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Gender and Modern Identity

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Title: Gender and Modern Identity


1
Gender and Modern Identity
  • Sarah Richardson

2
Overview
  • Introduction What is modern identity?
  • Case study Baylys use of Girodets portrait
  • Historiographical trends
  • Joan Scott
  • Social Science/Davidoff and Hall
  • Masculinity
  • Class v Gender

3
Gender Identity
  • How are markers of identity class, age, gender,
    sexuality and ethnicity represented?
  • How are identities constructed?
  • What does the category of gender offer to an
    understanding of modern identity?

4
Gender Identity
  • Many womens historians have presented an almost
    unchanging story of timeless, endemic patriarchy
    and misogyny.
  • It has also been assumed that men were an
    unproblematic norm

5
Voices
  • Without question, our first inspiration was
    political. Aroused by feminist charges of
    economic and political discrimination . . . we
    turned to our history to trace the origins of
    women's second-class status. (Carroll Smith
    Rosenberg)
  • When I started working on women's history about
    thirty years ago, the field did not exist. People
    didn't think that women had a history worth
    knowing. (Gerder Lerner)

6
Voices
  • Black identity is a narrative, a story, a
    history. Something constructed, told, spoken, not
    simply found (Stuart Hall)

7
Anne-Louis Girodets Portrait of Jean-Baptiste
Belley, Ex Representative of the Colonies
exhibited in Paris in 1798.
8
Case Study
  • Christopher Baylys use of Girodets portrait
    tells us much about history, historians and
    gender identity
  • the most splendid visualisation of the
    universalising intention of the revolution

9
  • Belley former Senegalese slave who worked to
    abolish slavery in the colonies
  • Representative of the French colonies elected in
    San Domingue in 1793
  • Spoke in debate in in 1794, when a unanimous
    decision was taken to abolish slavery. Lost seat
    in 1797.
  • Lost from records in the struggles of Haitians
    against the Napoleonic army, which was attempting
    to reinstate slavery.

10
  • Leaning against bust of the encyclopaedist Abbé
    Raynal, critic of slavery and of colonial policy.
  • Artist has 'united two very different citizens of
    the French nation in a Janus-faced double
    portrait'.
  • Yet there is no equality between these two
    figures, rather much ambivalence.
  • This portrait tells us about modernity - a
    modernity structured through particular images of
    masculinity and racial difference.

11
Bayly and Gender
  • Gender merits little discussion in Baylys book
  • Binaries of gender, of class and of race are
    central to the definition of being modern
  • Questions of identity and difference need to be
    part of our picture of the Making of the Modern
    World alongside discussions of states and wars
    and revolutions to enable us to understand what
    kind of people modern people are.

12
Historiography of gender identity
  • the emergence of gender history
  • the social science approach.

13
Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of
History (1985)
14
Distinction between Sex Gender
  • Sex is biologically determined
  • But see Foucaults History of Sexuality (1976-86)
  • Laquers analysis of the one-sex model which
    was prevalent in science before eighteenth century

15
Male and Female reproductive organs demonstrating
correspondence as drawn by Andreas Vesalius in
Tabulae Sex 1558
16
Gender
  • Gender is a cultural/social phenomenon.
  • Gender is what a given society makes of
    sexual/biological differences.
  • If sex deals in men and women, gender deals in
    concepts of femininity and masculinity.
  • Gender is a social category imposed on a sexed
    body. (Scott)
  • Gender is a constitutive element of social
    relationships based on perceived differences
    between the sexes, and gender is a primary way of
    signifying relationships of power. (Scott)

17
  • Approach relied on post-strucuturalism and
    discourse analysis.
  • Language plays primary role in construction of
    gendered identity.
  • Gender is a category, not in the sense of a
    universal statement but in the sense of public
    objection and indictment, of debate, protest,
    process and trial. (Bock)
  • Such theoretical methods would initiate new areas
    of historical inquiry

18
Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family
Fortunes Men and Women of the English Middle
Class, 1780-1850 (1987) In particular, our
concern has been to give the neglected dimension
of gender its full weight and complexity in the
shaping and structuring of middle-class social
life in this period.
19
Social science approach
  • Categories of gender, race and class are central
    to any social structure
  • Importance of rhetoric of separate spheres in
    establishing boundaries
  • Male dominated public sphere/female dominated
    private sphere

20
Critiques of separate sphere model
  • Discourse neither novel to nineteenth century nor
    applied to one social class
  • several spheres more appropriate model
  • public and private were ideological
    constructs used in different ways rather than
    fixed, unchanging entities

21
Critics of gender history
  • Runs the risk of abandoning attempts to get at
    womens real experiences in the past
  • Portrays women as lacking agency trapped
    inexorably in a web of discourse

22
Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight
(1992). The narrative of the woman confined to
the domestic/private sphere is juxtaposed with
other narratives of women shoppers in Department
stores, East End prostitutes, girl victims of
white slavery, striking factory match girls,
bourgeois charity workers, and emerging
feminists.
23
Masculinity
  • History of masculinity evolved from work on
    womens history
  • Mens movement questioned modern patriarchal
    gender roles
  • if we live in a mans world it is not a world
    that has been built upon the needs and
    nourishment of men. Rather it is a social world
    of power and subordination in which men have been
    forced to compete if we want to benefit from our
    inherited masculinity (Seidler, Rediscovering
    masculinity)
  • Historians looked back into history to search out
    more positive conceptions of masculinity.

24
Victorian Masculinity which picture is more
apposite?
25
Masculinity and Race Thomas Babington Macaulay
on the Bengal people His pursuits are
sedentary, his limbs delicate, his movements
languid. There never perhaps existed a people
so thoroughly fitted by habit for a foreign yoke.
26
Class Gender
  • An understanding of modernity needs to include
    issues of class and gender (as well as race).
  • See Catherine Halls analysis of Peterloo which
    considers the gendered experiences of Samuel
    Bamford and his wife Jemima

Samuel Bamford, 1788-1872
27
What does this image tell us about class, gender
and modernity?
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