《媒介与社会性别 Media and Gender》本科课程参考文献_Scott_GenderUsefulCat

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Gender: A Useful Category of Historical anal JOAN W. SCOTT To talk of persons or creatures of the masculine or feminine gende of the male or fer is either a jocularity(permissible or Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English n usage THOSE WHO WOULD CODIFY THE MEANINGS OF WORDS fight a losing battle, for words like the ideas and things they are meant to signify, have a history. Neither Oxford ncaise have been entirely capture and fix meanings free of the play of human invention and imagination Mary Wortley Montagu added bite to her witty denunciation "of the fair sex"("my only consolation for being of that gender has been the assurance of never being married to any one among them by deliberately misusing the grammatical reference I Through the ages, people have made figurative allusions by employing Imatical terms to evoke traits of character or sexuality. For example, the usa offered by the Dictionnaire de la langue francaise in 1876 was, "On ne sait de quel genre il est, s'il est male ou femelle, se dit d'un homme tres- cache, dont on ne connait pas les sentiments. "" And Gladstone made this distinction in 1878: Athene has nothing of sex except the gender, nothing of the woman except the form. "3 Most recently-too recently to find its way into dictionaries or the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences-feminists have in a more literal and serious vein beg gender"as a way of referring to the social organization of the relationship between the sexes. The connection to grammar is both explicit and full of unexamined possibilities. Explicit because the grammatical usage involves formal This article is for Elizabeth Weed, who taught me how to think about and theory. It was first December 27. 1985. I am deeply grateful to Denise Riley, who showed historian and Harriet Whiten all members of the seminar on "Cultural Constructions of Gender"held at Brown University's Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women during 1982-85. Suh, Research, especially estions and criticisms from members of the Historical Studies Workshop at the New School for So Ira katznelson. Charles Tilly, and Louise A. Tilly, forced me to clarify the argument Comments from othe lly those of Elisabetta (aleotti, Rayna Rapp, Christine Stansell, and Joan Vincent. Donald Scott, as always, was at once my most demanding anug6l edn ) vol 4 1 Oxford English de la langue fr (Paris, 1876) Raymond w Keyords(New York, 1983), 285

1054 Joan w. Scott rules that follow from the masculine or feminine designation; full of unexamined possibilities because in many Indo-European languages there is a third category In its most recent usage, gender" seems to have first appeared among American feminists who wanted to insist on the fundamentally social quality of distinction based on sex. The word denoted a rejection of the biological determinism implicit in the use of such terms as " sex"or"sexual difference. " "Gender"also stressed the relational aspect of normative definitions of femininity. Those who worried that womens studies scholarship focused too narrowly and separately on women used the term"gender"to introduce a relational notion into our analytic vocabulary According to this view, women and men were defined in terms of one another, and no understanding of either could be achieved by entirely separate study. Thus Natalie Davis suggested in 1975, It seems to me that we should be interested the history of both women and men, that we should not be working only on the subjected sex any more than an historian of class can focus entirely on peasants Our goal is to understand the significance of the sexes, of gender groups in the historical past. Our goal is to discover the range in sex roles and in sexual mbolism in different societies and periods, to find out what meaning they had and how they functioned to maintain the social order or to promote its change." 4 In addition, and perhaps most important, "gender"was a term offered by those ho claimed that womens scholarship would fundamentally transform discipli- nary paradigms. Feminist scholars pointed out early on that the study of women would not only add new subject matter but would also force a critical reexam- nation of the premises and standards of existing scholarly work. We are learning, wrote three feminist historians, "that the writing of women into history necessarily involves redefining and enlarging traditional notions of historical significance, to encompass personal, subjective experience as well as public and political activities It is not too much to suggest that however hesitant the actual beginnings, such a methodology implies not only a new history of women, but also a new histor The way in which this new history would both include and account for women experience rested on the extent to which gender could be developed as a category of analysis. Here the analogies to class(and race)were explicit; indeed, the most politically inclusive of scholars of women's studies regularly invoked all three categories as crucial to the writing of a new history. 6 An interest in class,race,and gender signaled first, a scholar's commitment to a history that included stories of the oppressed and an analysis of the meaning and nature of their oppression and second, scholarly understanding that inequalities of power are organized along at least three axes Natalie Zemon Davis, "Womens History in Transition: The European Case, "Feminist Studies, 3 Vinter197576:90, Ann D. Gordon, Mari Jo Buhle, and Nancy Shrom Dye, "The Problem of Women's History, "in Berenice Carroll, ed, Liberating Women's History(Urbana The best and most subtle example is from Joan Kelly, "The Doubled Vision of Feminist Theor in her Women, History and Theory( Chicago, 1984), 51-64, especially 6l

Gender 1055 The litany of class, race, and gender suggests a parity for each term, but, in fact, that is not at all the case. While"class" most often rests on Marxs elaborate(and since elaborated) theory of economic determination and historical change, "race and"gender"carry no such associations. No unanimity exists among those whe employ concepts of class. Some scholars employ Weberian notions, others use class as a temporary heuristic device. Still, when we invoke class, we are working with or against a set of definitions that, in the case of Marxism, involve an idea of economic causality and a vision of the path along which history has moved dialectically. There is no such clarity or coherence for either race or gender. In the case of gender, the usage has involved a range of theoretical positions as well as simple descriptive references to the relationships between the sexes Feminist historians. trained as most historians are to be more comfortable with description than theory, have nonetheless increasingly looked for usable theoret ical formulations. They have done so for at least two reasons. First, the pro- liferation of case studies in womens history seems to call for some synthesizing perspective that can explain continuities and discontinuities and account for sisting inequalities as well as radically different social experiences. Second, the discrepancy between the high quality of recent work in women's history and its continuing marginal status in the field as a whole(as measured by textbooks do not address dominant disciplinary concepts, or at least that do not address these oncepts in terms that can shake their power and perhaps transform them. It has not been enough for historians of women to prove either that women had a histor or that women participated in the major political upheavals of Western civilization In the case of womens history, the response of most non-feminist historians has been acknowledgment and then separation or dismissal ("women had a history separate from mens, therefore let feminists do womens history, which need not concern us;or"womens history is about sex and the family and should be done separately from political and economic history"). In the case of women,s partic- ation, the response has been minimal interest at best("my understanding of the French Revolution is not changed by knowing that women participated in it). The challenge posed by these responses is, in the end, a theoretical one. It requires analysis not only of the relationship between male and female experience in the past but also of the connection between past history and current historical practice How does gender work in human social relationships: How does gender give meaning to the organization and perception of historical knowledge? The answers depend on gender as an analytic category or the most part, the attempts of historians to mained within traditional social scientific frameworks, using longstanding formulations that provide universal causal explanations. These theories have been limited at best because they tend to contain reductive or overly simple generali- zations that undercut not only history's disciplinary sense of the complexity of social causation but also feminist commitments to analyses that will lead to change

1056 Joan w. Scott A review of these theories will expose their limits and make it possible to propose an alternative approach. 7 THE APPROACHES USED BY MOST HISTORIANS fall into two distinct categories. The first is essentially descriptive: that is, it refers to the existence of phenomena or realities without interpreting, explaining, or attributing causality. The second usage is causal; it theorizes about the nature of phenomena or realities, seeking an understanding of how and why these take the form they do In its simplest recent usage,"gender"is a synonym for"women. "Any number of books and articles whose subject is womens history have, in the past few years, substituted"gender"for"women"in their titles. In some cases, this usage, though vaguely referring to certain analytic concepts, is actually about the political acceptability of the field. In these instances, the use of"gender"is meant to denote he scholarly seriousness of a work, for"gender "has a more neutral and objective sound than does"women. Gender"seems to fit within the scientific terminology of social science and thus dissociates itself from the(supposedly strident) politics of feminism. In this usage, "gender "does not carry with it a necessary statement about inequality or power nor does it name the aggrieved (and hitherto invisible) party. Whereas the term"womens history"proclaims its politics by asserting (contrary to customary practice) that women are valid historical subjects, "gender includes but does not name women and so seems to pose no critical threat. Thi use of "gender"is one facet of what might be called the quest of feminist scholarship for academic legitimacy in the 1980s But only one facet. Gender"as a substitute for"women"is also used to suggest that infor implies the study of the other. This usage insists that the world of women is part of the world of men, created in and by it. This usage rejects the interpretive utility of the idea of separate spheres, maintaining that to study women in isolation perpetuates the fiction that one sphere, the experience of one sex, has little or nothing to do with the other. In addition, gender is also used to designate social relations between the sexes. Its use explicitly rejects biological explanations, such s those that find a common denominator for diverse forms of female subordi- nation in the facts that women have the capacity to give birth and men have greater muscular strength. Instead, gender becomes a way of denoting "cultural con- structions-the entirely social creation of ideas about appropriate roles for women and men. It is a way of referring to the exclusively social origins of the subjective identities of men and women. Gender is, in this definition, a social exed body. Gender seems to have become a particularly useful word as studies of sex and sexuality have proliferated, for it offers a way f differentiating sexual practice from the social roles assigned to women and men 7 For a history, see Joan w. Scott, Women's History: The Modern Period. "Past and Moira Gatens, "A Critique Marxism? Interventions after Marx(Sydney, 1983), 143-60

gender 1057 Although scholars acknowledge the connection between sex and (what the sociologists of the family called)"sex roles, "these scholars do not assume a simple or direct linkage. The use of gender emphasizes an entire system of relationships that may include sex, but is not directly determined by sex or directly determining These descriptive usages of gender have been employed by historians most ofter to map out a new terrain. As social historians turned to new objects of study, gende was relevant for such topics as women, children, families, and gender ideologies This usage of gender, in other words, refers only to those areas--both structural and ideological-involving relations between the sexes. Because, on the face of it, war, diplomacy, and high politics have not been explicitly about those relation- ships, gender seems not to apply and so continues to be irrelevant to the thinking f historians concerned with issues of politics and power. The effect is to endorse a certain functionalist view ultimately rooted in biology and to perpetuate the idea separate spheres(sex or politics, family or nation, women or men)in th of history. Although gender in this usage asserts that relationships between the sexes are social, it says nothing about why these relationships are constructed as they are, how they work, or how they change. In its descriptive usage, then, gender is a concept associated with the study of things related to women. Gender is a new topic, a new department of historical investigation, but it does not have the analytic ower to address(and change) existing historical paradigms Some historians were, of course, aware of this problem, hence the efforts to employ theories that might explain the concept of gender and account for historical change. Indeed, the challenge was to reconcile theory, which was framed n general or universal terms, and history, which was committed to the study of contextual specificity and fundamental change. The result has been extremely eclectic: partial borrowings that vitiate the analytic power of a particular theory or, worse, employ its precepts without awareness of their implications: or accounts of change that, because they embed universal theories, only illustrate unchanging themes; or wonderfully imaginative studies in which theory is nonetheless so hidden that these studies cannot serve as models for other investigations. Because the theories on which historians have drawn are often not spelled out in all their plications, it seems worthwhile to spend some time doing that. Only through such an exercise can we evaluate the usefulness of these theories and, perhaps articulate a more powerful theoretical approach Feminist historians have employed a variety of approaches to the analysis of gender, but they come down to a choice between three theoretical positions. g The first, an entirely feminist effort, attempts to explain the origins of patriarchy. The econd locates itself within a marxian tradition and seeks there an accommodation with feminist critiques. The third, fundamentally divided between French post-structuralist and Anglo-American object-relations theorists, draws on these For a somewhat different approach to feminist analysis, see Linda J. Nicholson, Gender and History The Limits of Social Theory in the Age of the Family(New York, 1986)

1058 Joan w. Scot different schools of psychoanalysis to explain the production and reproduction of the subject's gendered identity. Theorists of patriarchy have directed their attention to the subordination of women and found their explanation for it in the male"need"to dominate the female. In Mary O'Brien's ingenious adaptation of Hegel, she defined male domination as the effect of mens desire to transcend their alienation from the means of the reproduction of the species. The principle of generational continuity restores the primacy of paternity and obscures the real labor and the social reality of womens work in childbirth. The source of women's liberation lies in"an Adequate understanding of the process of reproduction, an appreciation of the contradiction between the nature of womens reproductive labor and(male) ideological mystifications of it. 10 For Shulamith Firestone, reproduction was also the bitter trap"for women. In her more materialist analysis. however. liberation would come with transformations in reproductive technology, which might in some not too distant future eliminate the need for womens bodies as the agents of species reproduction. II If reproduction was the key to patriarchy for some, sexuality itself was the answer for others. Catherine MacKinnon's bold formulations were at once her own and characteristic of a certain approach: "Sexuality is to feminism what work is to marxism: that which is most one's own, yet most taken away cation is the primary process of the subjection of women. It unites act with word construction with expression, perception with enforcement, myth with reality Man fucks woman; subject verb object. "12 Continuing her analogy to Marx MacKinnon offered, in the place of dialectical materialism, consciousness-raising as feminism's method of analysis. By expressing the shared experience of objectification, she argued, women come to understand their common identity and so are moved to political action. For MacKinnon, sexuality thus stood outsid ideology, discoverable as an unmediated, experienced fact. Although sexual relations are defined in MacKinnon's analysis as social, there is nothing except the herent inequality of the sexual relation itself to explain why the system of power perates as it does. The source of unequal relations between the sexes is, in the end, unequal relations between the sexes. Although the inequality of which sexuality is the source is said to be embodied in a"whole system of social elationships, "how this system works is not explained. 13 Theorists of patriarchy have addressed the inequality of males and females in important ways, but, for historians, their theories pose problems. First, while they otter an analysis internal to the gender system itself, they also assert the primacy of that system in all social organization. But theories of patriarchy do not show hor gender inequality structures all other inequalities or, indeed, how gender affects Mary OBrien, The Politics of Reproduction(London, 1981),8-15,46 i Shulamith Fi Politics of Reproduction, 8 e, The Dialectic of Sex(New York, 1970). The phrase"bitter trap"is O Brien's 12 Catherine McKinnon, "Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theor Sgs,7( Spring1982):515.541 3hid,541,53

gender 1059 those areas of life that do not seem to be connected to it. Second, whether domination comes in the form of the male appropriation of the female reproductive labor or in the sexual objectification of women by men, the analy rests on physical difference. Any physical difference takes on a universal and Inchanging aspect, even if theorists of patriarchy take into account the existence of changing forms and systems of gender inequality. A theory that rests on the single variable of physical difference poses problems for historians: it assumes a consistent or inherent meaning for the human body--outside social or cultural construction-and thus the ahistoricity of gender itself. History becomes, in a sense, epiphenomenal, providing endless variations on the unchanging theme of a fixed gender inequality Marxist feminists have a more historical approach, guided as they are by a theory of history. But, whatever the variations and adaptations have been, the self imposed requirement that there be a"material"explanation for gendler has limited or at least slowed the development of new lines of analysis. Whether a so-called dual-systems solution is proffered (one that posits the separate but interacting realms of capitalism and patriarchy)or an analysis based more firmly in orthodo Marxist discussions of modes of production is developed, the explanation for the origins of and changes in gender systems is found outside the sexual division of labor. Families, households, and sexuality are all, finally, products of changing modes of production. That is how Engels concluded his explorations of the Origins of the Family: 1.s that is where economist Heidi Hartmann's analysis ultimately rests Hartmann insisted on the importance of taking into account patriarchy and capitalism as separate but interacting systems. Yet, as her argument unfolds, economic causality takes precedence, and patriarchy always develops and changes as a function of relations of production. When she suggested that"it is necessary eradicate the sexual division of labor itself to end male domination she meant ending job segregation by sex. s early discussions among Marxist feminists circled around the same set of problems: a rejection of the essentialism of those who would argue that the ' exigencies of biological reproduction"determine the sexual division of labor under capitalism; the futility of inserting"modes of reproduction"into discussions of modes of production(it remains an oppositional category and does not assume equal status with modes of production); the recognition that economic systems do not directly determine gender relationships, indeed, that the subordination of women pre-dates capitalism and continues under socialism; the search nonethele between historians Sheila Rowbotham, Sally Alexander, and Barbara Taylor in Raphael samuel, (m'G For an interesting discuss of the strengths and limits of the term"patriarchy, "see the exchan Frederick Engels. The Origins of the Family, Pri ate Property and the State(I88-1: reprint edn I Heidi Hartmann, "Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Job Segregation by Sex. Signs, I (Spring 1976): 168. See also"The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: 'I i More Progressive Union. " Capital and Class. 8(Summer 1979): 1-33: "The Family as the Locus of Gender, Class, and Polit ical Struggle: The Example of Housework. "Signs, 6i(Spring 1981):366-0-4

1060 Joan w. Scott for a materialist explanation that excludes natural physical differences. 17An important attempt to break out of this circle of problems came from Joan Kelly in her essay, The Doubled Vision of Feminist Theory, "where she argued that economic and gender systems interacted to produce social and historical exper ences; that neither system was causal, but both"operate simultaneously to reproduce the socioeconomic and male-dominant structures of [a] particular social order. Kelly's suggestion that gender systems had an independent existence provided a crucial conceptual opening, but her commitment to remain within a Marxist framework led her to emphasize the causal role of economic factors even in the determination of the gender system: "The relation of the sexes operates in accordance with, and through, socioeconomic structures, as well as sex/gender oduced the idea of lly based social reality, but she tended to emphasize the social rather than the sexual nature of that reality, and most often, "social, "in her usage, was conceived in terms of economic relations of productio The most far-reaching exploration of sex uality by American Marxist feminists is in Powers of Desire, a volume of essays published in 1983. 9 Influenced by increasing attention to sexuality among political activists and scholars, by French philosopher Michel Foucault's insistence that sexuality is produced in historical contexts, and by the conviction that the current"sexual revolution"required serious analysis, the authors made "sexual politics"the focus of their inquiry. In so doing, they opened the question of causality and offered a variety of solutions to it: indeed, the real excitement of this volume is its lack of analytic unanimity its sense of analytic tension. If individual authors tend to stress the causality of social (by which is often meant"economic")contexts, they nonetheless include suggestions about the importance of studying"the psychic structuring of gender dentity. "If"gender ideology" is sometimes said to"reflect"economic and social structures,there is also a crucial recognition of the need to understand the complex link between society and enduring psychic structure. 20 On the one hand, the editors endorse Jessica Benjamins point that politics must include attention to"the erotic, fantastic components of human life, "but, on the other, no essays besides Benjamin's deal fully or seriously with the theoretical issues she raises.21 Instead 7 Discussions of Marxist feminism include Zillah Eisenstein, Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism(New York, 1979): A Kuhn, "Structures of Patriarchy and Capital in the F A. Kuhn and A. Wolpe, eds, Feminism and Materialism(London. 1978): Rosalind Coward, Patriarchal Precedents(London, 1988); Hilda Scott, Does Socialism Liberate Women?(Boston, 1974): Jane Humphries, Working Class Family, Women's Liberation and Class Struggle: The Case of Nineteenth-Century H:3 euew'of Radical Political Economics, 12(St 1 Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson, eds, Powers of Desire: The Politics of ork,1983) eo Ellen Ross and Rayna Rapp, "Sex and Society: A Research Note from Social History and Introduction, Powers of Desire, 12: and Jessica Benjamin, "Master and Slave: The Fantasy of Erotic Domination. Poe'ers of Desire, 297

gender 1061 a tacit assumption runs through the volume that Marxism can be expanded te include discussions of ideology, culture, and psychology and that this expansion will happen through the kind of concrete examination of evidence undertaken in most of the articles. The advantage of such an approach lies in its avoidance of sharp differences of position, the disadvantage in its leaving in place an already fully articulated theory that leads back from relations of the sexes based to relations of production A comparison of American Marxist-feminist efforts, exploratory and relatively ide-ranging, to those of their English counterparts, tied more closely to the politics of a strong and viable Marxist tradition, reveals that the English have had greater difficulty in challenging the constraints of strictly determinist explanations This difficulty can be seen most dramatically in the recent debates in the New Left Review between Michele Barrett and her critics, who charged her with abandoning a materialist analysis of the sexual division of labor under capitalism. 22 It can be seen as well in the replacement of an initial feminist attempt to reconcile psy choanalysis and Marxism with a choice of one or another of these theoretical positions by scholars who earlier insisted that some fusion of the two was possible. 23 The difficulty for both English and American feminists working within Marxism is apparent in the works I have mentioned here. The problem they face is the opposite of the one posed by patriarchal theory. Within Marxism, the concept of gender has long been treated as the by-product of changing economic structures, gender has had no independent analytic status of its own A REVIEW OF PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY REQUIRES a specification of schools, since the various approaches have tended to be classified by the national origins of the founders and the majority of the practitioners. There is the Anglo-American school, working within the terms of theories of object-relations. In the U. S, Nancy Chodorow is the name most readily associated with this approach. In addition, the work of Carol Gilligan has had a far-reaching impact on American scholarship, Johann and Maria Ramas, Rethinking Women's Oppression, " New Left R 144 (March-April 1984): 33-71; Michele Barrett. Rethinking Womer A Reply to brenne and Ramas, " New Left Review, 146(July-August 1984): 123-28: Al d Elizabeth wilson The British Womens Movement, Nea Left Review, 148 (NG berl984):74-103; Michele Barrett, "A Response to Weir and Wilson, New Left ReT April I985:143-47 e Lewis. " The Debate on Sex and Class so Hugh Armstrong and Pat Armstrong, " Beyond Sexless Class and Classless Sex: Towards Feminist Marxism, " Studies in Political Economy, 10(Winter 1983): 7-44: Hugh Armstrong and Pat mstrong, Comments: More on Marxist Feminism. "Studies in Political Economy, 15(Fall 1984) 179-84; and Jane Jenson, "Gender and Reproduction; or, Babies and the State, " unpublished paper. June 19 eoretical formulations, see Papers on Patriarchy: Confere I am grateful to Jane Caplan for telling me of the existence of this publication and for her ally alexande Women, Class and Sexual Difference, " History Workshop, 17(Spring 1984): 125-35. In seminars at Princeton University in early 1986, Juliet Mitchell seemed to be returning to an emphasis on the priority nde or a f marxis feminism, see Coward. Patriarchal Precedents. See also the this direction by ologist Gayle Rubin, " The Traffic in Women: No "Political Economyof Sex R. Reiter, ed, Towards an Anthropology of Women(New York, 1975): 167-68

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《媒介与社会性别 Media and Gender》本科课程参考文献_Scott_GenderUsefulCat