The question of gender: Joan W. Scott's critical feminism

337 Pages·2011·3.622 MB·English

by  Butler, Judith;Scott, Joan Wallach;Weed, Elizabeth

Gender • Cultura-l Studies Butler
a-nd
“a- rema-rka-ble collection enga-ging with the work of one Weed
of the most rema-rka-ble thinkers of our time.”
—Bonnie Smith, Rutgers University The
“This richly stimula-ting book . . . demonstra-tes in ka-leido-
scopic deta-il how feminist thought ha-s come of a-ge.”
—Leonore Davidoff, University of Essex
T
Question
h
A generation after the publication of Joan W. Scott’s influential essay, “Gender: A Useful
Category of Historical Analysis,” this volume explores the current uses of the term—and e
the ongoing influence of Scott’s agenda-setting work in history and other disciplines. How

has the study of gender, independently or in conjunction with other axes of difference—
Q of Gender
such as race, class, and sexuality—inflected existing fields of study and created new ones?
To what extent has this concept modified or been modified by related paradigms such as
women’s and queer studies? With what discursive politics does the term engage, and with u
what effects? In what settings, and through what kinds of operations and transforma-
e
tions, can gender remain a useful category in the twenty-first century? Leading scholars
from history, philosophy, literature, art history, and other fields examine how gender has s
Joa-n W. Scott’s
translated into their own disciplinary perspectives. t
i
Contributors o Critica-l Feminism
Janis Bergman-Carton Éric Fassin Elora Shehabuddin
Wendy Brown Lynne Huffer Mary D. Sheriff n
Judith Butler Mary Louise Roberts Mrinalini Sinha

Miguel A. Cabrera Gayle Salamon Elizabeth Weed
o
Mary Ann Doane
JUDITH BUTLER is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Com- f
parative Literature and Co-director of the Program of Critical Theory at the University of
California, Berkeley. Her books include Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of
G
Identity; Undoing Gender; and Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?
e
ELIzABETH WEED is Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University and n
Director of the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. She is editor of
Coming to Terms: Feminism/Theory/Politics and editor (with Naomi Schor) of Feminism d
Meets Queer Theory (IUP, 1997) and The Essential Difference (IUP, 1994).
e
21st Century Studies r
Merry Wiesner-Hanks, General Editor Edited by
Cover illustration © i dream stock/www.idreamstock.com. Used by permission. Judith Butler

INDIANA
Eliza-beth Weed

a-nd
University Press INDIANA
Bloomington & Indianapolis
iupress.indiana.edu
1-800-842-6796
Question of Gender MECH.indd 1 5/18/11 1:04 PM
THE QUESTION OF GENDER
The Question of Gender: Joan W. Scott’s Critical Feminism
is Volume 4 in the series
21st Century Studies
Center for 21st Century Studies
University of Wisconsin– Milwaukee
Merry Wiesner- Hanks, General Editor
Terror, Culture, Politics: Rethinking 9/11
Edited by Daniel J. Sherman and Terry Nardin
Museums and Diff erence
Edited by Daniel J. Sherman
The State of Sovereignty: Territories, Laws, Populations
Edited by Douglas Howland and Luise White
THE QUESTION
OF GENDER
Joan W. Scott’s Critical Feminism
Edited by Judith Butler and Elizabeth Weed
indiana university press
bloomington and indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
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Bloomington, Indiana 47404- 3797 USA
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© 2011 by The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University
Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American
National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI Z39.48– 1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The question of gender : Joan W. Scott’s critical feminism / edited by Judith Butler and
Elizabeth Weed.
p. cm. — (21st century studies ; v. 4)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-35636-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-22324-1 (pbk. : alk.
paper) 1. Sex role. 2. Feminist theory. 3. Feminism. 4. Women—History.
5. Scott, Joan Wallach. I. Butler, Judith, [date]- II. Weed, Elizabeth, [date]-
HQ1075.Q47 2011
305.4201—dc22
2011004520
1 2 3 4 5 16 15 14 13 12 11
CONTENTS
Introduction 1
Judith Butler and Elizabeth Weed
PART 1 READING JOAN WALLACH SCOTT
1 Speaking Up, Talking Back: Joan Scott’s Critical Feminism | Judith Butler 11
PART 2 THE CASE OF HISTORY
2 Language, Experience, and Identity: Joan W. Scott’s Theoretical Challenge
to Historical Studies | Miguel A. Cabrera 31
3 Out of Their Orbit: Celebrities and Eccentrics in Nineteenth- Century
France | Mary Louise Roberts 50
4 Historically Speaking: Gender and Citizenship in Colonial
India | Mrinalini Sinha 80
5 Gender and the Figure of the “Moderate Muslim”: Feminism in the
Twenty- First Century | Elora Shehabuddin 102
6 A Double- Edged Sword: Sexual Democracy, Gender Norms, and
Racialized Rhetoric | Éric Fassin 143
PART 3 SEEING THE QUESTION
7 Seeing Beyond the Norm: Interpreting Gender in the Visual
Arts | Mary D. Sheriff 161
8 Unlikely Couplings: The Gendering of Print Technology in the French
Fin- de- Siècle | Janis Bergman- Carton 187
9 Screening the Avant- Garde Face | Mary Ann Doane 206
PART 4 BODY AND SEXUALITY IN QUESTION
10 The Sexual Schema: Transposition and Transgenderism in Phenomenology
of Perception | Gayle Salamon 233
11 Foucault and Feminism’s Prodigal Children | Lynne Huff er 255
12 From the “Useful” to the “Impossible” in the Work of Joan W.
Scott | Elizabeth Weed 287
Thinking in Time: An Epilogue on Ethics and Politics 312
Wendy Brown
List of Contributors 319
Index 321
Introduction
JUDITH BUTLER AND ELIZABETH WEED
In a 2008 essay, Joan W. Scott relays a telling story about the academic dis-
comfort that posing questions can produce.1 When she fi rst submitted her
essay, “Is Gender a Useful Category of Historical Analysis?” to the American
Historical Review (AHR), the editors asked her to remove the question mark,
explaining that question marks were not allowed in the titles of articles. They
could not simply drop the question mark without losing the sense of the title.
If the question mark were simply missing, the question would still be there,
but defl ated, deprived of the punctuation mark without which it does not
make sense. Of course, the title that was accepted, “Gender: A Useful Cate-
gory of Historical Analysis,” is an assertion and a declaration, however mod-
est. The insertion of the colon makes us think, “Gender, what is gender? What
comes after the colon will tell us what it is.” What follows is then a kind of
understatement: useful. If it is useful, it is not useless, but that makes us won-
der who thought it was useless to begin with? If it w ere to have been declara-
tive and more bold, it could have read “In Praise of Gender as a Useful
Category of Analysis.” “Useful” is most emphatically not “destructive” or
“revolutionary” and not even “critical.” One wonders whether “useful” was
meant to compensate in an academic forum for all the more raucous ways that
gender could be discussed. Indeed, the essay could have been called, “In
Praise of Non-R aucous Considerations of Gender in a Presumptively Hostile
Academic Context.”
More seriously, it turns out that the question mark as well as the reference
to “usefulness” proved central to the defi nition of gender itself. The original
question form that Scott wanted to preserve carried a kind of challenge. “Is
gender useful or not?” implies a context that one might consult in order to
track the eff ects of gender. So, to ask the question is to presume that there are
par ame t ers and contexts that must fi rst be known and analyzed in order to
answer the question. When the question mark is dropped, then gender ap-
pears simply as “useful” in the abstract, then so too does gender become sepa-
rated from its specifi c historical operations and eff ects as well as its changing
contexts. If one declares in a vacuum that gender is “useful,” then is one im-
plicitly declaring it always useful, or useful on all occasions? It is a nearly
pugnacious claim: “Gender is always useful in all contexts, so don’t doubt it!”
Scott was precisely not trying to advance that polemic—a lthough it seems as
if the AHR somehow preferred the formulation that implied that she did. If
AHR did not allow questions in titles, was that because questions are not the
same as knowledge— indeed, may be signs of not knowing, or of not yet
knowing? How does one, then, write and publish an essay that queries how
fi elds of knowledge are formed, calling into question prevailing paradigms,
within such a journal? If the question form is forbidden because of its critical
potential, then it seems that only certain kinds of academic inquiries are per-
missible, and they do not include those that question the paradigms that estab-
lish the contours of existing domains of knowledge.
So what is the big deal? It is, after all, a simple punctuation mark that goes
missing in favor of another that transforms an interrogative into an assertoric
claim. “Gender” is introduced and it is “a” useful category, presumably one
among others. We are solicited to imagine a full pantry of useful categories of
analysis and to discover gender there, nestled between other such categories,
such as class and power. It would be one category among many, useful in the
same way as they are. A modest claim, a bid for inclusion in the class of useful
things: an understated pluralism of useful categories of historical analysis.
But if we return the title to its question form, then something e lse hap-
pens. First, whoever asks the question (and whoever reads it) does not know in
advance whether or not it is useful, and this not-k nowing proves to be impor-
tant. The one who poses the question has not settled on the answer in advance
only to proceed to explain why it is patently and obviously true that gender is
a useful category. In its question form, the title starts with the confession of a
certain epistemic uncertainty. One does not know whether gender, as a cate-
gory, is useful, and one does not even know how one is supposed to go about
deciding that question. Some other set of terms has to intervene to help us
move the question forward. From the start, however, gender is in an uncer-
tain and unknown quantity in relation to the matter of usefulness. It may or
may not be useful, but in order to know, we have to consider how gender
works, and to do that, we have to look at specifi c historical contexts and the
2 | JUDITH BUTLER AND ELIZABETH WEED
dynamics of gender to start to formulate an answer. We also have to know
what kinds of uses we are looking for, and so to understand how usefulness
will be gauged. Useful for what? We do not yet have grounds for knowing,
and we do not yet have a meas ure for understanding what usefulness might
be. But as we read, matters become more clear.
Twenty-f our years after the publication of this extraordinarily impor-
tant essay, Scott now argues, “I want to insist that the term gender is useful
only as a question.”2 Indeed, she has now reversed the editorial decision of
the AHR in 1986, showing just how much their decision to change the title
rested on a misapprehension of her project. She was trying in the essay not
only to ask a question about gender, but also to develop a conception of gen-
der that required asking questions: “It is not a programmatic or method-
ological treatise.”3 Of course, Joan Scott is credited with having developed
a theory of gender, but if we mean by “theory” a timeless set of precepts or
principles, then we have missed the point of Scott’s theoretical explora-
tions. For Scott, theory always proceeds by way of questions, and questions
are the means through which taken- for- granted presuppositions are con-
tested and new ways of thinking and analyzing become possible (a point that
brings us close to understanding in what “usefulness” consists). This became
very clear at the moment within women’s history when Scott, along with
some other scholars, proposed that it was not enough to look at images of
women in certain historical scenes or even how women are treated diff eren-
tially within certain contexts. Whereas both of these kinds of inquiry have
their place and even their urgency, they only make sense once we start to ask
how gendered meanings are produced. In other words, we cannot take gen-
der, or gendered meanings, for granted, since gender is precisely that which is
being produced and or ga nized over time, diff erently and diff erentially, and
this ongoing production and mode of diff erentiation has to be understood as
part of the very operation of power or, in Scott’s words, “a primary way of
signifying power.”
This leads to two extremely important conclusions. The fi rst has to do
with contextualizing gender; the second, with seeing how gender operates in
the production of apparently unrelated domains, such as class, power, poli-
tics, and history itself. To understand gender, we cannot pose the question of
its ontology. It is not possible to know what gender “is” apart from the way
that it is produced and mobilized; and further, it is not possible to know
whether gender is a useful category of analysis unless we can fi rst understand
the purposes for which it is deployed, the broader politics it supports and
helps to produce, and the geopo liti cal repercussions of its circulation. To say
that gender does not have a single meaning or, even, that there is no such
Introduction | 3