Historicising Agency
Why has ‘agency’ been such a tenacious concept in historical scholarship on women and gender, and what have been the consequences on this tenacity? This essay tackles these questions and proposes, through a brief examination of the history of skin lighteners in South Africa and beyond, how agency might be pushed in more surprising, more analytically productive directions. Too often agency slips from being a conceptual tool or starting point to a concluding argument. For example, in my subfield of African women's and gender history, statements like ‘African women had agency’ can stand as the impoverished punch lines of empirically rich studies. Consideration of Walter Johnson's 2003 essay ‘On Agency’ highlights the intellectual and political imperatives of 1970s Marxist and feminist social history that placed agency at centre stage. This essay examines why, more than a decade after Johnson's critique, agency endures as a ‘safety’ argument for reasons related to representational politics, research methodologies and the circumscribed imagination of intellectual gatekeepers. It argues that we should move beyond agency as argument by attending to the multiple concerns and desires – some intentional, others not – that animate human actions, including contentious gendered practices, and by examining how different historical actors have themselves understood agency. Agency has a history. By acknowledging and tracing that history, we will be better able to discern the usefulness and limits of agency for our own analyses.
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2F1468-0424.12210
‘No More Fears, No More Tears’?: Gender, Emotion and the Aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars in France
This article investigates why royalist popular culture in the immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic wars often depicted young mothers anxious for peace. Such representations reflected the brutality of the wars, women's relative prominence in anti-conscription resistance and a cultural shift from revolutionary injunctions to wives and mothers to sacrifice their menfolk for the good of the nation to Napoleonic images of women as tremulous counterparts to virile soldiers. But the image of peace-loving mothers in 1814 and 1815 was not simply a response to the devastation of war or a continuation of Napoleonic gender roles. Instead, it served distinctive purposes in a period of peace-making and political transition, which entailed not only disentangling masculinity from martial valour but also strategically invoking feminine anguish or joy. The focus on Louis XVIII's role in rescuing mothers helped legitimise an unpopular monarch, who had gained power only with the help of foreign armies, and was returning to a country that had executed its last king. The image of grateful women and happy families also deflected attention away from contemporary problems – including the difficult return of veterans to a defeated country and the lasting grief of those who had lost loved ones in war – by focusing on the joy of mothers whose sons would remain safely home. This article draws on two different bodies of scholarship, rarely considered together – the growing literature on the history of emotion in the era of the French Revolution and studies of gender and war in the twentieth century, especially the First World War – and uses a variety of sources, from recruitment propaganda to songs, to show the specific ways gendered and emotional images could be deployed at transitional moments.
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2F1468-0424.12217
Gender Binary and the Limits of Poststructuralist Method
In contemporary gender history, the story about the making of the gender category is inseparable from the concept of ‘gender binary’. It at once signifies a research agenda and constitutes a persistent problem pervading feminist analysis itself. On the one hand, it points to the massive historical record of persistent inequality between the sexes. On the other hand, the concept of ‘gender binary’ undergirds gender history's analytics, which empowers historians to pursue, expose and deconstruct the binary organisation of gendered – woman/man – identities as well as social relations and discursive formations that produce them. In both capacities, the concept carries a rich repertoire of connotations, which informs and influences the gender category: those of radical distinction, opposition, mutually exclusive and exhaustive differentiation, hierarchy, domination, oppression – in all their myriad historical forms. As a result, it captures the entanglement of gender – in theory, an open-ended category – in binary, that is, negatively and positively determined connotations of feminine and masculine and, consequently, in a particular, historical form of heterosexual subjectivity, the one structured like a binary system. The entanglement of gender history's foundational category – gender – in the binary systems of assigning difference has had many critics. What has been left unexamined however and what gives this article its focus is the poverty of gender as a binary device to analyse those gendered identities that constitute heterosexual relations but do not fit the binary matrix. The goal in this article is to enable the conditions for the continuous development – not abandonment – of the gender category and our theoretical framework. To do that, I explore how the gender category became a binary category, tightly identified with connotations of asymmetry and hierarchy, by undertaking a deconstructive rereading of a foundational work by one of the discipline's most influential poststructuralist theorists – Joan Scott. I conclude by arguing that in order to address the problem of gendered, heterosexual identities that do not fit the binary matrix we need to revisit the concept of dichotomy and differentiate it from binary connotations of difference found in heteronormative gender systems.
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2F1468-0424.12209