Reading Notes for February 12 Class

Joan Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis" (1985)

-- "gender as a way of referring to the social organization of the relationship between the sexes" -- new discourse begun by feminists
-- against the biological determinism of "sex"
-- "women and men were defined in terms of one another"-- Natalie Davis -- 1975
-- put on par with class and race, making gender only one of the factors in power plays that usually end in the oppression or suppression of certain histories

Scott argues that these three are not on part with one another at all:

-- there are certain assumptions that go with class analysis (economic causality, historical processes, the dialectic) that do not apply to the ways historians use race or gender in their analysis
-- need for gender as a new category because there are limitations to simple descriptions of women's history that require a larger look at the mechanisms that support that history

Review of past theories and how they've limited the scope of useful analysis:

-- gender as a synonym for women -- adds academic and social science cache to the study; less politically charged
-- gender used to denote social constructedness, that femininity doesn't exist without masculinity, etc., which also opens the door to a specific study of sexuality as separate from gender as a social role
-- Marxist-Feminism as an approach to gender, as in Powers of Desire -- materialist analyses that focus on consumption/production and gender as a reflection of this power struggle -- but then it's not an independent analytical category, is it?
-- Psychoanalytic approaches -- Chodorow and Gilligan from Anglo-U.S. perspective (moral behavior, limit to the family and home); French psychoanalysis borrowing from Freud and Lacan with a focus on language (so, unconscious and internalized gender roles, but limited to the subject and individuality instead of the larger social structure) -- Alexander's reading is useful here-- Feminist Studies symposium in 1980 -- Gilligan's insistence on binaries works against feminist projects

The project:

-- accept the allies within post-strucuralism and the humanities who open a space for this disuccsion
-- focus not on the individual or the society, but how each is interconnected with the other
-- bring in Foucault's interpretation of power as a constellation of smaller hierarchies and interactions
-- "gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, and gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power." -- cultural symbols that mean a multiplicty of representations (Eve, light vs. dark, etc.) and how they are used and contested in different moments and to what purpose

Some examples she shares:
-- power determined by limtation of women's legal rights
-- power determined by expanding welfare for women
-- gendering of labor roles or of populations (like some men of color in America denoted as feminine in certain contexts)

Questions to explore further:

How can this lead to change?
Does she provide an answer?
What's the point of writing this kind of history then?
What does this tell us about masculinity?
How might we apply this to comics and graphic novels?
One possibility is that by using gender as a category of analysis, we see it as just that and not as a fixed system that defined social roles in ways that cannot and have never been subverted. What does she mean by utopia at the end here?

Bryce Traister, "Academic Viagra: The Rise of American Masculinity Studies" (2000)

-- Masculinity studies as heterosexual masculinity studies with some overlap into gay male studies
-- This heteromasculinity is awkwardly defined against and in tandem with homomasculinity
-- Strongly Americanist
-- Phallocentrism – writing this history of "men as men"
-- “Crisis theory” – instability of American masculinity vs. Butler’s performative and contingent masculinity
-- Criticism: this just puts masculinity back at the center of the story and crowds out femininity
-- Response to the pro-“men’s rights” strain in popular culture
-- These studies tend to begin with a confession of the author’s own subjectivity
-- Kimmel : “make gender visible to men.” “constructedness”
-- Kimmel: the ideal version vs. the lived version
-- Butler: the performance is based on regulatory practice that naturalizes gender and is based on compulsory heterosexuality

Some questions asked in the texts discussed in the essay:

-- “What is the role of the warrior in a society that no longer requires defending?”
-- How do men confront the patriarchy as much as women do? Might patriarchy be the creation of both? In other words, is power always lodged with the male in a patriarchy? Must we assume that the benefiter of a system is always the creator of it?
-- Are the paths of masculinity different for African American men? Working-class men?
-- Is there always a dominant narrative of masculinity with which everyone must contend? Or is this a dominant discourse from which different eras borrow for different reasons (Scott)?
-- Is it possible that no man is a “real man” according to the ideal? If everything is a performance, if we’re all anxious, all queer, all “not living up,” then what’s “normal”? Can we even write this narrative?
-- Are masculinity and femininity equal analytic categories? (Traister says no)
-- Why are we not pushing toward an analysis of masculinity as strength, the force of domination, the force of imperialism, etc.?