Conclusions
Current research trends suggest ways in which the subject matter, theory, and methodology within world and global history and the history of gender and sexuality can intersect, and indeed are intersecting.
First there is the emphasis on movement, interconnection, and interaction. World history is a study of interactions, encounters, interconnections, and intertwinings. These interconnections also shaped the experiences of people who did not move a meter, for any fixed location can be saturated with global relationships. Sexual behavior, in its most common forms, is, of course, just these things: physical, emotional, mental, and other interactions and intertwinings. Gendered social and political structures, including families, dynasties, and nations, build on these sexual relationships.Second, though both world history and the history of gender and sexuality have created binaries - elite/subaltern, colony/metropole, East/West, homo- sexual/heterosexual, masculine/feminine - they have also called for their destabilization. Both early world history and early women's and gay and lesbian history often involved a grand narrative of domination and resistance, in which the subordinate subject was either a victim or resistor (or both). This dichotomous grand narrative has now been thoroughly critiqued. Increasingly all categories are complicated, and the emphasis instead is on intersectionality, entanglement, and mixture. All dichotomies are too limiting, runs this line of thought, particularly in a globalized world in which individuals can blend and build on elements from many cultures to create hybridized or fluid gender, sexual, national, racial, and other identities.
Third, both fields underscore the need for multiple perspectives. Both world history and gender history stress the importance of presenting a multiplicity of possible viewpoints, both in the sources that one uses and the approaches that one applies to them.
Thus both often cross disciplinary boundaries to draw on the conceptualizations and analytical perspectives of many fields: linguistics, anthropology, genetics, archaeology, economics, literary studies, psychology, and even biology and chemistry. All of these fields have contributed to our understanding of the ways in which gender has shaped world history, and will no doubt continue to do so in an even fuller and more sophisticated way in the future.The intersections between world and global history and the history of gender and sexuality both enhance and complicate our stories of the past. This is unsurprising, as these historical projects all began with the assertion that the history that we knew was incomplete and wanting. The best work in these fields retains this critical lens, and has included its own assumptions, perspectives, and limitations within that analytical scope. It has continued to stress that the story needs to include a wide range of actors of every possible category and identity - including identities we may not yet recognize.
Bringing the insights of these fields together makes our task as historians more difficult, but also allows us to portray the world's encounters, interconnections, entanglements, and mixtures in their full complexity.