This chapter features the contributions of influential and lesser-known essayists who have written persuasively and engagingly on gender and sexuality in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Issues of identity and difference have had a profound effect on the writing of our age, and certainly on the essay, the most elusive of genres. This chapter considers the intersections of the essay, gender, and queer studies/consciousness over the last few decades, first in a general sense, and then through the lens of specific essayists who have had the most significant impact on the direction of the essay since 1970 in the United States. Beginning with second-wave feminism, this chapter discusses the work of those essayists in feminist and LGBTQ+ communities whose foundational writing on gender still resonates today. The chapter examines important essays that emerged from third- and fourth-wave feminism and then pursues the stylistic and thematic innovations brought by lesbian, gay, trans, and queer writers who have explored topics such as gender as performance, HIV and AIDS, misogyny and misandry, intersectionality, discrimination, and the medicalization and mediatization of desire.

In Late Imperial China sexual and domestic violence were understood in terms of the Confucian kinship system. Legally defined social status keyed to class structure (‘free commoner’ vs. ‘mean/debased’) had played a complementary role for much of the imperial era. But in the Qing dynasty it yielded to the primacy of gender roles defined in terms of normative kinship hierarchy – a shift from status performance to gender performance. The chief priority of Qing law was to ensure that males played their proper role as husbands and fathers, and that females played their proper role as wives and mothers. A related priority was to defend chaste wives and daughters, as well as vulnerable young sons, against the predatory threat of the single, rogue male (‘bare stick’) who was left outside the family order altogether. This shift in the law reflected not only underlying change in imperial ideology but also the long-term transformation of social structure and the mounting social crisis in China.