Women write history; subject verb object

I should not be surprised at this point, but every topic we read about leaves me with a greater appreciation for the subfield than I had before.  That certainly goes for the readings this week on gender history.  I never heard of Joan Scott, or “Joan Scott,” but it is clear she is a major force in the field: her article has had an amazing impact, according to Meyerowitz’s article, on so much that falls under the heading of gender or feminist history.  “Gender” was a complicated article, but it turned a comment I made earlier in the semester on its head: I had said that history is interesting, but it doesn’t always seem as important as the social sciences.  (I was wrong, and classmates and Scott dished out my comeuppance with force.) Rather than just describing the history of women or the term “gender,” she wanted to critically analyze much of what has been done and provide some recommendations for future research.  None of this was easy to understand or get through, but I sensed incredible importance.  

In “Gender,” Scott is attempting to critique the state of gender history as of the mid-1980s and offer some recommendations for further research.  First, she notes that there has been an awful lot of description in gender history, and she wants to see more theoretical work.  Granted, there are legitimate reasons for the description, but perhaps it’s time to move forward.  Where there has been theory, Scott believes it has been limited.  The three “theoretical positions” then in vogue include the following:

1. Origins of patriarchy.
2. Marxian tradition.
3. Psychoanalysis, resulting from the divide between French post-structuralist and Anglo-American object-relations theory.  

If I’m understanding Scott correctly, the first two are directions she is less interested in; Scott is more hopeful about certain areas of the promise of the third theoretical position.  However, the Anglo-American object-relations theory is also not to her liking.  The two and a half theoretical positions to be avoided, according to Scott, seem to focus too much on the “fixed and permanent quality of the binary opposition” (p. 1065).  So that leaves us with the French post-structuralist promise: “In the space opened by this debate and on the side of the critique of science developed by the humanities, and of empiricism and humanism by post-structuralists, feminists have not only begun to find a theoretical voice of their own, but have found scholarly and political allies as well.  It is within this space that we must articulate gender as an analytic category” (p. 1066).  Here Foucault raises his head again.  This leads us into her definition of gender, which I detail in my notes below.  

To get to Chris’s prompt, I think that Scott’s gender essay is relevant to what we learned about from our Marxist readings.  Although Scott critiqued Marxist theoretical approaches to gender, I think Scott and Foucault are working in a “Marx 2.0” world.  Marx 1.0 - or Marx - dealt with a clear and obvious powerful force: the bourgeoisie.  Scott is working in the Foulcaultian world in which trying grab at power and see it is more complicated.  (Scott describes Foucault’s concept of power perfectly, as “dispersed constellations of unequal relationships, discursively constituted in social ‘fields of force,’” p. 1067.) And with her preferred theoretical approach, she points us in the direction of politics and political history.  That is where we will find gender shaping the outcomes of interstate and domestic affairs, which will provide plentiful data to test an open-ended and interesting theory.  

I also enjoyed the Ditz article.  Considering how powerful a force capitalism was becoming as of the late 1700s, and how powerful the merchant class was in this newer economic system, Ditz was wise to focus on communications among merchants to make a larger point.  Although the applicability of case studies can be limited to just the case at hand, taking such an influential group and finding a certain mindset at work there means that it is almost certainly applicable beyond that group.  Coincidentally, I have been reading Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow, and this morning I came across this quote regarding the arrogant American General Horatio Gates: “Gates grew puffed up with his own power after [a military] victory.  If ‘old England is not by this taught a lesson of humility,’ he told his wife, ‘then she is an obstinate old slut’” (Kindle 6461).  Seems to be a mindset beyond just the merchants.  

Below are some notes I took on the Scott “Gender” article.  It’s largely verbatim and doesn’t have quotation marks.

Scott’s definition of gender “has two parts and several subsets” (from p. 1067):

Gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, and gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power.  Changes in the organization of social relationships always correspond to changes in representations of power, but the direction of change is not necessarily one way.  As a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, gender involves four interrelated elements:

1. Culturally available symbols that evoke multiple (and often contradictory) representations.
2. Normative concepts that set forth interpretations of the meaning of the symbols, that attempt to limit and contain their metaphoric possibilities.
1. religious, educational, scientific, legal, and political doctrines, and in the form of fixed binary opposition, categorically and unequivocally asserting the meaning of male and female, masculine and feminine.
3. A notion of politics as well as reference to social institutions and organizations.  
1. Focus here will help disrupt the notion of fixity, to discover the nature of the debate or repression that leads to the appearance of timeless permanence in binary gender representation.  (Does Ditz’s “Shipwrecked” article get at this point?)
4. Subjective identity.
1. Psychoanalysis, but need to move beyond this, in a historical direction.
2. Relate findings to a range of activities, social organizations, and historically specific cultural representations.  Biographies are highlighted here.  (p. 1068-9)