思考婦女／性別史與世界／全球史： 交集、張力與機會

Thinking About Women's and Gender History & World and Global History: Intersections, Tensions, Opportunities

世界／全球史、婦女／性別史這兩個歷史研究領域，談論的是連結關係越趨緊密的21世紀世界當中，一些最迫切的議題：權力如何被全球性地分配並跨越邊界地運作；世界上不同的民族如何利用和共享地球的環境資源；出現在世界上某一地區的病原體如何對其他地區造成影響（儘管經常是以極為不同的方式）；以及商品的生產和交易如何創造出巨大的財富和機會，卻使得貧困和不平等的結構更形惡化。在這些議題面前，我們的身分不僅只是某個社群（可能是政治的、國家的、國際的、宗教的、文化的、民族的）的其中一個成員─那意味著我們必須與其他成員之間發生合作、競爭、衝突等等的連結關係，我們所有人更是作為性別化的個體在面對這些議題。即使性別的具體輪廓因地而異，在全世界的各種人類社群當中，它仍是一項社會原則。

World and global history and the history of women and gender are two fields of historical inquiry that speak to some of the most pressing issues of our intensely connected twenty-first-century world: how power is distributed globally and exercised across boundaries; how the planet's environmental resources are used and shared by the world's different peoples; how pathogens that arise in one part of the world affect all others although in often dramatically different ways; and how the production and traffic of goods can generate tremendous wealth and opportunities as well as exacerbate structures of poverty and inequality. We face these issues not only as members of communities — political, national, international, religious, culture, and ethnic — that have to relate to one another in co-operation, competition, and conflict. All of us also face them as gendered individuals since gender, even if its specific contours vary from place to place, remains an organizing social principle of communities world-wide.