The Boundaries of Gender, Technoscience, Literature, and Visual Culture

The humanities today are a category of knowledge work, one that is undergoing a set of rapid shifts and transformations in both its boundaries - the question of what is or is not the proper method and subject of humanistic inquiry- and its cultural capital - the question of why the humanities are necessary, and according to whom. These shifts have already been profound enough that it is by now commonplace to say that the humanities are in a state of crisis. Crisis response, however, is a difficult and uncertain task; does one adapt so freely that whatever used to be called "the humanities" no longer goes by that name? Or does one hold more tightly to the humanistic traditions that are most threatened, using them as a shield against the things that would divest them of meaning (globalization, the pervasiveness of the market, technocracy, or other forces, depending on whom one asks)! These questions become even more complicated if one views the humanities not as a bulwark against the onslaught of the Twenty-First Century but as a complex set of knowledge practices, many of which are politically or ethically problematic in their erasures, but some of which have proven valuable or even in some cases have become indispensible