Joan Scott

Question 1

What does Scott say about words and grammar?

Answer 1

• Codifying words meaning is useless for words like the ideas and things they signify have a history

Question 2

Why was gender history wanted instead of women’s history?

Answer 2

• Women’s history was viewed to be focus to narrowly on women
• women and men were viewed as needing each other to understand either

Question 3

What did Scott say was the problem with descriptive women’s history?

Answer 3

• It hasn’t been enough for historians of women to prove either that women had a history or the women participated in the major political upheavals of Western civilisation
• Most have acknowledged women’s history then separation or dismissal

Question 4

What does women’s history need to involve in Scott’s eyes?

Answer 4

• Analysis of the relationship between male and female experience but also the connection between past history and current historical practice

Question 5

What were the two parts of Scott’s definition of gender?

Answer 5

• The two parts are interrelated and must be analytically distinct
  1. Gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes
  2. Gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power

Question 6

What was part one of Scott’s gender?

Answer 6

• Changes in in the organisation of social relationships always corresponds to changes in representation of power but it’s not always a direct change
• It involves 4 interrelated elements - they don’t operate with out the other yet don’t operate simultaneously
• Her point is to clarify how one needs to think about the effect of gender in social and institutional relationships

Question 7

What is element one of Scott’s part one definition of gender?

Answer 7

• Culturally available symbols that evoke multiple representations
• E.G: Virgin Mary vs Eve from Adam and Eve, Innocence vs Corruption of women
• Lots represent how women should be in Western Christian tradition
• Historians need to look into what these symbolic representations mean and in what context

Question 8

What is element two of Scott’s part one definition of gender?

Answer 8

• Look at the normative concepts that set up the interpretations of the meanings of the symbols, that attempt to limit metaphoric possibilities
• Expressed in religious, educational, scientific, legal and political doctrines
• They have a fixed binary position
• The normative rely on the repression of alternative possibilities
• Subsequent history is written as if the normative positions were from social consensus rather than conflict
  E.G: contemporary fundamentalist groups that forcibly link their practice of women to supposedly traditional roles, when there’s very little historical evidence

Question 9

What is element three of Scott’s part one definition of gender?

Answer 9

• New historical investigation is disrupting the idea of a fixed notions. Creating debates to question the appearances of timeless binary representations
• This kind of analysis must include a notion of politics, social institutions and organisations
• Scott argues we need a broader view than just kinship but to also include labour market (sex segregated labour market), education, and the polity (universal male suffrage is part of the process)
• She states Gender is constructed through kinship but not exclusively. Also economy and polity

Question 10

What is element four of Scott’s part one definition of gender?

Answer 10

• The subjective identity
• If gender identity is based only and universally on fear of castration the point of historical inquiry is denied
• Real men/women don’t always/literally fulfil the terms of their society’s ideas
• Historians instead need to look at the ways in which gendered identities are constructed and relate it to activities, social organisations and cultural representations in history

Question 11

What’s a contemporary and past example of Scott’s element 4 from her part one of the definition of gender?

Answer 11

• Joan of Arc in the 15th century, a peasant girl who believed God had chosen her to lead a french victory. She is said to have convinced Charles of Valois to allow her to lead a french army to besieged city of Orleans. Where she achieved a victory.
• This goes against the church institutions pushed views of innocence, weak women
• The LGBTQ movement in the 1980s showed that people were going against the supposed binary gender imposed on them.
• Even today celebs like singer Pink who is a woman and claims to be a woman does not portray the normative idea of a woman as she is strong, powerful, independent and unafraid to speak her mind, especially in her music.

Question 12

What is part two of Scott’s gender definition?

Answer 12

• Gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power
• Gender is a critical means by which power is expressed or legitimised - especially in the west

Question 13

What is useful about historians looking into the concept that gender legitimises and constructs social relationships?

Answer 13

• Scott argues historians can develop an insight into the reciprocal nature of gender and society
• In particular specific ways in which politics constructs gender and gender constructs politics

Question 14

How has gender been used in political theory?

Answer 14

• It’s used to justify or criticise the reign of monarchs and relationship between the rulers and the ruled

Question 15

What can set off changes in gender relationships?

Answer 15

• It can be set off by views of the need of the state

Question 16

What’s an example in current politics of politicians asserting power over women and why is it done in the eyes of Scott?

Answer 16

• In America Alabama has recently passed a near-total ban on abortion at eight weeks gestation, without exceptions for rape or incest and other countries are following suite e.g. Missouri
• Some may think why has it been done when abortion is argued to be at all time low (between 2006-2015 abortion declined by 26% according to Centres for disease Control and prevention)
• Scott would have argued that these actions can only make sense when part of an analysis of the construction and consolidation of power
• She would argue that as a dominated white male senate, only 4 women, of which only two men voted against the bill. Assertion of control was used here over women through the form of this policy

Question 17

What does Scott say about the attention to gender?

What’s an example?

Answer 17

• Although not always explicit gender is crucial for the organisation of equality and inequality
• Hierarchical structures rely on generalised understandings of the so called natural relationships between male and female
• E.G: class in the 19th century relied on gender for its articulation
  
  • When middle class reformers in France depicted workers in terms coded as feminine like weak and subordinate. Labour and socialist leaders replied by insisting on the masculine position of the working class e.g. producers, stronger, protectors of their women

Question 19

What does Scott mean by men and women being overflowing categories?

Answer 19

• They must be recognised as as empty and overflowing
• Empty because they have no ultimate transcending meaning
• Overflowing because even when they appear to be fixed they are still able to have alternatives, denied or suppressed definitions

Question 20

What does Scott argue investing the issues she’s said with do for history?

Answer 20

• Provide new perspectives e.g. how political rule is imposed
• Redefine the old questions in new terms e.g. introduce family and sexuality into studies of economics and war
• Make women visible as active participants
• Create analytic distance between the seemingly fixed language of the past and our own terminology
• Will leave open possibilities for thinking about current feminist political strategies and the utopian future

Question 21

What questions does Scott think historians must ask about gender?

Answer 21

• What is the relationship between laws about women and the power of the state?
• Why have women been invisible as historical subjects, when we know they participated in history?
• What is relationship between state, politics and the discovery of the crime of homosexuality?
• How have social institutions incorporated gender into their assumptions and organisations?