Judith Butler and Elizabeth Weed, editors. The Question of Gender

These complementary works provide fresh analyses of the state of gender studies and the dynamic theories of “sexual difference” as proposed, tested, and critiqued by Joan Wallach Scott. The Fantasy of Feminist History is Scott's latest attempt to rethink the theoretical and methodological implications of gender for feminist politics. Here, Scott, one of the leading public intellectuals of our day, reads the ways feminist theorists, primarily drawing on Jacques Lacan, have employed classical Freudian psychoanalysis and sharpened its critical edge as an ongoing tool for feminist history writing. Once resistant to psychoanalysis, Scott confesses in the introduction, she now sees it as a way to reinvigorate gender analysis by insisting on gender's “mutability” and, thus, on “sexual difference as an unresolvable dilemma” (p. 5) that confounds biology and social construction. Her long-standing colleagues and collaborators, Judith Butler and Elizabeth Weed, bring together eleven other scholars to track the reverberations of Scott's writings across many disciplines. Their edited collection is organized around historical test cases and also examines gender analysis in art history, print technology icons, avant-garde film, and the body and sexuality. Psychoanalysis as method gets a separate and detailed reading as well. A shared question animates virtually all of these authors: what are the implications for feminist analysis and practice today of the methodological and theoretical questioning of gender and its many uses? Seen from a global perspective, the two books are part of a wider and urgent debate about the nature and viability of transnational feminism as a mode of struggle for gender and social justice. While Scott and her colleagues explicitly eschew ties to the global women's human rights movement and critique the understanding of gender in United Nations work, this position, perhaps, narrows their overall purview. A broader interdisciplinary exchange of perspectives might have much to offer transnational feminism in the “dark times” in which we are living (p. 314), to borrow a phrase from Wendy Brown's epilogue in the Butler and Weed collection.

Art · Dilemma · Epistemology · Fantasy · Femininity · Feminism · Freudian slip · Human sexuality · Literature · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · Philosophy · Psychology

• Does Feminist History have a future

  Joy Damousi•Australian Feminist Studies•2014

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