Arifin - Gender and the Politics of History

GENDER AND THE POLITICS OF HISTORY

GENDER AND CULTURE SERIES

GENDER AND CULTURE

A SERIES OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Nancy K. Miller and Victoria Rosner, Series Editors

Carolyn G. Heilbrun (19262003) and Nancy K. Miller, Founding Editors

For a complete list of books in the series, see .

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

PUBLISHERS SINCE 1893

NEW YORK CHICHESTER, WEST SUSSEX

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Copyright 2018 Columbia University Press

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E-ISBN 978-0-231-54761-1

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ISBN 978-0-231-18801-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-231-54761-1 (e-book)

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Cover design: Elliott S. Cairns

Cover image: Daumier, Honor, Monsieur, pardon si je vous gne un peu.

Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.

FOR ELIZABETH

Contents

I ts been 30 years since this book was first published; its endurance is a testimony to the continuing importance of gender in our political and cultural vocabulary. Its not as if the meaning of gender has been settled, far from it. There are more connotations of the term gender than can be listed in any single dictionary entry. Contested from the outset (in the 1970s), when feminists first appropriated Robert Stollers distinction between sex and gender, biology and culture, the term has acquired more visibility in ensuing years as well as more passionate advocates and critics. On the left, Judith Butler has counseled us to undo the male/female binary upon which gender has long rested. On the right, opponents of feminism and gay marriage have likened the theory of gender to a communist plot that would overturn the natural order of societies and nations.

Gender, from these perspectives, is a historically and culturally variable attempt to provide a grid of intelligibility for sex; as such it can never be pinned down to a settled definition. And it is precisely because of this indeterminacy that gender continues to be a useful category for historical analysis.

My thinking about the indeterminacy of genderits inability ever finally to nail down the meanings for differences of sexwas initially influenced by the writings of Michel Foucault. His insistence on the dispersion of power in modernity, its presence in ordinary relations which had never been thought of as exemplifying power, had an influential impact on social history and, later, cultural history. Foucault refused the definition of power as an object, that is as a transferable property associated only with rule, law, wealth, and monopolies of violence. Instead he took power to be relational, generativeunderstood in terms of its effects. It was productive not repressive, constituting subjects, flowing along discourses, coursing through populations. The question was not who held power, but what forms it took and what operations it performed.

With Foucault, the study of power was no longer limited to the institutions and agents of the state, but expanded to a broad range of human activities, including those that were conventionally thought to lie outside the realm of the political: science, arts, literature, even sex and sexual desire. These were not separate spheres of activity and power, but mutually constitutive realms: for example, scientific studies legitimated economic policy, art and literature helped make normative ideals into common sense perceptions (and sometimes also challenged them), disciplinary associations established hierarchies of mastery and standards for the production of knowledge. The production of knowledge was at once riven with internal politics of its own, and could also no longer be thought apart from more conventional notions of the dynamics of power.

My thinking about genders indeterminacy has been sharpened in the years since I wrote this book by engagement with psychoanalytic theory. I was skeptical about psychoanalysis in the 1980s because it seemed ahistorical, but I have since revised my view in light of what Adam Phillips calls the post-FreudianFreud, read through the lenses of post-structuralism, post-colonialism, and theories of race and racism, with attention to language and the many associations it evokes. This means that sex and sexual difference are not simply metaphors for other areas of human activity; they are always already imbricated in the conceptualization of those other domains.

The history of politics is opened in new ways by a psychoanalytic reading of the mutual constitution of gender and politicsin past centuries as well as in our present moment. An example from the past comes from Ancien Rgime France in the work of the feminist historian liane Viennot, who has written several magnificent volumes on women and political power from the Renaissance to the aftermath of the French Revolution. Viennot documents the formidable political role of queens, regents, mothers, and mistresses during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. The Valois kings, she shows, expressly relied on noblewomen, who moved freely in court circles and had a recognized public role to play. Their participation was not universally acceptedas demonstrated by the famous querelle des femmes and several centuries of misogynist writing by disaffected bourgeois, provincial spokesmen, and foreigners. But the criticism was not what we might call pure misogyny; rather it was a form of social protest whose motives went far beyond the activities of the women it denounced. Still, it wasnt until the Bourbon monarchs that noblewomen were definitively barred from politics. In an effort to consolidate monarchial power, agents of the crown depicted noblewomen as capricious, hare-brained, and driven only by a desire for luxury and pleasure. For that reason, it was argued, they had no place in serious political deliberations. Interestingly, the characterization extended to noblemen, who were reduced by the architects of absolutism to frivolous appendages to court life, their influence achieved through liaisons dangereusessexual intrigue as a sign of their political impotence. Having lost the prerogatives that once defined their very being, the court nobility was represented as feminizedin effect they were castrated. The characterization of the aristocracy as feminized was not invented by the eighteenth-century revolutionariesas I once thought was the caseit dated to the onset of absolutism. In the regime of absolutism, authority was to be the kings alone; everyone else served to confirm his sovereignty. There was to be no confusion about who was in charge, who had the phallusthe signifier of power.

There are any number of examples for the fantasy of the phallic exception that can be drawn from contemporary political contests, the most dramatic of which are Silvio Berlusconi and Donald Trump (surrounded by all those glittering women), although French president Emmanuel Macrons preference for Versailles and the accoutrements of monarchy also comes to mind.