With each shift in her historiographical focus, Scott has found the material needed to fuel her critical thought and shed light on the blind spots of social systems from the time of the French Revolution until the present day. As a historian and critical feminist, she has called for the concepts used in the social sciences to remain categories of critical intervention within political and academic debates.
Indeed, it was a dissertation on the social and political organization of glassmakers in Carmaux in Southern France in the late nineteenth century that earned her a Ph. Fascinated by the lengthy strike that these glassmakers organized in , she seized upon the event to analyze the process by which this social group acquired a consciousness of class and asserted itself politically. Building upon the concepts of new social history put forward by British historians E. Hired at a time when academic feminism was bursting onto the campus scene, she found unprecedented creative potential for historical research in the political issues of feminist epistemology.
Through a statistical and social analysis of three economically different towns in France and England over time, the authors present a history of female labor in the face of changes brought about by industrialization.
Their examination of the interplay between the economic sphere and the familial sphere allowed them to shed light on a central problem of feminism: despite newfound access to wage labor, women remained in a subordinate social position due to the sex-based division of labor.
The authors pay close attention to the various aspects of the female worker who is at the same time a wife, a mother, and a pillar of family life. These overlapping identities, converging in the identification of women with the family unit, explain why their economic practices were also subordinated to the needs of the family. Scott felt that she had reached an impasse when she had finished her work on this project.
A focus on economics and family dynamics seemed too limited to grasp the historical persistence of male-female inequalities and even more so to understand the emphasis on the natural, biological, and cultural differences of sex. Instead, Scott maintained, what was needed was a broader sense of how ideas about the natural differences of sex were used to put in place and justify relations of power.
Davis, on the other hand, offered a relational study of the sexes and sexual identities that was first printed in a issue of the journal Feminist Studies. But while the challenges of conceptualizing the notion of gender were already being spelled out, Scott lacked the theoretical tools that would enable her to challenge the conventional frameworks of historical analysis. The epistemological breakthrough came shortly thereafter, when Scott, now a professor at Brown University, joined a reading group with feminist literary scholars who were employing the tools of poststructuralism.
The arrival of French theory—Deleuze, Derrida, and Foucault—on American campuses offered Scott a radical change of perspective on history and its methodology as well as the practical means to achieve the conscious break that she had called for at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in It would be from then on possible to think of domination in other ways, rather than through objective structures like work or family, which organize domination and reproduce it.
Mot impie, sordide The question of the construction of gender relations and the feminine and masculine categories are restated in terms of discursive constructions.
Gender is defined as being a social and cultural construct. Noting the failure of existing theories to explain the persistence of inequalities between women and men, she proposes a new conceptualization of the term situated at the crossroads of feminist humanities and poststructuralist theories. The translation of this article into French was instrumental in introducing the analytic concept of gender into France at a time when feminist studies were still struggling to be accepted by the academy.
Scott, however, had yet to finish destabilizing the history of women and gender. In recent times, psychoanalysis has played a prominent role in her thinking. By highlighting the complexities and elemental tensions at play as each individual goes through the process of identifying as male or female, psychoanalysis turns masculinity and femininity into an ongoing chaotic and contingent problem.
Scott sees in psychoanalysis the chance to examine the imaginaries and the desires at work in the construction of feminist movements and their political identity. In the wake of Foucault, Scott called for the writing of a history that would operate to reveal the implicit and yet structuring norms underpinning our social and political certitudes by challenging the categories of difference. While gender has long been her preferred starting point, Scott has also invoked race, class, nationality, and sexuality in her works in order to chart hierarchies of domination.
With this in mind, she made it her aim to shed light on the paradoxes of universality promoted by French republicanism. Scott will explore the relationship between gender and politics in the light of some insights from psychoanalytic and political theory. For Scott, gender and politics have been historicaly co-constitutive, the one establishing the meaning of the other, each providing a guarantee of the otherwise elusive and unstable grounds on which each rested.
While gender referred its attributions to nature, politics naturalized its hierarchies by reference to gender. A historically driven and combined discussion of gender and politics, thus, can help us to decipher the ways in which gender has become the contemporary battleground for the various attempts to re-establish a form of nationalist politics that aims to control women's bodies and sexuality.
Broadly, the object of her work is the question of difference in history: its uses, enunciations, implementations, justifications, and transformations in the construction of social and political life. If you are attending an event and need the College to help with any mobility requirements you may have, please contact the event organiser in advance to ensure we can accommodate your needs.
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