How New Things Come into the World of Feminist History

In December 1986, I opened the American Historical Review to find Joan Wallach Scott's essay on "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis." As a budding medieval social and economic historian, I was grappling with what seemed to me to be intransigent categories of economic analysis—"peasant" being an example. I intuited that such terms elided historical differences in order to produce apparent continuities, but I was having trouble articulating that insight clearly. Scott's essay offered me an analytical tool to unravel these economic categories and it also provided me a way to show how they were gendered. The thrill has not gone. In her current collection of essays Scott exhilaratingly reprises her work from the 1980's. She now proposes another "critically useful tool for historical analysis" (5)—fantasy: "Fantasy offers historians a way of thinking the history of sexuality beyond the narrow confines of identity politics, comparative social movements, and national or transnational sexual cultures" (18). Scott uses fantasy to move from a critical reading of categories to an investigation of identity and identification both individual and collective.¹ The volume revisits the relationship of history and psychoanalysis. For Scott, they are incommensurable temporal modes and, therefore, mutually implicated for a project of opening up a history of sexed beings onto something else, a "beyond of desire," as Jacques Lacan would put it.² In the Fantasy of Feminist History, Scott emphatically restores the question mark to her 1986 essay (punctuation disallowed by the editorial policy of the journal). Does Scott also want to imply a question mark after the current title, the fantasy of feminist history? Put another way: how can historians raise questions in the psychoanalytic register in such a way that they do not consolidate that register? How can historians remain open to a notion of psychoanalysis that is always differing from itself and, perhaps as my conclusion will suggest, a psychoanalytic theory in need of its own mourning?

In the introduction (also a touching homage to the work of the historian and Lacanian psychoanalyst, Michel de Certeau) Scott traces how she came to engage with "psychoanalytic theory as a critical reading practice for history" (5). She emplots how her initial resistance to psychoanalytic theory conflicted with her growing insights into the limits of treating gender as a social category "known" in advance. She realized that feminists could not transform epistemology without a critique of knowledge and such a critique entails an investigation of desire defined by Scott as a "critical faculty" (34)—one that does not decide categories and identities in advance.

Scott's engagement with psychoanalytic theory (and later, psychoanalytic practice in her own analysis) began in earnest. It prompts a leading concern of the volume: does women's studies have a future, or has it become another example of docile disciplinarity? It can have a future, according to Scott, if it works through its attachment to melancholy: "some of the difficulty we now have in thinking about the future seems to me to be a symptom of melancholy, an unwillingness to let go of the highly charged affect of the homosocial world we have lost- indeed an unwillingness even to acknowledge that it has been lost. The melancholic wants to reverse time to continue living as before" (31). Rather than recognize the disruptive impact of radical gender discontinuity excavated by their research, academic feminists, Scott contends, consoled themselves with a melancholic fantasy of "woman" as a continuous, trans-historical category. Women's studies thus missed the creative opportunity to illumine epistemological problems posed by sexual difference.³

The essay, "Fantasy Echo", studies how an essentialist identity, such as "woman," gets formed in feminist history. Key to her analysis is the question of temporality. Fantasy is a narrative device that organizes instabilities (conflicts, incoherence, gaps) into diachronic relations, cause and effect. The fantasy of feminist history secures the continuous identity of "woman" over diachronic time (51). What kinds of critical methods can disrupt the...