Big Ideas Flashcards
(35 cards)
Gender HAP
Women's history Gender as a construct Implications of gender as a construct Gendering men Gender & the non-binary Heterosexual criticisms of gender
Women’s history
Missing women Re-discovery of women Patriarchy Agency Gender Practice A Problematic Category?
Gender as a construct
Sex does not equal gender Gender as performance All women do not have the same gender Thought changes [/time] Sex is also a construct
Implications of gender as a construct
Gendering mainstream history
Inter-sections with other categories in new light
Inter-relations between the sexes, within the sexes
Re-defining traditional narratives of history
Gendering the mens (see below)
Gender as a signifier of relationships of power
Symbols, institutions, concepts, identity
Gendering men & the history of masculinity
Hegemonic masculinity Becoming a man Problematic category? 1. Men subsumed w/i gender 2. Representations rather than realities 3. Lack of integrated category
Gender & the non-binary
Imposition of the gender binary through “gender”
Euro-centric & Western focus
“Category”
Practical application
Heterosexual criticisms of gender
Subjective experience & the psyche
The body
Lived experience
Annnndddd bonus points for - politics & gender!
WOMEN’S HISTORY 1
Missing Women
POWER TO WOMEN: Early 20th c - Eileen Power’s 1926 study on the social roles of aristocratic women, bourgeois women & countrywomen in medieval England, class most crucial factor in experience of the world.
STRACHEY & DOMESTIC CONFINEMENT - “SAD” - Ray Strachey - history of English women’s movement, 1928 - “the prison house of home, 1792-1837”, “the stirring of discontent, 1837-1850”.
WOMEN’S HISTORY 2
Re-discovering women
1960s and 1970s - Second Wave Feminism
[[300 YEARS OF VAGINA ART]] - Shelia Rowbotham’s Hidden from History - 300 Years of Women’s Oppression & the Fight Against It (1973) - June Purvis “encapsulated the spirit” - women’s activities across time trying to integrate their concerns w/ wider societal difficulties.
DID WOMEN HAVE A RENAISSANCE? JOAN KELLY, 1977 - applies the historical categories of men’s history to women’s history, re-defining the pre-existing narrative.
SOLIDARITY IS FOR WHITE WOMEN: criticism b/c experience of shared sisterhood does not encompass variety of experiences of black & non-white women.
OH, YES, NOT ALL WOMEN ARE WHITE: Antoinette Burton’s Burdens of History (1984) - study on the relationship between liberal middle-class British feminists, Indian women, and imperial culture 1865-1915. Demonstrated how British women’s suffrage campaigners, positioned w/i an imperial civilising mission, saw Indian women as “the white feminist burden”, “helpless victims” needing aid from their British sisters.
WOMEN’S HISTORY 3
Patriarchy
Ahistorical patriarchy: over-arching narrative imposed on the past. Gisella Bock, 1998 (modern European history & gender).
Amanda Vickery, “Golden age to separate spheres? A review of the categories and chronology of English women’s history” (1998) - challenges narrative of seeing freer world of 18th c to rigid confines of domesticity of 19th c - refocus on lived experience, rather than prescribed nature.
WOMEN’S HISTORY 4
Agency
That Nineties Show
Gossip among women: Henrietta Leyser, 1995: study of medieval women - emphasises the centrality of gossip for rural and urban women - identity - seriousness of gossip - defamation was assessed with more regularity than assault in the rolls of Warboys, Huntingdonshire.
WOMEN’S HISTORY 5
Gender and Practise
POLITICAL CONVENIENCE: Initial function of ‘gender’, (JS 1986) to avoid women’s history (overly politicised & unreliable) - lack of sophisticated concept
GENDER TOOLS (NOT A EUPHEMISM): Bennett points out - women’s historians study gender as performance; many genders that fracture bi-gender paradigm; gender discourse generally; history of masculinities.
“I SEE NO DIFFERENCE”
- Judith Bennett - women’s & gender history - shared more than divide them - political goals
- ACTORS VS CONCEPTS: women’s historians focus on women as actors; gender historians focus on ideological systems as the agents of history; many historians do both.
PERRY SUMMERFIELD: study of the effects of the Second World War on women’s sense of themselves - oral histories of 42 women who did war work - interaction between text & cultural representations (1998).
WOMEN’S HISTORY 6
A Problematic Category?
“AM I THAT NAME?” - Denise Riley - English philosopher and poet (1988) - unstable category - “no essence of womanhood to provide a stable subject of our histories”, “doesn’t have a fixed referent and so doesn’t always mean the same thing”.
AS IF THEY EXISTED: Judith Bennett - following Denise Riley - acknowledge women do not really existed “while maintaining a politics as if they existed”.
PURVIS - “a retrievable ‘women’s history’ was not possible”.
GENDER AS A CONSTRUCT 1
Gender as a construct, sex as biological
Traditional definition: the way in which bodily sex and procreation is understood and culturally constructed.
Joan Scott, 1986: “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis”.
- Gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes.
- Gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power, and a primary method through which power is articulated.
Identifies: symbols, institutions, (normative) concepts, identity.
GENDER AS A CONSTRUCT 2
Gender as performed
Judith Butler, 1990: GENDER TROUBLE: gender is something one does, not something one is. Not an identity that exists beyond the acts which supposedly “express gender”; instead these acts constitute gender itself.
GENDER AS A CONSTRUCT 3
“All women do not have the same gender”
Elsa Barkley Brown, 1992: “What Has Happened Here?” - criticised white feminist’s alarm at the efforts of black feminists to emphasise the important radical differences in their experience of gender - we assume that “despite race, class, ethnicity, sexuality and other differences, at the core women do have the same gender… all women do not have the same gender”.
STRONGLY DISAGREE [JUNE PURVIS] - about whether these differences meant that there is still a “common ground shared by female genders against male genders”.
SCOTT’S GOT U: part of what “gender” does is help understand “radically different social experiences”.
Peasant women vs aristocratic women example, inc:
- Judith Bennett
- Eileen Power, 1926
- Eleanor of Aquitaine (d.1204)
- Emma Huntynton - husband’s death 1362.
GENDER AS A CONSTRUCT 4
Gender as considered throughout time
Thomas Laquer, Making Sex: Body & Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990)
- Vesalius’ depiction of female gentialia in De Fabrica (1543)
- 12th century surgeon Ambrose Pare
Helen King, 2013 - HYPOCRITE SAYS WIFE IS A MAN?
- Hippocrates (c.460-c.370BC) - flesh
- Case of Phaethousa, “wife of Phytheas”
JEWISH MALE MENSTRUATION: John L Beusterein - Jewish Male Menstruation in 7th Century Spain: Juan de Quinones, official in court of King Philip IV, 1686.
LIONS IN THE RABBLE - Philadelphia, Revolution.
GENDER AS A CONSTRUCT 5
Sex as also a construct
BUTLER ON SEX - inter-sex individuals; sex cannot signify without gender; no existence of sex before gender discourse. Cf. work of Joan Fjuimura, “complexity of genetics in sex determination”.
JS - 2010 - “Gender: Still a Useful Category of Analysis?” - - “there is not only no distinction between sex and gender, but gender is key to sex”.
Thomas Hall - 1629 - Warraskoyack (Virginia) - Captain Nathaniel Bass.
IMPLICATIONS OF GENDER AS A CONSTRUCT 1
”””” mainstream “”” history
+ WS example facts.
+ Gendering Mens.
Gisella Bock, 1998: “history in general can also be seen as the history of the sexes”.
Gendering Antiquarianism: Republic of letters - antiquarianism as a manly pursuit - masculine qualities - military/political/patriotic - Roman & Gothic - only antiquarian woman to publish something in 18th c - Elizabeth Elstob the Saxonist, described as having a “masculine” intelligence
WS example:
- Brian Harrison, 1978 - Separate Spheres
- Henry James; 1871; 1883
- 1832: 12.4% - 16.4%; 1867 - doubled; 1884-5 - 60%
- Charles Newdegate, Edward Leathem
IMPLICATIONS OF GENDER AS A CONSTRUCT 2
Inter-relations within and between genders
Lyndal Roper on the Reformation - Oedipus and the Devil, 1994 - religious upheavels in Europe in 16th c affected women - but this affects role of men - marriage lauded over other life-styles to neutralise the perceived threat of unmarried women. Changed common perception of celibate clerics as sexually pure > deviants, sexual purity achieved through marriage.
IMPLICATIONS OF GENDER AS A CONSTRUCT 3
Inter-section between different identities/categories
Anglo-Algonquian Gender Frontier:
- Kathleen Brown
- Jamestown 1607
- Algonquian speaking Native Virginians
- George Percy - diariest “doe all their drugerie”
IMPLICATIONS OF GENDER AS A CONSTRUCT 4
Re-defining historical narratives
Thomas Becket - H.M. Thomas (12th c England)
Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket (d.1170)
Henry II (1154 - 1189)
1160s - exile
Clerics third gender (R. N. Swanson, religion in medieval EU).
IMPLICATIONS OF GENDER AS A CONSTRUCT 5
Gender a signifier of relationships of power
JS, 1986, second insight.
Examples:
- cf. women’s suffrage;
- cf. Jewish Men
- French Rev - Edmund Burke - Marie Antoinette
- Martin Luther - Pope Paul III - “Her Sodomitical Hellishness, Pope Paula III”
- Cassius Dio’s (d.235) - account of Boudicca (d. AD 60/61, queen of the Iceni, rebellion against Roman control of Britain) mocking the Emperor Nero (mid 1st c AD) for his effeminacy.
IMPLICATIONS OF GENDER HISTORY AS A CONSTRUCT 6
Symbols, institutions, (normative) concepts, identity
Esther:
- Edith-Matilda, early 11th c wife of Henry I
- Clergymen in investiture crisis;
- Daughter’s marriage to emperor HV;
- ordered the release of unjustly condemned criminal, 1116
