Big Ideas Flashcards
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.
