The Question of Gender: Joan W. Scott’s Critical Feminism ed. by Judith Butler and Elizabeth Weed (review)

Whatever gender was or continues to be, a definitive theory of gender or gender-ness may be hard to come by, for obvious reasons. Judith Butler and Elizabeth Weed have edited a helpful volume on this subject called The Question of Gender. Joan W. Scott’s critical feminism, especially as her scholarship relates to the impasse of history/literature, is considered by a range of scholars, and here the discussion has taken a turn toward aesthetics.

Mary D. Sheriff examines paintings by women artists mainly from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This is the work of women European artists, to be sure, but the strange thing about the paintings considered in this study is that they are not better known. A key painting in Sheriff’s study is Artemisia Gentileschi’s striking Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (La Pittura). It’s worth looking up on Google to see the painting’s deep copper and green tones, naturalistic shadowing, and the artist’s white skin. The artist approaches her canvas in a contorted fashion; her hand holds a brush to the canvas on which she is working, but it looks like her legs are in a brace. This is a body in struggle, and the thematic concerns seem as modernist as those found in the work of Francis Bacon. Sheriff considers how pieces like La Pittura may have been unread by scholars and critics, and how these pieces may have engaged, paradoxically or playfully, with the audiences and dominant artistic trends of the historical moment in which they were produced.

Considering modernism proper, Mary Ann Doane’s paper, “Screening the Avant-Garde Face,” riffs on the contorted bodies theme also, and her study plots a nice comparative trajectory that covers Man Ray, Duchamp, Warhol, Godard, Jane Fonda, and Busby Berkeley. Doane observes that the avant-garde face was as much Hollywood as it was avant-garde, achieving its ultimate interface in Warhol’s films from the 1960s, like Chelsea Girls. The term “interface” is not chosen lightly in this context, as Doane observes how close-up shots of the female face, avant-garde or Hollywood, have served as a crucial site for themes of veiling and unveiling, screening and un-screening, and how all these themes tie up with the articulation of divergent sexual alterities. As Doane writes, “It is difficult to imagine Godard (or even Warhol …) assigning the male face a similar function” (220). She reinforces her case with references to Levinas’s thoughts on inter-subjectivity and negation, and how these notions may play into the formation of sexual alterities, and the constituent identities that each gender is nominally said to signify.

Sexual alterity is precisely the scene from which Lynne Huffer undertakes her analysis of the “non-reading in the English-speaking world” (261) of Foucault’s History of Madness. For Huffer, the problematic publication history of this text (a complete, unabridged English version did not appear until 2006) is symptomatic of the ways in which Foucault has been read or not read in academic scholarship engaged with unraveling questions of gender and sexuality. Too exclusive of a focus on The History of Sexuality, Volume I is seen by Huffer as a lapse of reading by scholars who, ignoring the ethical dimension articulated in an early Foucault text like Madness, miss out on the ethical possibilities of Foucault’s historico–genealogical project overall. For Huffer, Sexuality I might be described as tending toward logos and identity, whereas Madness makes more space for Eros and experience. A retrospective reading of Madness in light of the later claims of a text like Sexuality I shows how diligently Foucault sought to articulate an ethics of sexual experience, which many scholars have interpreted as being absent in the later work. Foucault’s use of the “ship of fools” figure in Madness sets into play a much broader array...