The Fantasy of Feminist History (Next Wave Provocations)

In The Fantasy of Feminist History, Joan Wallach Scott argues that feminist perspectives on history are enriched by psychoanalytic concepts, particularly fantasy. Tracing the evolution of her thinking about gender over the course of her career, the pioneering historian explains how her search for ways to more forcefully insist on gender as mutable rather than fixed or stable led her to psychoanalytic theory, which posits sexual difference as an insoluble dilemma. Scott suggests that it is the futile struggle to hold meaning in place that makes gender such an interesting historical object, an object that includes not only regimes of truth about sex and sexuality but also fantasies and transgressions that refuse to be regulated or categorized. Fantasy undermines any notion of psychic immutability or fixed identity, infuses rational motives with desire, and contributes to the actions and events that come to be narrated as history. Questioning the standard parameters of historiography and feminist politics, Scott advocates fantasy as a useful, even necessary, concept for feminist historical analysis.

• Gender and the Politics of History
• The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order
• Two or Three Things I Know for Sure
• Sex and Secularism (The Public Square)
• City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Women in Culture and Society)
• Reproducing the French Race: Immigration, Intimacy, and Embodiment in the Early Twentieth Century
• The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s
• Gender and Justice: Violence, Intimacy, and Community in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (The Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science)
• Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siecle France
• Bellissima: Feminine Beauty and the Idea of Italy