Politika, Politológia | Tanulmányok, esszék » Some explanations of Joan Scotts, Gender, A Useful Category of Historical Analysis in Gender and the Politics of History

Source: http://www.doksinet Some explanations of Joan Scotts, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis" in Gender and the Politics of History NB: please remember that these are my notes designed for your benefit. As such, they are my intellectual property. If you use my comments for papers, you must properly cite them INTRODUCTORY SECTION "Throughout the ages, people have made figurative allusions by employing grammatical terms to evoke traits of character or sexualityMost recentlyfeminists have in a more literal and serious vein begun to use gender as a way of referring to the social organization of the relationship between the sexes" (28). -Here Scott talks about the historicity of words, that they do change, that they are used to transform attitudes or play upon common stereotypes. More specifically, Scott refers to the use of the grammatical term "gender" to fix certain characteristics or defining traits to the sexes. In the past (as now)

this was used humorously. Scott argues that feminists have begun to use the word to explain social organization. Like the very word, social organization has a historythat history is, in part, based on certain attributes of the sexes. "In grammar, gender is understood to be a way of classifying phenomena, a socially agreed upon system of distinctions rather than an objective description of inherent traits. In addition, classifications suggest a relationship among categories that makes distinctions or separate groupings possible" (29). Grammar has a specific use for genderit is used to classify terms. "[G]ender seems to have first appeared among American feminists who wanted to insist on the fundamentally social quality of distinctions based on sex. The word denoted a rejection of the biological determinism implicit in the use of such terms as sex or sexual difference. Gender also stressed the relational aspect of normative definitions of femininity." -Society has

built distinctions (status, really) based on sex -Sex by itself does not create social differences. This is constructed by society -Because it is constructed, we must get away from saying, "well, thats the way it is between a man and a woman." Thats the way it is because society has created it, not because it is NATURAL. -What defines "normal" feminine behavior? A relation to something abnormal must be established. To know what IS normal, we need to know what IS NOT Oppositions are set in place. -In addition, this relational model was claimed by some historians (notably Natalie Zemon Davis) to understand "the significance of the sexes." This means that historians sought to understand how sex and sexual relations were built on culturally constructed notions of what is appropriate sexual behavior (sex roles). "[G]ender was a term offered by those who claimed that womens scholarship would fundamentally transform disciplinary paradigms." -What does

this mean????? Basically, it could be used to "push the envelope" or to "throw a wrench into" traditional histories. It was a way of moving forward, of rethinking history and the way we look at the past. "An interest in class, race, and gender signaled, first, a scholars commitment to a history that included stories of the oppressed" (30). -shes getting at the "history from below" that weve talked about before. Emerging partly from the New Left of the 1960s -she connects studies of class to Marxs economic theories and argues that while scholars use class in various ways, there is always an understanding that it "involve[s] an idea of economic causality and a vision of the path along which history has moved dialectically." (check out the dialectic cheat sheet for further elaboration) -she then separates race and gender from studies of class. Source: http://www.doksinet Sayegh notes Joan Scott, "Gender" Page 2 -she argues

that feminist historians are looking to find that kind of coherence in studies about gender for two reasons: 1. "the proliferation of case studies in womens history seems to call for some synthesizing perspective that can explain continuities and discontinuities." 2. "the discrepancy between the high quality of recent work in womens history and its continuing marginal status in the field as a wholepoints up the limits of descriptive approaches that do not address dominant disciplinary concepts." -she then says that nonfeminist historians essentially dismiss this work or try to divorce it from any connection to political or economic history or basically to say something like "great, women participated in X event. My knowledge of the event still remains very much as it was" Her response to these kinds of dismissive attitudes is the following: "The challenge posed by these responses is, in the end, a theoretical one. It requires analysis not only of the

relationship between male and female experience in the past but also of the connection between past history and current historical practice. How does gender work in human social relationships? How does gender give meaning to the organization and perception of historical knowledge? The answer depend on gender as an analytic category" (31) *we MUST take gender seriously to understand the way in which it is so firmly embedded not only in our understanding of the past, but also in our very relationships today. If we do not critically examine these relationships, we can never fully come to an understanding of how the relationship between the sexes was at an imbalance through much, if not all of human history. SECTION I She first asserts that historians attempts to theorize gender have been rather formulaic falling under the rubric of the fashion of social science and this is utterly not conducive to truly understanding gender. The problem, she claims is that "they tend to contain

reductive or overly simple generalizations" (31). She then asserts that the approaches fall into two categories: 1. descriptiveit merely recognizes the existence of certain relationships, but offers no analysis or explanation 2. causalit attempts to understand the how and the why of the social world It asks questions about the nature of these phenomena and it wants to understand why "they take the form they do." Why does she say that gender is a synonym for women? She argues that gender has been co-opted by womens historians because it seems more neutral (politically and personally), but the subject of the works remains distinctly about women. This can be problematic because it doesnt carry the analytical punch it should. "Whereas the term womens history proclaims its politics by asserting (contrary to customary practice) that women are valid historical subjects, gender included, but does not name women, and seems to pose no critical threat." Now, she says this

assertion occurred on the one hand as part of the quest for academic legitimacy. At first glance, it may seem that she may not like this particular use of gender, but go to the next paragraph on page 32: "This usage rejects the interpretive utility of the idea of separate sphere, maintaining that to study women in isolation perpetuates the fiction that one sphere, the experience of one sex, has little or nothing to do with the other. In addition, gender is also used to designate social relations between the sexes. Its use explicitly rejects biological explanations" I see this as a crucial statement from Scott because with two sentences she has torn asunder the argument, made above, that ones understanding of a certain event can remain the same despite the inclusion of women. With the category of gender, one cannot marginalize the study of women or dismiss their history. Their history is necessarily interwoven with mens. "[G]ender becomes a way of denoting cultural

constructionsthe entirely social creation of ideas about appropriate roles for women and men. It is a way of referring to the exclusively social Source: http://www.doksinet Sayegh notes Joan Scott, "Gender" Page 3 origins of the subjective identities of men and women. Gender is, in this definition, a social category imposed on a sexed body." *KEY POINT!!! This is a MAJOR MAJOR point for Scotts theory. We cannot claim that womens roles or mens roles have traditionally been what they are because of some innate biological function. We MUST break away from a biologically determined notion of what it means to be male (and what the male sex-role is) and what it means to be female (and what the female sex-role is). In fact, even the sex roles themselves are culturally constructed to a certain extent, because they imply that "normal" men have sex with women for the purpose of proceation, etc. BUT, there are still some problems. She states that this describes what

gender is, and has helped to create a new object of study. However, "gender seems no to apply and so continues to be irrelevant to the thinking of historians concerned with issue of politics and power. The effect is to endorse a certain functionalist view ultimately rooted in biology and to perpetuate the idea of separate spheresin the writing of history. Although gender in this usage asserts that relationships between the sexes are social, it says nothing about why these relationships are constructed as they are, how they work, or how they change." HUH??? Didnt the definition just suggest the historicity of this category? Why is she critiquing her own statements? What shes getting at is that while these definitions tell us something about what exactly gender MEANS, they dont get to the heart of how to analyse those meanings. Historians needed a way to get at using gender to explain not just a phenomena about the sexes, but how that phenomena was related to historical change.

What we need is a reconciliation between history (praxis) and theory (33). She then says we should take a look at the theories that have been used (some of them problematically, some of them so hidden in the historical work as to not be present at all). There are three theories that she wants to talk about: Patriarchy, Marxism and psychoanalysis (all of these should be familiar) 1. Patriarchythe study of the historical subjection of women by men For some feminists (p. 33), the key was linked to womens biological sex role Subordination was based on linking women to having babies. For others, sexuality (we should totally know this term!) was the answer. Throughout history, women have been objectifiedeven in the very description of the heterosexual sex actwomen are subordinate to men by a very MATERIAL thing, sex. According to Catherine MacKinnon as filtered by Joan Scott, "although sexual relations are definedas social, there is nothing except the inherent inequality of the sexual

relation itself to explain why the system of power operates as it does." Basically, everything is chalked up to inequality between the sexesa material, and biologically determined, analysis 2. Marxismwhile Scott says that Marxist feminists are more historical (hence her critique of the former), she still opines that they are wedded to a material understanding of the relations between the sexes. Despite the claim by theorists to deny a biological determinism (and other problems), "the search nonetheless for a materialist explanation that excludes natural physical differences" was proving hard to come by (35). There were some critiques within Marxism, but for Scott, the problem was just thatremaining within Marxisms fold. She states that "[Joan Kellys] commitment to remain within a Marxist framework led her to emphasize the causal role of economic factors even in the determination of the gender system." SO WHAT?? Why is Joan Scott so bothered by this? Surely,

this is as good as it gets, right? No, because "she tended to emphasize the social rather than the sexual nature of that reality, and, most often, social, in her usage, was conceived in terms of economic relations of production." OK, so why isnt this the end of her discussion of Marxism and feminism? She recognizes that many scholars increasingly fell under the spell of analytic conceptions of sexuality and that Michel Foucaults historicization of the concept of sexuality resonated among many Marxist scholars. She critiques Power of Desire (1983) and its attempt to fuse gender into a materialist discourse. She claims that this volume of essays is exciting because there is ACTUAL DEBATE about the way in which gender should be used, yet, Source: http://www.doksinet Sayegh notes Joan Scott, "Gender" Page 4 to Scotts dismay, "a tacit assumption runs through the volume that Marxism can be expanded to included discussions of ideology, culture, and psychology and

that this expansion will happen through the kind of concrete examination of evidence undertaken in the articles." Again, they accept the concept of relations of production Big difference between Brits and Americans, however, because Brits had a huge Marxist tradition in academia. Her ultimate stance on Marxism: "within Marxism, the concept of gender has long been treated as the by-product of changing economic structures; gender has had no independent analytic status of its own" (36-37). When this happens, it is easy to be subsumed by the dominant ideologybig fish eats little fish. 3. Psychoanalysis She begins by defining different schools of though within this heading: A. object-relations theorystresses actual lived experience (and experience based on the senses). Here Nancy Chodorow and Carol Gilligan are given the status of primary practitioners. For Scott, the problem with object-relations theory is that it is too literal and too focused around the family itself. As a

consequence, it is too limiting and the historian cannot apply the theories (without problem) to explain how other social systems like the economy, politics or power (top, page 38). Important question: "How can we account within this theory for persistent associations of masculinity with power, for the higher value placed on manhood than on womanhood, for the way children seem to learn these associations and evaluations even when they live outside nuclear households where parenting is equally divided between husband and wife?Without meaning, there is no experience; without processes of signification, there is no meaning" (38). B. post-structuralist theorystresses language as a central manner of representing gender (here she uses Jacques Lacan as her model). Language here means not "words but systems of meaningsymbolic ordersthat precede the actual mastery of speech, reading, and writing" (37). She states that "through language, gendered identity is

constructed" (38). According to Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, "the childs relationship to the law (the dominant parent) depends on sexual difference, on its imaginative (or fantastic) identification with masculinity or femininity." Nevertheless, in Lacanian theory, gender identification is NOT a fixed category. Masculinity emerges through repression (of feminine characteristics), not through some predetermined biological connection. Thus, there is always conflict and competing meanings of sexuality. As a consequence, the very concept of "man" and "woman" becomes problematic because their precepts, masculinity and femininity, are thrown into disarray (that is, what is "masculine" emerges from the conscious behavior of a person who is always engaged in a repression of the opposite impulse). THUS, and this is a good thing for Scott, Lacanian theory points to language as the place to analyse gender, not to a material reality. Scotts problem

with Lacan: The theory focuses too much on the individual subject. It also tends to universalize categories without contextualizing them, thus, "the outcome for historians is a reductive reading of evidence from the pastit does not permit the introduction of a notion of historical specificity and variability" (39). Historians using these two variants of psychoanalytic theory run into problems as well. They seem to accept fixed relations between male/female as being universal (and consequently ahistorical). And this has problems because it leads us to an "essentialist notion of woman" (40). NB: look up essentialist in a good dictionary BINARY OPPOSITIONS??? "fixed always in the same way" is her definition (40). And this is a good definition And because there is this idea of a binary opposition "woman/man" there is a problem. If you want to get at the problems under the category of female, you need to interrogate the category that it is Source:

http://www.doksinet Sayegh notes Joan Scott, "Gender" Page 5 somehow universally opposite something called "male." This is ahistorical What we need to do in refuting binary oppositions is to not accept categories as somehow natural. What is needed is a deconstructionlooking at a binary opposition in context and asking questions of how it operates; that is, not merely accepting the existence of such phenomena, but analyzing how they were created by getting to their root, as JS says, "reversing and displacing its hierarchical construction" (41). SECTION II SHES GETTING TO THE HEART OF HER ARGUMENT IN THESE PAGES *"The term gender is part of the attempt by contemporary feminists to stake claim to a certain definitional ground, to insist on the inadequacy of existing bodies of theory for explaining persistent inequalities between women and men" (41). -This merely reasserts her argument. "It seems to me significant that the use of the word

gender has emerged at a moment of great epistemological turmoil that takes the formof debates about theory between those who assert the transparency of facts and those who insist that all reality is construed as constructed, between those who defend and those who question the idea that man is the rational master of his own destiny" (41). -For the purposes of History 302, I find this comment informative because it gets to the way that we have somewhat arbitrarily divided the sections of this coursefrom a scientistic "the truth is out there in some objective reality" approach to an approach that asserts that all knowledge is built around "discourse." I would hope that this comment resonates with you from lecture 1 until this reading. Scott makes an important point on page 42 about historical methods. She states that, "I do not think that we should quit the archives or abandon the study of the past, but we do have to change some of the ways weve gone about

working, some of the questions we have asked. We need to scrutinize our methods of analysis, clarify our operative assumptions, and explain how we think change occurs. Instead of a search for single origins, we have to conceive of processes so interconnected they cannot be disentangledIt is the processes we must continually keep in mind. We must ask more often how things happened in order to find out why they happened." -Ive quoted a huge chunk from this very important page because were getting right to the soul of our class. Were seeing how ways of looking at the past can radically transform they way we do historyfrom what sources we read to how we read them. And this transformation does not signal the demise of history as a profession. To the contrary, this transformation will allow us to ask questions of the material that would previously remain unasked. We can stop the search for causality and begin the search for "how." -She also says we need to pursue meaning in

this how/why model. To understand gender, according to JS. "we need to deal with the individual subject as well as social organization and to articulate the nature of their interrelationships, for both are crucial to understanding how gender works, how change occurs" (42). -More significantly, she declares that "we need to replace the notion that social power is unified, coherent, and centralized with something like Michel Foucaults concept of power as dispersed constellations of unequal relationships, discursively constituted in social fields of force" (42). -Having read Foucault, you should recognize that this is not some top-down analysis of power. -What is intriguing about her attempt to rework gender is that AGENCY remains a part of itpeople matter and make decisions!! "there is room for a concept of human agency as the attemptto construct an identity, a life, a set of relationships, a society within certain limits and with language" whats with this

"within certain limits" stuff? Either you are free to choose or you arent. Agency isnt that simple We are all at least partially constrained by our environmentssocial, personal, political, ecological. Given those Source: http://www.doksinet Sayegh notes Joan Scott, "Gender" Page 6 confines people make decisions. History doesnt happen, people make it happen (my line, here). BINGO! BELLS AND WHISTLES SHOULD BE BLOWING! KEYWORD OF THE DAY! "My definition of gender has two parts and several subsetsThe core of the definition rests on an integral connection between two propositions: gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes [part 1], and gender is a primary way of signifying relations of power [part 2]" (42). -Part 1 states that gender is culturally constructed. There is nothing natural or biologically predetermined about it. Its not "actual" difference but "perceived"

difference Some of this of course cannot escape physical differences, but those physical differences become defining traits of essence. There are four elements of this part of her definition: 1. cultural symbols evoke multiple representations; 2. there are normative concepts that interpret what these cultural symbols mean; 3. notion of politics and a reference to social institutions and organizations; 4. subjective identity -tying these four together, JS states that "Historians need instead to examine the ways in which gendered identities are substantively constructed and relate their findings to a range of activities, social organizations, and historically specific cultural representations" (44). -She asserts that this has been successfully accomplished in recent biographies, both about the individual (as Halls [not the same one!] Jessie Daniel Ames) and the collective (as Sinhas Bengali world). All four of these must exist together in her definitionthey cant operate

separately. So, what is her point of offering a process of how gender is constructed? "to clarify and specify how one needs to think about the effect of gender in social and institutional relationships, because this thinking is often not done precisely or systematically." -Part 2 recognizes that gender is used to create and enforce power relations, most notable the subordination of one sex (female) by another (male). She states, "gender is a primary field within which or by means of which power is articulated" (45). This is not to say that power solely is about gender or is built for the purposes of creating gender distinctions and imbalances; it is only one way in which power manifests itself (others include race and class). -She then makes a very intriguing statement: "gender becomes implicated in the conception and construction of power itself" and she quotes anthropologist Maurice Godelier to help explain this. We discover that sex differences are used

by society to establish and uphold social relations "that have nothing to do with sexuality." Once this is done, sexuality is used as legitimation for gender inequalities and differences. -How does legitimation work? At first she gives a number of examples. She then asserts that the examples she has provided "are based on the idea that conceptual languages employ differentiation to establish meaning and that sexual difference is a primary way of signifying differentiation." -Society takes obvious physical differences and uses them to construct meaning about social relationships, social phenomena, etc. She then claims that "Gender, then, provides a way to decode meaning and to understand the complex connections among various forms of human interaction[historians] develop insight into the particular and contextually specific ways in which politics constructs gender and gender constructs politics" (46). -Now were getting not only to reasons why gender is a

useful category of historical analysis, but also to why the title of the book is Gender and the Politics of History. Source: http://www.doksinet Sayegh notes Joan Scott, "Gender" Page 7 -Examine her examples here from political history. Not only does she want us to see how politics is an area where gender can be used as analysis, but she wants to throw a wrench into traditional political history because it has remained so staunchly resistant to the inclusion of women or gender. -Burke and the "murderous sansculotte hags" vs. "soft femininity of Marie Antoinette" -Burke again, "to make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely." -medieval Islamic political theory as similar to Classical Greece (and here she references Foucault). What do these homosexual power relations have in common? "the irrelevance of women to any notion of politics and public life." And this, of course, is a gendered notion. -She then says that we need

to understand how the needs of the state gender society. She says a bit later about authoritarian regimes: "emergent rules have legitimized domination, strength, central authority, and ruling power as masculine (enemies, outsiders, subversives, weakness, as feminine) and made that code literal in laws (forbidding womens political participation, outlawing abortion, prohibiting wage-earning by mothers, imposing female dress codes) that put women in their place" (47) -But not only authoritarian regimes: "In different ways the democratic regimes of the twentieth century have also constructed their political ideologies with gendered concepts and translated them into policy" (47). She asserts that these examples show how gender is connected to power, but they do not form the whole of her definition / understanding of gender: "attention to gender is often not explicit, but it is nonetheless a crucial part of the organization of equality or inequality" (48). The

very concept of hierarchy does not necessarily need to be based in official politicsher example of class relations (middle class vs. working class) exemplifies this point -Even so, high politics is still an important venue for understanding how gender operates: "Gender is one of the recurrent references by which political power has been conceived, legitimated, and criticized. It refers to but also establishes the meaning of the male/female opposition. To vindicate political power, the reference must seem sure and fixed, outside human construction, part of the natural or divine order" (48-9). She ends her analysis with a discussion of change. How is it possible if gender and power are implicated in each others construction? How do you break free of the cycle? Well, she provides lots of examples on page 49 of how / where change may be initiated. -In the end though, she asserts that "If we treat the opposition between male and female as problematic rather than known, as

something contextually defined, repeatedly constructed, then we must constantly ask not only what is at stake in proclamations or debates that invoke gender to explain or justify their positions but also how implicit understandings of gender are being invoked and reinscribed" (49). This is an important statement because it forces us to examine sexual relations in the past as part of their culturewe cannot get away with assigning them some fixed, universal and consequently ahistorical, predetermined position. We need to understand how each subject under investigation USED the ideology of gender (however unconsciously) to create a certain sense of the world. What of all this? Whats in it for us? She ends the piece by saying that history will be richer for including gender as an analytic tool for it "will provide new perspectives on old questions, redefine the old questions in new terms, make women visible as active participants, and create analytic distance between the

seemingly fixed language of the past and our own terminology" (50). In other words, gender will be its own theoretical discourse to be applied to history in the same way that we apply the methods of Marxism, annales, or cultural history. But gender in this sense does more than this. It will provide new ways of thinking about the feminist project itself because gender "must be redefined and restructured in conjunction with a vision of political and social equality that includes not only sex, but class and race."