Downs/Debate on J. Scott Flashcards
What did Joan Hoff say about Scott’s theory?
- Worries that if material experience become abstract representations through textual analysis, then personal identities and human agency will become obsolete.
- ‘flesh and blood women also become social constructs’
What concerns to some have about Scott’s stressing of primacy of language?
- It leads to questioning the concept of experience and suggests experience is unknowable outside of language
- Some feminists argue with a concept of a shared experience there was nothing for women to share on which to ground feminist politics.
- By putting the idea of a woman as a social construct is seemed to deny the existence of women, so deny them power to speak.
- The focus on symbolic link between gender and power could sidestep historical questions about the operation of patriarchy, the inequalities in power between women as a group compared to men
How does Rose defend Scott on the argument that Scott’s theory is wrong to focus on differences between men and women and instability of the meaning of women stops women from finding common ground?
- She argues that only by recognising diversity on men and women and acknowledging the multiple ways in which identities are formed can then it be possible to create political ties among women
Who and how do they defend against people who argue the symbolic link between gender and power could sidestep questions on patriarchy?
Nancy Cott and Drew Faust
- Argue it is BECAUSE gender has been understood as a hierarchical formation that gender has been a way of signifying relations of power
How does Rose think Scott impacted on feminist scholars?
- Impacted in numerous ways as her theory contributed to that academic history circles and the cultural and linguistic turn. After Scott’s work increasingly the terms ‘discourse’ and ‘text’ and a focus on the production of meanings appeared in scholarship
What did Boydston say the problems with Scott’s 1986 theory on a perceived gender was?
- Saying gender is based on perceived differences between sex complicated the sex/gender distinction. It deflected analysis from the naturalised body to the perceived body, this was a deflection, not a displacement.
- Perception now became the real subject
- If people perceive male and female bodies as gendered in a binary opposition then we are left once again with a natural oppositional binary
What did Boydston say was the problem with Scott’s 4 subparts of her first proposition on the definition of gender?
- None of them altered the fundamental binary structure of gender itself.
- Gender history would be the story of their complex and altering interplay but these would be variations within an enduring oppositions, configuration of gender
What does Boydston say the problem is with Scott’s idea of gender as a primary way of signifying relations of power?
- It further secured, binary, oppositional framework for thinking about male and female. It virtually ruled out (as naive) distinctions between male and female that might not be about this kind of power
- Difficult to imagine distinctions between males and females that that are not unfair to one or the other
What does Oyewumi say about the idea of Gender being a primary field?
- The western work on gender is preoccupied with the oppositional sexed body, it inhabits the category of gender but this is idea is mostly European and not universal
- If gender is a social construct there was a time when gender was constructed and a time before it. Therefore, it can be assumed in some societies, gender construction may not have existed at all.
- She says in pre-colonial Yorubland there were social distinctions but the gender construction as viewed in Western eyes did not exist
- For her this type of society means a society in which perceptions of sexual difference are not always enlisted as the basis of social classification
- She claims in pre-colonial Yoruba culture the primary principle of social classification was seniority, based on chronological age and did not denote gender
- It doesn’t mean they weren’t aware of differences but simply that perceptions and representations of sexual opposition were not presumptively a primary field for the articulation of that particular power
What is Downs main criticism of Scott?
- Scott does not look at gender, race and class cohesively enough
- Woman is not just an empty category it’s also real world experience
- The idea of deconstruction can only go so far. Deconstruction, deconstructs language to show instability of basic word.
- She isn’t sure on Scott’s idea that by showing men and women as meanings are unstable we can move past them all together
- Downs argues even without the words it doesn’t make a woman any less vulnerable to a man when walking the streets
- People could also link this to the idea of race and racism
What is Scott’s reply to Downs’ to her theory ignoring women’s experiences
- She states that she is not arguing that there is no meaning in the words but instead there are problems of identity politics.
- Putting all women under the same label with no matter to culture, time or place
- Not all women are afraid, the current association of women and fear comes from some feminist discourse which makes the experience of anticipated violence a major aspect of what it means to be a woman
How does Downs reply to Scott’s idea that fear comes from feminist discourse?
- She finds it a disturbing conclusion
- It is surely wrong to assert that the experience/anticipation of violence is a particularly contemporary aspect of being female.
- E.G: Memoirs of Hariot Jacobs Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - to see how fear experiences have helped construct and constrain women’s lives
What does Downs says Scott snd her can both agree on?
- Concern that is scholarly and political about the ways in which the category of difference can become absolute
- When this happens the politics of difference (daughter of politics of identity) produces a paradoxical effect
- Once this has happened then difference has simply been evaded
What does Downs say needs to happen to move from theory to politics?
- The engagement in intersubjective encounter and refusing binary extremism
- Without this there can be no move from theory to politics, or hope for change in the hierarchical communities, scholarly and otherwise, through which we all move
