labrys, études féministes/ estudos feministas
juillet / décembre 2010 - julho/dezembro 2010

Interview with Professor JOAN W. SCOTT

By tania navarro swain

JOAN W. SCOTT’s work has challenged the foundations of conventional historical practice, including the nature of historical evidence and historical experience. Drawing on a range of philosophical thought, as well as on a rethinking of her own training as a labor historian, she has contributed to the formulation of a field of critical history. Written more than twenty years ago, her now classic article, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” continues to inspire innovative research on women and gender. In her latest work Professor Scott has been concerned with the ways in which difference poses problems for democratic practice. She has taken up this question in her most recent books: Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man; Parité: Sexual Equality and the Crisis of French Universalism; and the forthcoming The Politics of the Veil: Banning Islamic Headscarves in French Public Schools.

tania navarro swain– Gender, as an analytical category, has many times been considered as an invariable element in human relations, where the masculine means domination and the feminine submission. What is your comment on this?

Joan Wallace Sott - I reject the the idea that gender is invariable, that masculine always means domination and feminine submission.  I’ve argued instead that gender is a question we must pose in different contexts (historical, political, etc).  The questions are: HOW are relations between the sexes being constructed? what ends are regulatory norms serving?  What are the discrepancies between those norms and individual and/or collective identifications?

tns-  – If gender is a historical category, “effect of laws and political options”, would it not be possible to imagine a historical social formation without genders, that is without any sexual / biological  foundation?

JWS -I have to confess that a future without sexual difference is beyond my imaginative powers.  I think sexual difference will always be there to confound, challenge us about what it means.  Here I’m persuaded by psychoanalytic theory that posits sexual difference as a problem without resolution, a puzzle to be grappled with but, ultimately, unresolvable.  The history of “gender” represents various collective attempts not only to resolve the puzzle, but to arrive at a certain solution once and for all.

Still, it would be interesting to ask whether sexual difference could become a problem detached from social and political formations.  One could ask the question of anthropologists and historians of other than Western cultures: are there places where issues of sexuality are irrelevant to social/political organization?

tns – How do you see today’s development of the history of women?

JWS - There’s been a lot of interesting history written—there still is.  I’m most attracted to the histories which embed theoretical perspectives, which don’t simply describe live for women in another time, but ask questions about how gender is operating and what it serves to construct.

tns – Would you say that the history of women is a different production of knowledge, other than that of a history of gender?

JWS - I’m not sure I understand the question.  Do you mean that the history of women and the history of gender are different activities with different outcomes?  I don’t think so, at least not if questions about gender are driving the history that’s being written about women.

tns – How do you perceive today’s feminisms in all their different approaches?

JWS - There have always been multiple approaches to feminism, so it’s not surprising that is the case now.  My sense is that feminist theorizing has had an important effect everywhere, even if not always acknowledged.  And feminist activism continues in many arenas even if (in the US at least) there’s no sense of a single “movement” we can identify.

tns – In your opinion, which are the most relevant theoretical aspects of all the feminisms at the moment?

JWS - This is such a broad question.  For me, it’s the theory that poses questions, that problematizes things having to do with women rather than assuming we know what’s going on.  So, instead of assuming with so many feminists (at least in Western Europe these days) that Islam equates with the oppression of women, I would ask: why have women and their clothing been taken as a symbol of all that’s wrong with Islam?  What does it mean when Western countries that still have big inequalities between women and men (wages, job opportunities, domestic violence, politics, etc) define Islam as THE religion in which women are subordinate to men? Why have democracy and secularism been defined as guarantees of women’s equality when historically and currently this is not necessarily the case?

tns – Instead of the proposal of a “difference of sexes”, Nicole-Claude Mathieu proposes an analysis of the “process of sexual differentiation”. What do you think of this analytical proposal?

JWS - I have no objection to it, though it seems to me that “process of sexual differentiation” implies that the difference of sex itself poses no psychic problem.  Her phrase suggests that sexual difference is more a sociological than a psychological issue.  I think we need to have a psychoanalytic perspective on this as well.

tns - Could you explicit your conception of the notion of “experience” in relation to the construction of the historical narrative?

JWS - Here I have to ask you to read my article on “Experience”.  And also perhaps an article called “Fantasy Echo: History and the Construction of Identity.”  I just can’t summarize the arguments in those articles in this brief space.

tns- How can you explicit experience in the construction of a feminist subjectivity?

JWS – Again, I ask you to read those pieces.  (This is not a matter of arrogance or narcissism, but of being unable to summarize difficult arguments in a short space.)  Briefly, I’d say that “experience” is not something we just have, but which we interpret, so the “construction of feminist subjectivity” involves the interpretation (or the reinterpretation) of things that have happened in our lives.  Women become feminists when they are offered a different lens through which to view their histories, their relationships, their attempts to do things in the world.

tns- In your opinion, did feminist epistemology receive any contribution from the reflections made by Foucault?

JWS - Here it’s best to speak for myself.  For me, Foucault was crucial for thinking differently about gender.  His ideas about power changed the way I analyzed the relations between women and men; his notions of historical “genealogies” were also important.  The ideas of discourse, regimes of truth, discontinuities in history—all of this led me to rethink the historical training I had had.

tns- Your work has a political repercussion in the development of feminist historiography and the history of women. Do you consider yourself as a feminist historian?

JWS - I certainly consider myself a feminist historian.  That’s the label with which I identify myself.

tns- The “paradoxical citizen” is about French feminisms of the XIXth century. Would you explain us your choice and what you consider the main axis of your historical narrative?

JWS - I wanted to “deconstruct” the standard representation of feminism as being divided between “difference feminists” and “equality feminists.”  I also wanted to ask what constituted a “tradition” of feminist work.  I wanted to challenge that idea that there was a continuous, evolutionary movement of feminism. It seemed to me that I could do this by looking at my own field of French history and at some of the feminists whose lives and writings I had encountered in the course of other research.  My historical narrative, such as it is, is about the discontinuity of the movement and about the very different positions feminists took in their long struggle for the vote in France.

  The real focus of the narrative though is the persistence of a problem that somehow couldn’t be resolved: no matter how much feminists insisted on equality with men, they were defined (and had to define themselves) in terms of their difference.  In the logic of French republican theory, individuals were singular beings, represented as masculine.  They were abstracted from their social and other characteristics.  But women could not be abstracted from their sex and so were different, thus not capable of being “individuals.”  The story I tell is of how feminists grappled with that problem, how the “difference” feminists often argued for equality and the “equality” feminists argued from their difference. 

tns- Which are your theoretical relations with French feminisms of the XXth century?

JWS - Again, I’m not sure how to answer this.  The French feminists I read are a varied group: Irigaray, Cixous, Wittig, Delphy, Gaspard.  These days, (the XXIst century) I’m especially interested in those, like Delphy, who are refusing simplistic depictions of Muslim women and who are trying to arrive at positions that don’t discriminate on the basis of race or religion.  So the group Delphy works with has come up with a platform that is against all forms of domination and that says “no forced wearing of headscarves”, “no forced removal of headscarves.”  These are difficult times and it requires great ingenuity to find political positions that avoid falling into partisan, nationalist, discriminatory traps.

tns- Your work is highly considered as well as quoted in Brazil. How is it received among American and French historians?

JWS - I think it’s had some influence in both countries, but I’m not the one to tell you how much.

tns. What is your research at the moment?

JWS - After I finished The Politics of the Veil, I wanted to do more work on secularism.  I was particularly struck by the arguments you hear everywhere today that equate secularism with gender equality.  I wondered if this were true historically (it’s not—the process of separating church and state had nothing to do with liberating women, in fact, the privatization of religion was coincident with the domestication of women—the discursive assignment of women to the home) and true in the contemporary world.   My research focuses on France, but I also want to look more broadly at processes of secularization and changes in women’ s status.

tns. Thank yoy very much!

labrys, études féministes/ estudos feministas
juillet / décembre 2010 - julho/dezembro 2010