Abstract
The burgeoning of the discipline of social history from the late 1950s onwards rendered visible numerous new subjects that had previously been absent from traditional historical narratives and hence invisible: male and female workers, primitive rebels, witches, peasants, prostitutes, beggars, etc. One consequence of this was that feminist scholars began to emphasize women’s and men’s different social roles over time and place and to treat human subjectivities and sexual differences as essential components of historical research. The stars of this historiographical revolution include two specialists in French history: Natalie Zemon Davis and Joan Scott. They belong to different generations (Davis was born in 1928, Scott in 1941) and in different ways were both active witnesses and participants either in the United States or in the dynamic intellectual and political debates that animated French society after the Algerian War of Independence and the May 1968 protests. The two have been an unparalleled source of inspiration for feminist scholars worldwide, and it is not easy for anyone in the field of gender studies to write about their work without sounding enthusiastically complimentary. In reviewing Joan Scott’s Fantasy of Feminist History, it will be difficult to avoid this risk myself.
Trained as a social historian in the 1960s, working as a teaching assistant for George Mosse at Wisconsin, Scott has published many important studies on 19th-century French history and women’s work; among them, the prize-winning volume The Glassworkers of Carmaux (1974) and the acclaimed Women, Work, and Family (coauthored with Louise Tilly, 1978). In 1980, she moved to Brown University as professor and founding director of the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women and in 1985 she joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton as Harold F. Linder Professor of Social Science. At Brown she became involved in the effervescent atmosphere of US feminist literary critics debating deconstruction and post-structuralism and enthusiastically reading Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, Cixous and Irigaray. This experience resulted for Scott in a decisive methodological shift to theoretical issues, traditionally a neglected area in the formation of historians.
The most important result of her immersion in the philosophical and literary debates of the period was the publication of the paper ‘Gender: A useful category of historical analysis’ (American Historical Review, December 1986), one of the most quoted and acclaimed contributions to the field of women’s studies, and a landmark in the area of interdisciplinary research. The essay was later included in the book Gender and the Politics of History and quickly translated into many languages. As a result, the category of gender acquired almost instant widespread popularity. The very word became a permanent central stage presence within political and academic debates on women, men and sexual differences; it was also a persistent source of conflict among women, as the controversies at the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing showed. Omnipresent in common language, it acted as a passepartout that as far as Scott was concerned, was frequently and unhappily misused.
As is commonly known within feminist scholarship, ‘gender’ had been introduced above all to establish a clear distinction between cultural and biological meanings in relation to sex. It was intended to designate a category referring to cultural constructions, and a system constituting social relationships. It was therefore conceived as a critical tool for understanding hierarchies of power. Above all, it was designed to be a theoretical instrument for thinking about identities; in particular, it allowed questioning of the rigidity of definitions related to sexual differences and consideration of differences as the constant challenge to the fixing of identities.
Yet, as a concerned Scott remarked in 1999 in the concluding reflections written for the second edition of the book, sex and gender have often been used as interchangeable synonyms, and ‘no matter how insistently feminist theorists have refined the term “gender” … they have been unable to prevent its corruption’ (p. 200). Time and again Scott insisted on identity being a temporal and cultural construction, subject to continuous change and variability so that men’s and women’s identities are not self-evident. Her ideas followed in the wake of Denise Riley’s path-breaking analysis of the figure of ‘woman’ as ‘a volatile collectivity in which female persons can be very differently positioned, so that the apparent continuity of the subject of “women” isn’t to be relied on’ (Am I That Name? Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History, 1988: 2).
In the 25 years after Gender and the Politics of History, Scott has produced several books and articles, including the 1991 influential essay ‘The evidence of experience’, the 1996 research on French feminist history published in Only Paradoxes to Offer, French politics and controversies regarding the Muslim veil, secularism. The collection of essays under the title of The Fantasy of Feminist History deal with one of the oldest and most difficult problems faced by feminist historians across the generations: how is it possible to account for emotions, passions, feelings, desires and fantasies while doing historical research? It is easy to predict that the arguments – and the book – will play a central role in theoretical and methodological debates among scholars working on gender issues in years to come.
Among the essays, mostly written and published in the last decade, a fascinating paper on ‘Fantasy echo’ (2001) stands out as a turning point in Scott’s intellectual research and as an innovative project to look historically at sexual identities. In this case, the main aspects under scrutiny are the mechanisms of collective identifications, those allowing ‘the articulation of scenarios that are at once specific in their representation and detail and transcendent of historical specificity’ (p. 49).
As ‘the theory that posits sexual difference as an unresolvable dilemma’ (p. 5) Scott claims that the psychoanalytical approach is highly appropriate. Accordingly, Michel de Certeau – who has been among the few scholars writing on psychoanalysis and history since the early 1970s – is an essential point of reference here, since he repeatedly insists on the need for historians to apply self-reflexive practices in order to unmask ambivalences and cleavages that are present in traditional historical discourse. In a similar vein, Scott’s book shows that what really matters is to keep open doors for gender as ‘a quest that never ends’ (p. 22).
Psychoanalysis, she maintains, allows the emergence of fantasy as a dynamic centre for the questioning of essentialism and continuity in identities. The aspects of fantasy considered here relate to the possibility of articulating scenarios that are conceived as a setting for desire, a space where it is possible to enact its fulfilment. Additionally, it is also ‘a (tightly condensed) narrative’ (p. 50) a way to resolve conflicts and contradictions through the representation of a coherent picture reducing the multiplicity and instability of human actions to a continuous narrative of steadiness and consistency.
Scott would probably agree with Jacques-Alain Miller – Lacan’s son-in-law and editor of the master’s seminars – who claimed that psychoanalysis is not revolutionary but subversive, as it goes against identifications, ideals and master signifiers. In a similar vein, for Scott, psychoanalysis is a way of thinking that ‘unsettles certainty’: a truly risky venture. As an example, she provides two powerful and effective fantasies in feminist historical experience: the orator and the mother. The first one refers to the figure of a woman active in the public arena and provides the fantasy of social transgression; the second is an antithetical figure seen as ‘a utopian fantasy of sameness and harmony produced by maternal love’ (p. 54). Whereas the orator’s fantasy opens up a space where women experience ‘the pleasures and dangers of transgressing social and sexual boundaries’ (p. 54), the maternal fantasy envisions a utopian ideal of fusion and cohesion. Both have been essential for fuelling feminist visions of solidarity and communal jouissance.
The cover of the book deserves a final comment. It represents a baroque masterpiece by Artemisia Gentileschi: the 1618 painting Judith and her Maidservant (in Palazzo Pitti, Florence). Judith has her right hand tightly folded around the sword. The servant holds a chest with Holophernes’ head in it. Both women are represented with their heads turned and faces in alert, Judith exposing her naked neck and décolleté while the maid wears an elaborate turban headdress. Curiously enough, the same cover had been chosen to illustrate another important collection of essays published in 2005: The Artemisia Files: Artemisia Gentileschi for Feminists and Other Thinking People edited by Mieke Bal. As the art historian Elena Ciletti wrote in her contribution to the book, the canvas is ‘an inventive amalgam of strength and tenderness’; it admirably represents how ‘the dichotomy between vulnerability and aggression is in a sense fused in the heroine Judith, the executioner who exposes her own neck to the blade’ (p. 91) These words also seem appropriate to describing the provocations raised by Scott’s book.