Language Matters!

Scott’s critique of Marxist historians’ approach to gender history helped illuminate for me something that I think is missing from a Marxist approach to history overall.  That is, because Marxist historians attribute historical change or differences including, Scott argues, gender, to material concerns and “modes of production,” they ignore a whole swath of other factors of change.  For example, Scott argues that Marxist historians ignore all physical differences in their approach to gender, giving gender no independent status as a category of consideration.  Consider, for example, Thompson’s approach to gender in “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the 18^th Century.”  In this article, Thompson discusses the role of women in bread riots at length.  However, he is considered almost entirely with their material needs and motivations, rather than their role as women particularly.  He ignores questions like, “How might have women viewed the opportunity to protest as a chance to gain previously inaccessible power outside the home?” and “How might physical differences between primarily male and primarily female crowds have contributed to the presence or absence of rioting?”

Rather, Scott argues that historians should look for processes of change, not single origins.  She argues that gender is a primary way of signaling relationships of power, and that to examine the power dynamics at play in the conceptualization of gender, historians must pay close attention to language as an indicator of the symbols, normativity, and subjective identity that comprise an understanding of gender.  This close attention to language, which probably was inspired by historians like Foucault (Scott references Foucault), still plays a prominent role in women’s studies today.  How we talk about gender matters.  That is, the language we use about gender, as is evident in Ditz’ “Shipwrecked,” not only signifies what we think about gender differences, but also helps to perpetuate constructs of gender  and the power relations underlying those constructs.