Płeć i władza w kontekstach historycznych i współczesnych

Abstract

The book addresses the issue of relationships between gender and power. Although the subject has been analysed on many occassions and in a variety of fashions, the volume does not duplicate the well-known views, but points to the limitations of the previous approaches and suggests possibilities of overcoming those. For the authors of the featured texts, gender also denotes sex in the biological sense, while power does not mean the omnipotent techniques of control, but also strategies of active resistance and emancipation. Having applied a different interpretative paradigm, the authors pose new questions to the already known research material: How to define the category of gender/sex in today's (trans)gender world? In what way do the deliberations on the nature and essence of power affect gender? Do men and women function equally within the machinery of power, assuming the roles of clearly defined cogs, i.e. the dominant (men) and the dominated (women) ones? Answering such questions requires a broad perspective, ranging from antiquity, when power was “invented” by being attributing one gender (though not without exceptions) and when the canon of speaking of what is “female” and “male” was devised, to the contemporary times, in which both categories and their mutual relationships undergo radical reevaluation.