In her book on gender and the politics of history first published more than thirty years ago, social historian Joan Wallach Scott describes how gender is doubly marginalized, not just by the academy but also by the discipline—that is, by history itself. The problem with distinct spheres of knowledge about women and their deeds in the form of “her-story,” Scott puts plainly, is that these can exist as discrete and separate, and consequently become irrelevant to common knowledge. Rather than being applied as a known entity, gender, as Scott notes in a later work, is a means “to get at meanings that are neither literal nor transparent.”⁴ Turning to psychoanalysis as a theoretical frame for rereading gender, Scott argues that gender is important analytically and historically because it is impossible to assign gender a fixed and enduring meaning and/or identity, since gender already embeds fantasies and transgressions that refuse to be regulated or categorized.