Stuart Hall once accused feminists of defecating on the table of cultural studies:For cultural studies (in addition to many other theoretical projects), the intervention of feminism was specific and decisive. It was ruptural…As a thief in the night, it broke in, interrupted, made an unseemly noise, seized the time, crapped on the table of cultural studies. (Hall 1992:282) It certainly sounds dirty. This is only one of many things of which feminists have been accused. The struggle to gain legitimacy and space within Sociology was, just like Cultural Studies, intense, producing many casualties. And it is a struggle that continues with some very specific temporal, spatial, national and local manifestations, which makes it a difficult history to write as perspective is shaped by location, positioning, capitals, vision, interest, will to ignorance and power. The representation offered here is partial and indicative aiming to connect the conditions for writing, speaking, hearing and practice to political context. I pepper this mainly national 'history' with personal examples to explicate some of the wider social issues. For this is not just a story of inhabitation but of the inscription of what we can think of as 'the social'. For Deleuze and Guattari (1977) inscription cuts or scars bodies in the making of strata and behaviour, assembling them into composite forms, enabling articulation and disarticulation of libidinal energies. Inscription therefore produces the subject via various regimes of classification, representation and control of the body: gender is a powerful form of inscription, both challenged and constituted by feminism. As Bogard (1998) notes:There are forms of social inscription that are exclusive, that separate bodies from what they are capable of doing, that demean their desire and distort their sense; and there are modes that are inclusive and connective, that liberate desire, destroy limits and draw 'positive lines of flight ' or escape. (p. 58) The mechanisms of gendered inscription produce bodies through classification, representation, discourse and iteration, but feminist modes of gendered inscription offer alternative ways of assembling bodies, offering lines of flight that can cut through power, block its operations, break out of limits and liberate desire. It is this struggle over how to re-inscribe gender that we see in the battle between feminism and sociology, both conceptually through the organisation of forms of knowledge and discourse and institutionally by creating spaces for the re-inscriptions.Sara Delamont (2003) has written an extensive account of the development of feminist sociology in the US and the UK, where she attempts to demarcate feminist sociology from the sociology of women/and or gender, sociology from feminist perspectives in other disciplines, and where she outlines the male-stream of sociology. It is a story told from within, by one of the creators, one that I partially recognise, but a history before my time yet one that shaped my time. The story here is told f...