The Fantasy of Feminist History

by Joan Wallach Scott

In The Fantasy of Feminist History , Joan Wallach Scott argues that feminist perspectives on history are enriched by psychoanalytic concepts, particularly fantasy. Tracing the evolution of her thinking about gender over the course of her career, the pioneering historian explains how her search for ways to more forcefully insist on gender as mutable rather than fixed or stable led her to psychoanalytic theory, which posits sexual difference as an insoluble dilemma. Scott suggests that it is the futile struggle to hold meaning in place that makes gender such an interesting historical object, an object that includes not only regimes of truth about sex and sexuality but also fantasies and transgressions that refuse to be regulated or categorized. Fantasy undermines any notion of psychic immutability or fixed identity, infuses rational motives with desire, and contributes to the actions and events that come to be narrated as history. Questioning the standard parameters of historiography and feminist politics, Scott advocates fantasy as a useful, even necessary, concept for feminist historical analysis.

Genres: Feminism, History, Nonfiction, Politics, Gender, Academic

200 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Joan Scott is known internationally for writings that theorize gender as an analytic category. She is a leading figure in the emerging field of critical history. Her ground-breaking work has challenged the foundations of conventional historical practice, including the nature of historical evidence and historical experience and the role of narrative in the writing of history, and has contributed to a transformation of the field of intellectual history. Scott's recent books focus on gender and democratic politics. Her works include The Politics of the Veil (2007), Gender and the Politics of History (1988), Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (1996), and Parité: Sexual Equality and the Crisis of French Universalism (2005). Scott graduated from Brandeis University in 1962 and received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1969. Before joining the Institute for Advanced Study, Scott taught in the history departments of Brown University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Northwestern University, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Rutgers University.

Reviews

[Kathleen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Scott is a great writer, and I wanted to like this book more. But...psychoanalysis? Really?

I don't understand academics that work with psychoanalysis. It has its roots in some coke-head's theories of the brain that have no basis in how the brain actually works. That is, there is nothing factual or rigorous or scientific about psychoanalysis. So, since it's been basically discarded by psychologists as pseudo-science, why do literary theorists and other humanities people insist on trying to revive it? I can't take it seriously in the same way that I can't take seriously people who study the bible as a factual document rather than a cultural artifact. It just makes me want to scream, "this is all made-up nonsense!"

[Megansnopik]

“i’d rather be dead than misread” yes MA’AM

cannot recommend enough

[Johanna · Rating 2 out of 5]

There were a few interesting points and ideas but I don't think psychoanalysis is the way to evaluate the feminist movement on or to use for setting new goals. I did learn more about the movement's history but I need to add that the title of the books was misleading - I'm going to have to look further to find an attempt to (re)write history from a feminist point of view.

[Christopher Sutch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Despite the provocative title there is surprisingly little that is new or different about this collection of disparate essays from one of the key figures in academic feminist history. Many of the essays were originally published about a decade before this collection was and this dates the work somewhat (particularly a further seven years on from the second publication), particularly in the realm of the texts that Scott relies on for historiographical and otherwise theoretical support. (She was a couple of decades late to the feminist discovery of Lacan and Freud as it was.) Her work on how fantasy is used to construct homogeneous imagined communities is helpful (say the first two essays or so), although the insights provided are minor. She is at her best when Scott considers the (continuing) controversy over banning the hijab in France. Following critiques of second-wave feminists by postcolonial critics in the 1980s and 1990s, Scott argues that, in certain contexts, what appears at first to be a self-oppressive position by some women ("I choose to wear the hijab") can actually be a progressive and activist feminist position ("I choose where others wish to deny me the choice"). The question that occurred to me, though, in considering the final essay in the book (on "French Seduction Theory," a truly vile nationalist "democratic" philosophy) was why the overlay of Lacanian theorizing was necessary in examining the premises of those espousing "seduction theory." I can't see that the theory adds anything insightful into a mere straightforward analysis of what some French writers say and how those pronouncements play out on the ground during debates about the hijab. I was also somewhat dismayed by the Epilogue, in which Scott worries about the implications of future historians and writers "misrepresenting" her positions and her work when they encounter it in the archives. Does Scott feel any remorse for the way she has used other people's materials (surely not in the way that _they_ intended they be used)? Once something is published (or archived) control is out of the author's hand. I'm surprised that "control" is something Scott worries about; it seems a little regressive to me.