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On the occasion of the publication of the 20th volume of the Advances in Gender Research series, this chapter reviews the series goals and previous volumes and introduces the themes and chapters of the current one.

The chapter shows both continuity and change in approaches to theories, research methods, pedagogy, and praxis in gender studies.

Newer approaches, gender-centered, intersectional and global, offer a critique of older ways of gathering and understanding data, ways that respond to and are impacted by social change.

The chapter and the volume are intended to encourage further advances in gender research.

Purpose: The overall purpose of the chapter is to begin development of a frame of reference that encompasses all gender constructs. This chapter focuses on gender constructs in relatively small-scale, sub-national ethnicities. These peoples represent a major focus of strain in the processes of national development and consolidation. The emphasis here is on the cultural (in this case gender oriented) variations that are preserved by their persistence.

Methodology/approach: The chapter is primarily a review of ethnographic literature, focusing on selected case studies that illustrate both the gender variations that exist and some of those that have already been lost.

Findings: The varieties of gender constructs that exist make it clear that the current binary social science paradigm for organizing our knowledge of gender is inadequate.

Value: This chapter is a reminder that rampant globalization threatens the survival of a variety of ethnic patterns and in reducing them to nameless, faceless cogs in a consumer-driven structure, cultural evolutionary potential for adapting to unforeseen conditions is lost.

Limitations: The data cited do not represent a systematic sample of existing variations. They have been chosen to illustrate the range of data existing outside the commonly accepted patterns.

Purpose/approach: This introduction provides an overview of the themes and chapters of this volume.

Research implications: The chapters in this volume present original research employing empirical and textual methods illustrating the complex responses and policy challenges posed by contemporary understandings and misunderstandings of the nature of gender. Various forms of gender panic and responses to it within individuals, institutions, national states, and the world society are explored.

Practical and social implications: Research demonstrates that gender panic can lead to potentially harmful reactions and fruitless policies that reinforce rather than dismantle the gender binary, thereby, impacting vulnerable members of societies.

Value of the chapter: The chapter and the volume are intended to illustrate the nature of current gender panics and related policies and to encourage further scholarship with the goal of promoting greater understanding as well as developing constructive solutions to issues raised.

With Volume 10, Gender and the Local/Global Nexus: Theory, Research and Action, a milestone has been reached in Advances in Gender Research. When we began to work on Volume 1 (Segal & Demos, 1996) of the series, we called for papers that advanced knowledge of gender theoretically, methodologically and in practice. That volume subtitled, “Theory, Methods and Praxis,” contains six papers exploring trans-genderism, love and gender stratification, gender issues among African Americans, women's liberation and strategies for social change. With the exception of one, each article focuses on advances in gender knowledge culturally relevant to North America.

Teaching about development contains a basic contradiction. The issues are even more stark when we consider that gender disruptions are always a part of the discontinuities in any development process. Students and text books often assume that women are being suppressed and it is a task of development workers to “free” women from “traditional” oppression.

Here the author explores some of the contradictions inevitably part of Development Anthropology. On the one hand, the development worker’s etic vision of problems to be solved by “development” controls discussion in the classroom and the transfer of resources to the field. On the other hand, ordinary villagers’ or urbanites’ emic vision of what is happening in the socio-­cultural system as it faces pressures to “develop” hold sway in field contexts, as well as in their classroom analysis. The author needs to bring the realities of field settings into the pedagogical setting.

Application and pedagogy tend to interpenetrate; there is no clear boundary. Relying on discussions of the pedagogical problems, the author explores some of the discontinuities to be found in a gendered vision of development. The author stresses the problems highlighted by the educational environment in which students frequently first encounter these issues. The ultimate goal of this study is to make clear that teaching about or engaging in development do not have sharp boundaries and cannot be accomplished within the confines of a value-free paradigm. Every decision in this area involves a meeting of emic and etic visions and the value systems that arise from them.

Most well-known conceptualizations of sex, gender and sexuality privilege one version or another of a Western European or North American bi-polar paradigm. However, such a focus ignores the ethnographic evidence for a larger range of sex–gender–sexuality constructs. This paper outlines parameters for known variations in cultural constructs of sex–gender–sexuality systems, and raises questions about contemporary trends in understanding sex, gender and sexuality. As a first step, and because the data are more plentiful, I focus on variations in cultural constructions of sex, gender and sexuality relevant to physiological males, leaving a thorough exploration of constructions relevant to physiological females for another paper. The contemporary spread of Western cultural hegemony, as well as some opposition to that model, has categorized many indigenous, multi-polar sex–gender–sexuality systems as either in need of modernization or simply not quite civilized. The result is a loss, not only of knowledge about human plasticity in this area, but also a loss of cultural flexibility in organizing and dealing with human biocultural variation.

This introduction provides the history and rationale for this volume on gender and practice. The editors’ broad conception of practice, especially gender practice, and the relationships among education, training, and practice, three sections into which the volume’s chapters are grouped, are outlined. Connections between gender practice and the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals are drawn. Each chapter is then summarized and relationships among them are highlighted.

Departing from an online interactive Gender Café on the topic of Knowledge Management (KM), jointly hosted by a UN agency and the Society of Gender Professionals, this chapter seeks to provide gender practitioners and others with practical examples of how to “gender” KM in international development. Through analyzing the travel of feminist ideas into the field of KM with inspiration from Barbara Czarniawska’s and Bernard Joerge’s (1996) theory of the travel of ideas, the chapter explores the spaces, limits, and future possibilities for the inclusion of feminist perspectives. The ideas and practical examples of how to do so provided in this chapter originated during the café, by the participants and panellists. The online Gender Café temporarily created a space for feminist perspectives. The data demonstrate how feminist perspectives were translated into issues of inclusion, the body, listening methodologies, practicing reflection, and the importance to one’s work of scrutinizing underlying values. However, for the feminist perspective to be given continuous space and material sustainability developing into an acknowledged part of KM, further actions are needed. The chapter also reflects on future assemblies of gender practitioners, gender scholars and activists, recognizing the struggles often faced by them. The chapter discusses strategies of how a collective organizing of “outside–inside” gender practitioners might push the internal work of implementing feminist perspectives forward.