Joan Scott

Gender and the Politics of History

1. This is an exposition on the theoretical conceptualization of gender from the viewpoint of an historian - with the foremost concern driven by the fact that traditionally historians have produced large number of descriptive works on many topics that can broadly be categorized as "women's history", yet that has not been enough to either provide for the unified and coherent theorizing on gender or to challenge the dominant version of history by revealing how it is constructed with certain power and interest in the first place. To solve this problem, the author argues that the feminist history needs to develop the concept of gender as an unified analytic category - while accounting for the historical nature of the discourse that gives meanings to the concept of gender fully.

2. Though Scott's basic line of argument appears quite similar to that of orthodox postmodern thoerists, in that she argues that there is no absolute criteria defining what it means to be "man" or "woman" and all gendered identities and meanings are the social creation, and that the task for feminist historians is to divulge the processes of the formation of gendered ideology, meanings and social organizations through political discourse, the merit of this work is that of a quite systematic bringing together of different sociologic analytical concepts that can be used to conceptualize how social relationships based on gender is constructed (in Ch. 2). This bringing together is done by expanding on the definition of the term "gender" she provides for in p. 42. Gender is defined as: a constitutive element of social relationships based on the perceived dfferences between the sexes, and gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power. The first part of this definition is in turn divided into four interrelated elements. First is the culturally available symbols that evoke multiple representations - historians need, then, to ask which symbolic representations are evoked under what context. The second part is the normative concepts that set forth interpretations of meanings; they typically take the form of fixed binary opposition in the form of male vs. female. The third aspect is the role of social institutions and organizations in constructing the social relationships based on gender. The fourth aspect is the subjective identity - while psychoanalysic is helpful in this aspect, the problem with psychoanalytic ideas are that they tend to universalize the gender differences and thus their analysis is ahistorical. Historians need to work in more historical mode, paying attention to the ways gender construction is related to historically specific cultural representations, activities and social organizations.

The second part of her definition is that gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power. The author notes that while power may build upon gender, it is not always about gender itself. Rather, it is one of reference point - the recurrent references by which political power has been conceived, legitimated, and criticized. The political power both refer to and establish the meaning of the male/female opposition. Gender, and all the social meanings accorded to the sex-related differences, are continuously summoned as a means for legitimizing social relations of domination, which by itself have nothing directly to do with gender. As such, gender is intricately related to politics - not politics in the narrow sense that it is concerned with the activities of the state but all the relationships of power and discourse - it both shapes and is shaped by the political processes. This concern with the dialectical nature of the concept of gender and politics is basically in line with other orthodox postmodern theorizing on gender.

3. Additionally, Scott provides for the nice summary on how previous feminist historians approached the analysis of gender. They can be divided into three approaches: The first is an attempt at explaining the origin of the "patriarchy", based on the "need" of the males to dominate females. For historians, the problem of this approach is their ahistorical stance as their analysis tends to be based on the physical differences that does not allow for the historical variation. The second approach is that of Marxist feminists. Here, the problem, as identified by Scott, is opposite of that of the first: gender is seen to be a by-product of the changing economic structure of the society, it has no independent analytic status of its own. Marxist feminists have consistently tried to grapple with this rather fundamental difficulty inherent in the Marxian approach, though never to the completely satisfactory degree, according to Scott. The third approach is the psychoanalytic theory. This approach, while it has made a substantial understanding of gendered identity comes to be formed socially, nevertheless has some problems. The two Scott mentions are that, it tends to focus exclusively on the individuals' experiences but not on the structure or the organiztion of society, and that it tends to reify "subjectively originating antagonism between males and females as the central fact of gender".

4. Chapter 4, "Women in The Making of the English Working Class", is somewhat similar to Smith's "SNAF as an ideological code" in the sense that it tries to reveal how even works that are explicitly committed to equality actually hides the organization and conception of the view of society based on gender. As such, E.P. Thompson's work is criticized for, say, his tacit usage of male/female opposition and subsequent attribution of superior social meanings to males in constructing the story of how the working class came about. For Scott, it is precisely the question of this kind neglected by Thompson - how meanings are created to marginalize women - that must be asked.