Event overview
In this lecture, renowned feminist historian Joan W. Scott will explore the relationship between gender and politics in the light of some insights from psychoanalytic and political theory. For Scott, gender and politics have been historicaly co-constitutive, the one establishing the meaning of the other, each providing a guarantee of the otherwise elusive and unstable grounds on which each rested. While gender referred its attributions to nature, politics naturalized its hierarchies by reference to gender. A historically driven and combined discussion of gender and politics, thus, can help us to decipher the ways in which gender has become the contemporary battleground for the various attempts to re-establish a form of nationalist politics that aims to control women's bodies and sexuality.
Joan Scott’s groundbreaking work has challenged the foundations of conventional historical practice, including the nature of historical evidence and historical experience and the role of narrative in the writing of history. Broadly, the object of her work is the question of difference in history: its uses, enunciations, implementations, justifications, and transformations in the construction of social and political life. Scott’s recent books have focused on the vexed relationship of the particularity of gender to the universalizing force of democratic politics. They include Gender and the Politics of History (1988), Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (1996), Parité: Sexual Equality and the Crisis of French Universalism (2005), The Politics of the Veil (2007), The Fantasy of Feminist History (2011), and Sex and Secularism (2017).
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 3 Dec 2018 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
Accessibility
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