustrate how the use of gender by scholars in various and overlapping fields of study has helped alter concepts and research designs. The goal of this volume is to present, and encourage, the debates that advance the study of social science.