Introduction: Gender and Authority’, in Gender and Authority Across Disciplines, Space and Time

The introductory chapter presents the volume’s structure and rationale and delineates the research questions and theoretical outlook informing it as a whole. It defines the manifold meanings of authority, comprising status, influence, decision-making power and authorship, and explores the ambits of its relationship with gender, including patriarchal social structures, the male-female binary, constructions of femininity and masculinity, heteronormativity and body politics. The chapter situates the notion of authority in the context of longstanding feminist reflections on power, agency and the intersection between gender and other axes of oppression including race, class, age and sexuality. Finally, it articulates the main aspects and connotations of authority that emerge from the various essays: first, the relationship between formal and informal authority in processes of decision-making; second, the gendered and racialized configuration of authority; and third, the negotiation of authority by traditionally disempowered subjects and the opening up of practices of solidarity, resistance and subversion that reshape authority itself.