Introduction

When Dr. Aner Govrin and Dr. Yael Peri invited me to write an introductory book on gender, I found myself reflecting not only on the task but on the weight of the project itself. To write an introduction to gender felt like stepping into the subjunctive—a mood of possibility and uncertainty. The subjunctive entertains what might be, what could have been, or what resists final determination. In this sense, the situation of gender is lived through temporality: an experience felt before it can be understood. Here I turn to André Green’s (1999) conception of history—not as chronology but as the return of what was never fully inscribed. For Green, history is not recollection but the trace of an absence, something that insists without resolution and shapes psychic life through what has been foreclosed, repressed, or missed. Gender, too, often emerges in these temporal folds—not as origin but as aftermath, marked by loss and the desire for belated coherence.