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Scott, Joan W. "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis."
The American Historical Review, Vol. 91, No. 5. Dec., 1986. pp. 1053-1075.
The word 'gender' is often used by feminist scholars to dissociate the physical characteristics of the female sexualized body from the social constructions attached to such female bodies. However, gender is still often used as a synonym for women, even by historians who attempt to debunk sexual stereotypes. Also, within the academy gender has been used as a less critically threatening term to describe the analysis of female history, because the term implies the study of men as well as women, unlike the more polarizing and radical term "women's history" (Scott 1056). Conversely, but perhaps just as damagingly, the term gender has been used to describe matters that only pertain to the female sexual experience, such as childbirth, which can compartmentalize experiences like war that might not be constructed as female. Joan W. Scott believes that the term of gender must find a way to encompass race and class without stressing the sexual and material aspects of gender, as psychoanalytic and politically oriented theorists of patriarchy and Marxists have tended to do. Theories based in patriarchy (and also psychoanalysis) tend to reinforce the male/female separate spheres divide even while they seek to undo it, and women's oppression predates industrialism and class.
Scott's analysis is especially useful at the end of her essay, when she calls for understanding power not as a male vs. female war, but what she calls a diffuse and Foucault-like manner that sees gender as woven to a fabric of social relationships (1067). Scott clarifies how gender is culturally symbolic as well as involves normative symbols for the individual, as well highlights gender's function in social institutions and organizations and in specific historical contexts.
On one hand, Scott seems to ask a great deal of the word gender, but by doing so her essay performs a useful function, not simply for scholars, but for everyone who is a participant in our own society's web of meanings, for she highlights the pervasiveness of gender assumptions in daily life, their mutability, and quite often their invisibility.
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