Feminism is a cluster of social and political movements as well as theories that promote equality of genders. Some branches emphasize commonality among genders, while others attend to essential differences. Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, is often credited as a founder of feminism.

The pandemic of Covid-19 has fueled intersectional forms of hatred and fear that have coalesced around race and gender. In particular, antifeminist, white nationalist, (trans)misogynist, and anti-immigrant movements use “genderism” (Butler 2021) to evoke a range of disruptive identities and to attack legal and social human rights. Even before recent global crises, however, gender has always structured our society and cultural activities, influencing how we read history’s relevance to our times and how we read forward to shape contemporary performance practices.

At least a century of development was behind the concept we now regard as common sense, namely that gender is a social script on a continuum. With the endocrinological discovery of the universal presence of male and female sex hormones in humans in the 1930s, psychoanalysts and biochemists began developing a theory where humans have inherent features of both sexes. Following the discovery, Lewis Terman and Catherin Cox Miles proposed a seven-part scalar instrument for diagnosing sex psychology, and anthropologists Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead laid the groundwork for relative gender norms.