Gender, Sexuality, and the Body

In early modern studies, gender first emerged as a question focused on women. Did women have a Renaissance (Kelly-Gadol 1977)? What about their experiences, expectations, contributions? Feminist scholars started with simply including women into history. The same questions were asked by historians of childhood and youth: did young people have a Renaissance? Did women go through a stage of youth in early modern Europe (Chojnacki 1992; Cohen and Reeves 2018: 11–32)? In the 1980s and 1990s, histories of youth followed the gender-neutral grand narrative of social history in which the research focused on education and professional training, that is, on male youth. Female youth remained an age category signifying readiness (or not) for marriage (Heywood 2001). Since the early 2000s gender historians have worked hard to deconstruct the female/male binary and highlight the complexities of experiences ascribed to the category of “women” as well as of “men” (Dolan 2014). Following recent studies to write non-binary gender history, this chapter will focus on gender as a practice and performance (Butler 1993; Freccero 2006; Traub 2002), that is, as a learnt behavior, in which adolescence and youth are crucial as a period of “learning,” a stage of life when women and men are produced as performative subjects. The chapter will explore how gender identities and gendered subjects are shaped during adolescence and youth in relation to their bodies and sexuality in Europe and non-European localities such as China, Americas, and South Asia.