The future of the past:

gender studies as archive

Abstract

 This article aims to show how gender studies are invested with the characteristics of an archive, often thrown into the future and at the wrong time of their moment of intervention in the public debate, only to find there a horizon of reception that blurs the limits of what contemporary means. To do this, first a search is carried out through different theories about the archive, with special emphasis on the works of Foucault and Derrida, and the subsequent “archival turn” of the social and human sciences and its “anarchivistic” drifts. Starting from this new configuration about “the law of what can be said,” in Foucault‘s words, archive theories are linked to gender studies and their ability to problematize historically unquestionable statements. To conclude, the “effect of  contemporaneity”, proposed by Giorgio Agamben, produced by gender studies as archives is noted when finding a historical situation where they produce meaning.