Gender, Revisited

Twenty-five years after its publication, two books revisit Joan Wallach Scott’s seminal essay, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” noting that gender has grown to be an extremely far-reaching, if not downright protean, concept, both in academe and beyond: sometimes, it’s used simply to draw focus on women, but less politically; other times, it’s used to discuss relations between women and men (in the European Union, nonprofit agencies speak of “gender mainstreaming” projects that target inequality between the sexes); and finally, and most outrageously to feminists, “gender discrimination” has been employed to justify American imperialist projects in the Middle East. Both Joan Wallach-Scott’s intriguingly titled collection of essays, The Fantasy of Feminist History, and Judith Butler and Elizabeth Weed’s edited collection, The Question of Gender: Joan W. Scott’s Critical Feminisms, highlight and criticize the spectacular and unpredictable trajectory that gender has traveled, while becoming a ubiquitous and often misunderstood category of analysis.

The Fantasy of Feminist History is a collection of essays, some previously published, some new, that cohere around Scott’s use of psychoanalytical and poststructuralist theory as a critical reading practice for history. Scott notes that too often, feminist history is conceived as an Enlightenment teleology that posits complete emancipation as a promise. Contrary to that, she advocates for a practice of history stemming from fantasy and desire, “the story of a circulating critical passion” (33) inspired by our own feminist struggles. This should encourage contemporary feminist historians to become aware of the relationship between present and past and to turn that relationship into an object of critical inquiry.

This passion that drives feminist history, according to Scott, emboldens us to question received categories—gender is no exception—and attend to a plurality of objects, including, among others, “the intersection of race, ethnicity, and gender in nation building” (39). Questioning how categories of analysis are constructed and contested enables Scott to make compelling points regarding a genealogy of French secularism. In another essay, Scott deconstructs “seduction theory” (an extrapolation of the erotic/aesthetic culture of French nobility to French society at large) in order to highlight its anti-immigrationist and antifeminist underpinnings.

Originally written for a conference held at the Center for 21st Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, the volume The Question of Gender: Joan W. Scott’s Critical Feminism collects cutting-edge research by some of the most prominent contemporary feminist scholars. The volume debuts with two essays that offer excellent introductions to Joan W. Scott’s work. Judith Butler overviews Scott’s writings, insisting on the historian’s practice of “speaking up and talking back” and of critically challenging the assumptions of her audience. Miguel Cabrera’s piece highlights Scott’s contribution to the linguistic turn in history and credits her with “reconstructing theoretically the field of history” (32).

Several essays study the gendered politics of nationalism and imperialism. Eric Fassin shows how “the racialized rhetoric of sexual democracy” (150)—the Western nations’ supposed commitment to secularism, equality between men and women, and the rights of sexual minorities—has served to justify immigration-restriction policies in the European Union and imperialist projects in the United States. The same rhetoric, argues Elora Shehabuddin, focuses Western eyes on the figure of a “moderate Muslim,” a Muslim woman who supports democracy and gender equality yet never criticizes unjust American policies in the Middle East, nor does she advocate for the possibilities of renewal from within Islamic societies. Mrinalini Sinha offers an example of such a possibility that opened up citizenship to women: colonial India in the aftermath of World War I, when as a result of a national women’s movement, Indian women were temporarily legitimized as citizens, subjects of the state and not primarily of their own communities.

Other chapters focus their analytical lens on Western societies. Marie Louise Roberts compares the lives of painter Rosa Bonheur and actress Sarah Bernhard, who...