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 The Fantasy of Feminist History

Next Wave Provocations

A series edited by Inderpal Grewal, Caren Kaplan, and Robyn Wiegman

A JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN CENTER BOOK

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JOAN WALLACH SCOTT

The Fantasy of Feminist History

Duke University Press

DURHAM AND LONDON 2011
 Theology Library
CLAREMONT
SCHOOL OF THECLOGY |
Claremont, CA

© 2011 Duke University Press

All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Designed by C. H. Westmoreland
Typeset in Arno Pro by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
appear on the last printed page of this book.

Chapter 1, “Feminism’s History,’ was originally

published in the Journal of Women’s History, 16, no. 2:
(2004), © 2004 Journal of Women’s History.

Chapter 2, “Fantasy Echo,’ originally appeared in

Critical Inquiry 27 (Winter 2001), © 2001 by the
University of Chicago.
Chapter 3, “Femininist Reverberations,” originally
appeared in differences 13 (Fall 2002), © 2003 by
Brown University and differences.
 Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction. “Flyers into the Unknown”

Gender, History, and Psychoanalysis 1
1. Feminism’s History 23

2. Fantasy Echo
History and the Construction of Identity 45
3. Feminist Reverberations 68
4. Sexularism
On Secularism and Gender Equality 91
s. French Seduction Theory 117
Epilogue. A Feminist Theory Archive 141

Notes 149
Bibliography 169
Index 181
 Acknowledgments

For their critical input into these essays I wish to thank Andrew
Aisenberg, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Gil Chaitin, Brian Connolly,
Eric Fassin, Fran¢goise Gaspard, Ben Kafka, Saba Mahmood, Miglena
Nikolchina, Claude Servan-Schreiber, Judith Surkis, and Elizabeth
Weed. I am also grateful to the anonymous readers for Duke Univer-
sity Press and to Ken Wissoker, who sent me back to the drawing
board more than once in an effort to get the book right. As usual,
Nancy Cotterman’s patient, careful attention to the details of the
manuscript, Donne Petito’s gracious willingness to help out, and
Laura McCune’s able assistance made my work not only easier but
better. The library staff at the Institute for Advanced Study, par-
ticularly Marcia Tucker, provided invaluable support for which I am
grateful. This book is dedicated to Denise Riley, whose intellectual
creativity has long enriched my thinking and whose friendship en-
riches my life.
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 Introduction:
“Flyers into the Unknown”
Gender, History, and Psychoanalysis

This tendency on the part of historians to become buried

in their own conservatism strikes me as truly regrettable.
... If progress is to be made we must certainly have new
ideas, new points of view, and new techniques. We must be
ready, from time to time, to take flyers into the unknown,
even though some of them may prove wide of the mark.
—WILLIAM L. LANGER, © The Next Assignment”

That is why we must do justice to Freud.

—MICHEL FOUCAULT, Madness and Civilization

I’ve never forgotten the review of my first book, The Glassworkers of

Carmaux (1974), by Professor Harold Parker, a historian at Duke
University. What stayed with me wasn't the abundant praise he of-
fered (the title of the review was “A Methodological Gem”)—though
I surely appreciated that—it was instead his one critical remark (“Is
 2 Introduction

this gem without flaw?”). This had to do with the fact that the book,
“despite the revealing personal incidents about obscure worker per-
sonalities, is too coldly analytical.” He went on:
Scott herself is a very warm person, but there is too little passion, too little
madness in her work. Man is precariously sane, in the sense that his
images of himself, of other people, and of the universe are rarely correct.
Sometimes, when passion enters, his images are completely off. The sci-
entific enterprise, in history as well as in other subjects, is dedicated to the
endeavor to make the images correspond to visual and analytical reality.
But part of the reality is that men are often mad, and the historian has to
show that. In her next book, I am sure Scott will.

It took me a long time—more than thirty years—to appreciate the

wisdom offered by this historian of the Napoleonic era.? After that
review I produced several more books, none of which fully accepted
his suggestion about the need to attend to passion and madness in the
writing of history. My interest in psychoanalysis—theorizing the real-
ity of that madness—came late, and after much resistance. Among
other objections, I found the uses that some psycho-historians made
of Freudian concepts reductive and unhelpful, an application of diag-
nostic classifications to behavior that, even when labeled, remained
puzzling. Michel de Certeau has said of their approach that “they cir-
cumscribe what cannot be explained, but they do not explain it”? I also
thought that history, with its insistence on specificity, variability, and
change, was incompatible with psychoanalysis, which dealt with indi-
vidual pathologies and, when it came to gender, universalized the cate-
gories and the relationships of women and men, fixing the sexes in per-
manent antagonism.* There was a normative side to this that I resisted,
too, as I took descriptions of the psychic operations of sexual differ-
ence to be prescriptions for their regulation. Beyond that, though, I
now think I considered the study of sex and sexuality—at the center,
after all, of psychoanalytic theorizing —somehow trivial in comparison
to the large social and economic forces that shape human action. I
operated within a more or less binary conceptual framework in which
sex was on the side of the private (even if I could recite my feminist
lesson that the personal was political), while forces and structures
were the public side that provided historians with their explanations.
 “Flyers into the Unknown” 3

My early work in women’s history took this approach, and even

when I began writing about gender, it was as a social category that
had little to do with unconscious processes, what Professor Parker
deemed “passion” and “madness.” Fascination with the workings of
language (by way of Derrida, Foucault, and feminist literary crit-
icism) led me slowly to Freud and Lacan and feminist psychoanalytic
theorists.° It took time for me to see the connections between psy-
choanalysis and the poststructuralist interrogations of foundational
concepts and categories that increasingly drew my attention; to grasp
that reading for rupture and contradiction was what Freudian anal-
ysis was about; to understand that the point was not to close a case by
applying a label to it, but to open things up by exploring the ambig-
uous meanings that were attached to intractable problems and un-
answerable questions. Reading Certeau, a student of history, religion,
and Lacanian psychoanalysis, helped articulate some of this for me. I
find his critique of history's disciplinary assumptions compelling:
To be sure, historiography is “familiar” with the question of the other,
dealing especially with the relation which the present holds with the past.
But its discipline must create proper places for each, by pigeonholing the
past into an area other than the present, or else by supposing a continuity
of genealogical filiation (by way of a homeland, a nation, a milieu, etc....).
Technically, it endlessly presupposes homogeneous unities (century,
country, class, economic or social strata, etc.) and cannot give way to the
vertigo that critical examination of these fragile boundaries might bring
about: historiography does not want to know this. In all of its labors,
based on these classifications, historiography takes it for granted that the
place where it is itself produced has the capacity to provide meaning,
since the current institutional demarcations of the discipline uphold the
divisions of time and space in the last resort. In this respect, historical
discourse, which is political in essence, takes the law ofplace for granted. It
legitimizes a place, that of its production, by “including” others in a
relation of filiation or of exteriority.°

Certeau thought this kind of thinking could be shaken by an encoun-

ter with psychoanalysis, by attention to the psychic investments his-
torians had in the stories they produced, as well as to those of the
subjects about whom they wrote. The beneficial “vertigo” produced
 4 Introduction

by “critical examination” would expose the conflicts and contradic-

tions contained by categories presumed to be homogeneous, chal-
lenge the entirely rational explanations usually given for human ac-
tion, and make historians more aware of their own investments in
writing about the past.
Certeau's idea of interdisciplinarity—in this instance, the bringing
together of history and psychoanalysis—rejected the importation of
concepts “transformed into figures of style,”’ calling instead for con-
frontation and differentiation: “The interdisciplinarity we look to-
ward would attempt to apprehend epistemological constellations as
they reciprocally provide themselves with a new delimitation of their
objects and a new status for their procedures.” I take this to mean
precisely that vertiginous “critical examination of . . . fragile bound-
aries” and of the work they do in maintaining disciplinary blind spots.
For Certeau, psychoanalysis enables a critique of historical practice
and, beyond that, the writing of a different kind of history. This has
more to do with methods of reading and interpreting than it does
with categorizing and classifying. Like Freudian praxis, he suggests, it
could “locate its veritable meaning not in the elucidation with which
it replaces former representation, but in the ever-unfinished act of
elucidation.”? Ambiguous words would be read for what their ambi-
guity revealed, not for given settled meanings; and there would al-
ways be surprises—not just in the form of unexpected documents in a
box of archival materials, but in the words chosen to express ideas, in
the form ‘and content of representations, in slips of the tongue and
the pen, in parenthetical remarks aimed at containing some irrepress-
ible, mad thought.

The essays collected in this book represent my engagement with

psychoanalytic theory as a critical reading practice for history. They
are particularly concerned with women’s history and gender, a con-
cept I have long championed as useful for thinking about the histor-
ical constitution of relationships between women and men, the artic-
ulation in different contexts (including cultural and temporal) of
meanings for sex and sexual difference. I have never been entirely
satisfied with my own formulations, and I am positively distressed at
the way in which gender has so often been emptied of its most radical
 “Flyers into the Unknown” 5

implications, treated as a known referent instead of a way to get at

meanings that are neither literal nor transparent. So, I’ve looked for
ways to more forcefully insist on its mutability. I’m sure that some
readers find it ironic that psychoanalysis is what permits that historic-
ization. But it’s not the psychoanalysis associated with normative
prescription, not the psychoanalysis invoked to pathologize homo-
sexuality, not the psychoanalysis that assigns individuals to catego-
ries. It’s the theory that posits sexual difference as an unresolvable
dilemma.'°
When understood this way, I argue, psychoanalysis animates the
concept of gender for historians. Gender is no longer simply a social
construction, a way of organizing social, economic, and political divi-
sions of labor along sexually differentiated lines. It is instead a histor-
ically and culturally specific attempt to resolve the dilemma of sexual
difference, to assign fixed meaning to that which ultimately cannot be
fixed. Sexual differences are defined neither as a transcendent male/
female opposition, nor simply as man’s wholeness and woman's lack,
but as an intractable problem that defies single solutions. It is pre-
cisely the futile struggle to hold meaning in place that makes gender
such an interesting historical object, one that includes not only re-
gimes of truth about sex and sexuality, but also the fantasies and
transgressions that refuse to be regulated or categorized. Indeed it is
fantasy that undermines any notion of psychic immutability or fixed
identity, that infuses rational motives with unquenchable desire, that
contributes to the actions and events we narrate as history. From this
perspective, fantasy becomes a critically useful tool for historical
analysis, as I argue in chapter 2.
To explain these comments more fully, I have attempted in this
introduction to trace the trajectory of my thinking about gender as
I’ve participated in or listened to conversations among feminists over
the past several decades—particularly, but not exclusively, those femi-
nists working with theories of language often referred to as poststruc-
turalist. I don’t claim that what I’ve written here is a guide to the
evolution of feminist thinking; my own engagement with psycho-
analysis came very late in the game. As early as the 1970s, some
feminists were working with psychoanalytic theory, most of them in
philosophy or literature. (There was no shortage of historians’ inter-
 6 Introduction

est in psychoanalysis in the 1960s and 1970s especially, but rarely were
they historians of women or feminism.)!! The great divide among
feminists in the 1980s was supposedly between those who took a
more sociological approach, working with the concept of gender, and
those who opted for psychoanalysis, insisting on sexual difference as a
more powerful critical tool. The division was thought to be geopoliti-
cal as well as philosophical, separating Anglo-American feminists
from their sisters in France and elsewhere in Europe. I never thought
of myself as firmly on the gender side, and I knew plenty of Ameri-
cans who were on the sexual-difference side. Nonetheless, I certainly
resisted psychoanalysis for a time, my resistance perhaps reflecting
the strength of my disciplinary formation as a historian.
Change came slowly, the product of curiosity, restlessness, and a
stubborn desire to hold onto gender as a critical challenge to conven-
tional history. If I had to summarize the change in my thinking as it
relates to theorizing gender, I would say that the path is from sex as
the known of physical bodies and so the referent for gender, to sexual
difference as a permanent quandary—because ultimately unknow-
able—for modern subjects and so, again, the impossible referent for
gender. Gender is, in other words, not the assignment of roles to
physically different bodies, but the attribution of meaning to some-
thing that always eludes definition. What psychoanalysis helps illumi-
nate is the ultimate unknowability of sexual difference and the nature
of the quest for knowledge of it, by way of fantasy, identification, and
projection. The vertigo that ensues for the historian deprives her of
the certainty of her categories of analysis and leaves her searching
only for the right questions to ask.

Sex and Gender

In the beginning it seemed easy. We had Gayle Rubin’s brilliant “The

Traffic in Women,’ which took the sex/ gender distinction as its prem-
ise.'* Sex was about the division of physical bodies into male and
female types; gender was the social or cultural assignment of roles to
that established reality. “Gender” meant that the limits placed on
women were not physical, but social and historical. From this it
followed that existing ascriptions were open to change. Listen to
 “Flyers into the Unknown” 7

Natalie Davis in 1974 at one of those early pathbreaking Berkshire

Conferences on the History of Women. “Our goal,” she said, “is to
understand the significance of the sexes, of gender groups in the
historical past. Our goal is to discover the range in sex roles and in
sexual symbolism in different societies and periods, to find out what
meanings they had and how they functioned to maintain the social
order or to promote change.”!> Change was the crucial point, since as
feminists we sought to overturn the limits placed on our aspirations,
the unequal treatment we (and other women) experienced. History
provided the evidence we needed to make our case. If the roles of
women had varied according to class, race, culture, and the time in
which they lived, there was nothing inevitable or permanent about
our own moment.
The conversation became more complicated with the critique of
the sex/gender, nature/culture distinction. Some feminists (among
them Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, those associated with the British
journal m/f) argued that it wasn’t enough to point out that physical
bodies were not the issue—to put them aside and focus exclusively on
culture—because that left in place the idea that sex was a natural and
transparent phenomenon and so didn't really contest the legitimating
grounds for the assignment of gender roles.'+ The biological reality, in
the form of the prior sexual division of bodies kept creeping back into
the arguments about culture, disrupting and displacing them. To stop
this, sex itself had to be historicized, as the product of social and
cultural discourse. The difference of the sexes was the referent that
acquired its natural status only retrospectively, as a rationale for the
assignment of gender roles. In other words, nature (the difference of
the sexes in this instance) was produced by culture as culture’s justi-
fication—it was not an independent variable, nor an ontological
ground, nor the invariant base on which edifices of gender were
constructed.
This deconstruction of the sex/gender opposition encouraged
important historical work in the history of science and medicine. It
also led to investigations of changing regulatory norms and their
enforcement; studies of the impact of symbolic structures on the lives
and practices of ordinary people; questions about how power and
rights related to definitions of masculinity and femininity; and assess-
 8 Introduction

ments of the ways in which sexual identities were forged within and
against social prescriptions. By refusing the notion that sexual iden-
tity was determined by biology, it also contributed to the emergence
of queer theory. With these developments, gender was no longer seen
as a commentary on sex; instead, sex was understood as an effect of
gender. Or to put it in other terms, gender and sex were both cultural
constructions, creating rather than reflecting a prior reality.

The Limits of Cultural Construction: “Women”

The notion of cultural construction was an important tool of analysis

in both the articulation and deconstruction of the sex/gender dis-
tinction. Adapted in part from European poststructural linguistic
theory and in part from US work in science studies and the social
sciences (particularly anthropology), “cultural construction” became
a shorthand for the exclusively human origin of the ideas and concep-
tual categories that organized the realities of experience. In the field
of gender studies, it substituted culture for nature in the determina-
tion of both sex and gender. Sex, the sexes, gender, and its roles—
sexed identities, both collective and individual—were all understood
to be the product of culture, by which was most often meant social
and political ideologies, whether taken to be expressions of tradition
or of modernity. These ideologies were seen to further some powerful
interest—status, class, state, sex—as they set forth the norms of cul-
ture and society, the justifications for hierarchy, the rules of sexual
behavior, and much more. From this perspective, law (whether for-
mal legislation or normative regulation) was not a reflection of na-
ture, as its creators claimed it was, but a producer of the very subjects
it regulated. “Legal recognition,’ Parveen Adams and Jeffrey Minson
have noted, “is a real and circular process. It recognizes the things that
correspond to the definition it constructs.”!5
This kind of reasoning informed a vast literature on the ways in
which men and women, masculinity and femininity, were represented
in medicine, science, art (high and low), architecture (domestic and
public), literature (children’s and adults’), philosophy, law, political
theory, public policy, economic theory, and historical texts. The ten-
dency was to assume that subjects (collective or individual) were
 “Flyers into the Unknown” 9

interpellated by these representations, brought into being by them,

whether as unquestioning products of social discourses or protesters
against their confining, subordinating, or marginalizing limits.'°
In much of the historical literature that used the notion of cultural
construction, “gender” referred to these representations, to the traits
and roles assigned to women (and men), but not to the category of
women (or men) itself. I think this had a lot to do with feminist
history's ties to the feminist movement and its resulting aim of pro-
ducing a political subject based on identification with a collectivity of
women. There was enormous tension between a theory that stressed
the productive work of representation (and so its various articula-
tions) and a political movement that mobilized women on the basis
of a universal experience of subordination.
A symptom of this tension was that, even as it gestured to gender
as mutable, the historical work done by many feminists assumed a
fixed meaning for the categories “women” and “men,” or at least didn’t
problematize them. Instead, it most often took the physical com-
monality of females as a synonym for a collective entity designated
“women.” Gender was said to be about the relationship between
women and men and assumed to be not only hierarchical, but invari-
ably so: a permanent antagonism that took different forms at dif-
ferent times. And, despite much innovative research on sexuality,
gender—at least in historians’ writing—most often referred to sexual
difference as if it were a known and enduring male/female opposi-
tion, a normative (if not distinctly biological) heterosexual coupling,
even when homosexuality was the topic being addressed.
It’s not that women weren't given a history; of course they were.
Ideas about them were said to change, as did their experiences, vary-
ing over time and by class, race, ethnicity, culture, religion, and geog-
raphy. The bountiful literature of women’s social history is full of
important distinctions that insist on the specificity of the experiences
of working or peasant or lesbian or medieval or Jewish or African
American or Muslim or Latina or Eastern European women. But
however much they attend to the quotidian lives of diverse popula-
tions, these differences take for granted what Denise Riley calls an
“underlying continuity of real women above whose constant bodies
changing aerial descriptions dance.”!” (Gender was taken to be those
 10 Introduction

dancing “aerial descriptions.”) Paradoxically, the history of women

kept “women” outside history. And the result is that “women” as a
natural phenomenon (one side of that permanent sexual division)
was reinscribed, even as we asserted that they were discursively con-
structed. To put it another way, the sex/ gender binary, which defined
gender as the social assignment of meaning to biologically given sex
differences, remained in place despite a generation of scholarship
aimed at deconstructing the opposition. As long as “women” con-
tinue to “form a passive backdrop to changing conceptions of gender,”
our history rests on a biological foundation that feminists, at least in
theory, want to contest.!®
There were, of course, some historians (influenced importantly by
Michel Foucault) who did interrogate the different possible mean-
ings of the terms “men” and “women.” Riley’s work is at once exem-
plary and a rare instance of the historicizing of the category of
women. Her Am I that Name? Feminism and the Category of “Women”
in History is addressed to feminists and focuses on the difficulty posed
for us by the need to simultaneously insist on and refuse the identity
of “women.” This, she maintains, is not a liability, but the condition
that gives rise to feminism. ““Women’ is indeed an unstable category
... this instability has a historical foundation, and . . . feminism is the
site of the systematic fighting-out of that instability”! It is not only
that there are different kinds of women assembled under the term,
but also that the collective identity means different things at different
times. Even individual women are not always conscious of being a
woman. The identity, Riley says, does not pervade us and so is “in-
constant, and can’t provide an ontological foundation.”° “The body”
doesn’t provide that foundation either, since it is a concept that must
be “read in relation to whatever else supports and surrounds it”?!
“For all its corporeality,’ Riley points out, the body is not “an originat-
ing point nor yet a terminus; it is a result or an effect?”
The absence of an ontological foundation might suggest that it is
futile to try to study women’s history: if there are no women, some of
Riley’s critics have complained, how can there be women’s history or,
for that matter, feminism?” In fact, by making “women” the object of
historical investigation, Riley engages in that vertigo-inducing critical
examination Certeau called for, albeit not in explicitly psychoanalytic
 “Flyers into the Unknown” 1

terms. Her more Foucauldian genealogy asks when the category

“women” comes under discussion and in what terms, and she points
to the ways in which, at different historical moments, there have been
different kinds of openings created for feminist claims: “The arrange-
ments of people under the banners of ‘men’ or ‘women’ are enmeshed
in the histories of other concepts too, including those of ‘the social’
and ‘the body: And that has profound repercussions for feminism.”*4
Riley shows how, in early modern Europe, notions of the androgy-
nous soul defined one kind of relation of “women” to humanity,
whereas by the eighteenth century, attention to nature and the body
led to an increasing emphasis on women’s sexuality. As “the social”
found a place between “the domestic” and “the political” in the
nineteenth century, it “established ‘women’ as a new kind of sociolog-
ical collectivity.’?> And, of course, until individuals were defined as
political subjects, there could be no claim for citizenship for women.
It's not just that women have different kinds of possibilities in their
lives, but that “women” is something different in each of these mo-
ments. There is no essence of womanhood (or of manhood) to pro-
vide a stable subject for our histories; there are only successive itera-
tions of a word that doesn’t have a fixed referent and so doesn’t always
mean the same thing. If this is true of “women,” it is also true of
“gender.” The relationship posited between male and female, mas-
culine and feminine, is not predictable; we cannot assume that we
know in advance what it is. This is so both at the level of social
understanding and, in a different—but connected—way, at the level
of a subject’s self-identification.

The Limits of Cultural Construction: Causality

Even if, as Riley so cogently argued, “women” is an unstable category,
this doesn’t mean that it has no historical existence. It may be transi-
tory, coming into and out of view, but it exists in its temporal context,
with important effects. It serves to organize women in its image,
either as willing or protesting subjects. Either way, we think of women
as culturally constructed—that is, as fitting more or less comfortably
into a socially specified way of being.
The notion of cultural or social construction was criticized from
 12 Introduction

the start (whenever that was) by theorists who recognized its philo-
sophical limits. Judith Butler describes the “problematic of construc-
tion” this way: “What is constructed is of necessity prior to con-
struction, even as there appears no access to this prior moment
except through construction.”*®
Some psychoanalytic critics went further, objecting not only to the
constructivist model of causality, but also to its failure to take psychic
processes into account. Here is Joan Copjec, a Lacanian, in 1989:

The social system of representation is conceived as lawful, regulatory, and

on this account the cause of the subject... . The subject is assumed to be
already virtually there in the social and to come into being by actually
wanting what the social laws want it to want. The construction of the
subject depends, then, on the subject’s taking social representations as
images of its own ideal being.””

Copjec argues that such a view missed “the essential fact of language’s
duplicity, that is, the fact that whatever it says can be denied. This
duplicity insures that the subject will not come into being as lan-
guage’s determinate meaning.”* Instead, Copjec maintains, it was
“the very impossibility of representing the subject to the subject . . .
that founds the subject’s identity”:
We are constructed, then, not in conformity to social laws, but in response
to our inability to conform to or see ourselves as defined by social limits.
Though we are defined and limited historically, the absence of the real,
which founds these limits, is not historicizable. It is only this distinction,
which informs the Lacanian definition of cause, that allows us to think the
construction of the subject without being thereby obliged to reduce her to
the images social discourses construct of her.”?

The subject is not the determined product of the law, but “rather
something that escapes the law and its determination, something we
can’t manage to put our finger on. ... This indeterminate something
... that causes the subject has historical specificity (itisthe product
of a specific discursive order), but no historical content. The subject
is the product of history without being the fulfillment of a historical
demand.”*° Or, as Certeau puts it, “the labor by which the subject
authorizes his own existence is of a kind other than the labor for
 “Flyers into the Unknown” 13

which he receives permission to exist. The Freudian process attempts

to articulate this difference.”3!
Certeau may be referring to Freud’s short essay, “Constructions in
Analysis,’ but whether he is or not, it is useful to consider it here. For
Freud “construction” means not cultural causality or interpellation,
but the analyst’s not always accurate or successful attempt to “make
out what has been forgotten from the traces” of memory unearthed in
the analytic process.** Constructions are more than interpretations, he
notes, because they are attempts to systematically put together pieces
of a patient's forgotten earlier history (akin to an archaeological recon-
struction of a pot from shards found in a dig). Any construction is
necessarily incomplete “since it covers only a small fragment of the
forgotten events.’ And it is subject to distortion and delusion on
both sides of the analytic process.** In this sense, construction is
hardly a fully accurate account but instead is a continuing effort,
necessarily incomplete, a way of elucidating the complexities that
notions of cultural construction typically neglect or ignore. Freud’s
use of the term nicely inverts that meaning of “construction,” defining
it instead as a way of getting at the repressions, displacements, and
fantasies that color a patient’s self-representations (and that are often
taken literally by those invoking cultural constructions of the subject).
Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis comment that “in the last
reckoning, the term ‘construction’ raises the whole problem of uncon-
scious structure and of the structuring role of the treatment.”
The question of the unconscious and fantasy returns us to Cop-
jec’s crucial point. I would say that the subject’s being is woven in
fantasies that attempt to provide substance for that “indeterminate
something,” that absence or kernel of “non-sense” (because it is an
absence, it can have no historical content) that follows from the
impossibility of representing the subject to herself. Identity, such as it
is, is not the “imitation of any ideal vision,” but a response to “the very
impossibility of ever making visible this missing part.’*¢ It’s not the
case that a fully formed self is resisting the impositions of the social
order or measuring what it knows of its true self against a misimpres-
sion on the outside, as some liberal theories of autonomous individ-
ual will would have it. Rather, what we have is the idea of a psyche
that has no access to certain confirmation of its identity—it doesn’t
 14. Introduction

“really” exist. Instead, it depends on some others or Other for com-

pletion or recognition. But these others, whether objects or people,
are not free of the subject’s projective fantasies or their own. More-
over, these fantasies express drives and desires not under the control
of conscious reasoning.
Coming at the question from a slightly different angle, but with
remarkable resonance to the thinking of these theorists, Foucault also
refuses a simple notion of cultural determination. The modern subject
is “always open, never finally delimited, yet constantly traversed.”3” He
continues:

When he tries to define himself as a living being, he can uncover his own
beginning only against the background of a life which itself began long
before him; when he attempts to re-apprehend himself as a labouring
being, he cannot bring even the most rudimentary forms of such a being
to light except within a human time and space which have been previously
institutionalized, and previously subjugated by society; and when he
attempts to define his essence as a speaking subject, prior to any effec-
tively constituted language, all he ever finds is the previously unfolded
possibility of language.**

The process is more dynamic, complex, and unpredictable than sim-

ple notions of cultural construction would have it:

The signifying chain by which the unique experience of the individual is

constituted is perpendicular to the formal system on the basis of which
the significations of a culture are constituted: at any given instant, the
structure proper to individual experience finds a certain number of possi-
ble choices (and of excluded possibilities) in the systems of the society;
inversely, at each of their points of choice the social structures encounter a
certain number of possible individuals (and others who are not [possi-
ble])—just as the linear structure of language always produces a possible
choice between several words or several phonemes at any given moment
(but excludes others).3°

Foucault offers this description toward the end of The Order of Things
as part of a discussion of the relationship between ethnology and
psychoanalysis—the two “branches of knowledge investigating man”
that operate on a “perpetual principle of dissatisfaction” with estab-
 “Flyers into the Unknown” 15

lished forms of knowledge.“ Both fields, he suggests, stand in critical

relationship to the empirical human sciences, exposing the uncon-
scious dimensions that escape them. They are “counter-sciences,”
“which does not mean that they are less ‘rational’ or ‘objective’ than
the others, but that they flow in the opposite direction, that they lead
them back to their epistemological basis, and that they ceaselessly
‘unmake’ that very man who is creating and re-creating his positivity
in the human sciences.”*!
The psychic dimension of human existence cannot be reduced
simply to exposures to implicit meaning or to interpretations of re-
sistance and defense. The great virtue of the Freudian approach, for
Foucault, is that it illuminates the “three figures by means of which
life, with its functions and norms, attains its foundation in the mute
repetition of Death, conflicts and rules [attain] their foundation in
the naked opening of Desire, significations and systems [attain] their
foundation in a language which is at the same time Law.’*? He con-
tinues: “It is indeed true that this Death, and this Desire, and this Law
can never meet within the knowledge that traverses in its positivity
the empirical domain of man; but the reason for this is that they
designate the conditions of possibility of all knowledge about man.”
That knowledge has to do not with empirical information, but rather
with that which cannot be known: “what is there and yet is hidden...
what exists with the mute solidity of a thing, of a text closed in upon
itself, or of a blank space in a visible text.’4+ “Psychoanalysis moves
toward the moment—by definition inaccessible to any theoretical
knowledge of man, to any continuous apprehension in terms of signi-
fication, conflict or function—at which the contents of consciousness
articulate themselves, or rather stand gaping, upon man’s finitude.”4S
Elizabeth Weed suggests that “the scene of man’s finitude finds pow-
erful staging in the psychoanalytic theory of sexual difference.’

Sexual Difference

For psychoanalysis, the conundrum of identity revolves around the

question of sexual difference. The term “sexual difference” is not
technically part of psychoanalytic vocabulary but comes from femi-
nists, particularly those working with the theories of Jacques Lacan.*”
16 Introduction

It refers to the complex process by which sexed identities are formu-

lated, to the difficulty—if not the impossibility—of finally answering
the questions that sex and sexuality pose: Where do I come from?
What do these bodies mean? How are the differences between them
to be explained? What is to be done with sexual desire? Butler offers
this definition: “Sexual difference is the site where a question con-
cerning the relation of the biological to the cultural is posed and
reposed, where it must and can be posed, but where it cannot, strictly
speaking, be answered. Understood as a border concept, sexual differ-
ence has psychic, somatic, and social dimensions that are never quite
collapsible into one another but are not for that reason ultimately
distinct.”48
For Freud, sexual difference is brought into being with the Oedi-
pus complex and the threat of castration. This is the point at which a
child realizes that one cannot be both male and female; the child is
given stories about this (the myths of his or her culture, with its
normative rules and regulations) and ponders what it all means. The
unconscious fantasies play with, adapt, transgress, and exceed cul-
tural norms; they find expression in drives and desires that cannot be
entirely correlated either with conscious intention or the body’s ma-
teriality. Infantile and childhood fantasies persist into adulthood, evi-
dent in dreams and brought to life by some tangible experience or
inadvertent stimulus. They become incorporated, albeit invisibly,
into the conscious ways in which we perceive the world and give
accounts of ourselves.
The fact that one cannot be both male and female is puzzling and,
indeed, troubling, but it does not restrict identification or limit the
operations of desire. As Butler puts it, “a woman may find the phan-
tasmatic remainder of her father in another woman or substitute her
desire for her mother in a man, at which point a certain crossing of
heterosexual and homosexual desires operate at once.”4? These identi-
fications, imagined resemblances, work with and against what Lacan
referred to as the symbolic, a structure of signifiers that establishes the
order into which human subjects are inserted. Although some follow-
ers of Lacan take the symbolic to be an immutable structure that
legislates a singular dimorphic meaning for sexual difference, I take the
interpretation by Laplanche and Pontalis to be more apt. On the one
 “Flyers into the Unknown” 17

hand, they suggest, the symbolic is “the law upon which this order is
based”; on the other hand, since signifiers cannot be “permanently
bound to the signified,” the boundaries are permeable and do not
irrevocably determine who the subject will be.S° Thus, there is no
necessary correspondence between the anatomy of men and women
and the psychic positions of masculinity and femininity that they
arrive at. Sexual difference, Weed writes, “is a term that could signify at
the same time the coercive psychic positioning in the symbolic and the
impossibility of ever taking one’s sexual place.”! It is in the interaction
between the symbolic (signifiers of the law) and the imaginary (nar-
cissistic identifications with others) around the unsolvable riddle of
sexual difference (in Lacanian terms, the real; Copjec’s kernel of non-
sense) that psychoanalysis interrogates; the process is dynamic for
both subjects and analysts. Its effects make history.
An example may be helpful here to get beyond the abstraction of
some of these terms. It comes from work I have done on nineteenth-
and twentieth-century French feminists who challenged the associa-
tion of masculinity and universalism in republican theories of citizen-
ship.°* Sometimes appealing to promises of equality for all, these
feminists insisted that their humanity made them eligible for citizen-
ship; sexed bodies were beside the point. At other times, they argued
that the universal individual was not singular, but included both
males and females; the recognition that bodies were sexed would
make them, again, beside the point. For all the ingenuity of their
arguments, for all their logical plausibility, these feminists nonethe-
less found it next to impossible to refute the deeply held belief that
differences of sex precluded genuine equality. This does not mean
that they failed to change laws or raise awareness of discrimination
against women; it does mean that the founding premises of sexual
difference persisted in other forms. Getting the vote, for instance, did
not improve women’s access to political office or to leadership posi-
tions in industry. The law that was supposed to guarantee that access
was based on a notion not of gender equality, but of the complemen-
tarity of the sexes—with the heterosexual couple as the model.
Weed suggests that we look to the symbolic, an unconscious di-
mension, to account for the persistence of these ideas. She follows
Lacan’s adaptation of Freud’s notion of the Oedipus complex, which
 18 Introduction

says that masculinity and femininity are defined in asymmetrical

relationships to the phallus—the signifier of desire in modern West-
ern cultures. According to Lacan, both masculine and feminine are
assumed to be castrated, but in different ways. The feminine is al-
ready castrated since she lacks the penis, which is mistakenly equated
with the phallus. The masculine is both castrated by the paternal
prohibition against sexual relations with the mother, but also con-
vinced that someone with whom he identifies (the primal father, his
own father, or the imagined lawgiver in whom phallus and penis are
taken to be the same) is exempt from castration. This makes the
masculine position a paradoxical one. The masculine subject is simul-
taneously castrated and exempt from the symbolic law; he is simulta-
neously singular and universal. The feminine subject is also castrated
but has no access to this phallic exception. Weed puts it this way: “In
psychical life, la femme, in her infinite lack, cannot be generalized;
only l’homme can be taken for the universal.”53 She then links this to
the ways in which, since the Enlightenment, the abstract individual of
political theory has been presumed to be masculine, while the femi-
nine has been synonymous with the particular and the concrete.
(Simone de Beauvoir expressed this contrast in terms of man’s tran-
scendence, his disembodiment, and woman’s immanence, her con-
finement to her body.)5* The language of this political theory, and the
changing and diverse practices justified in its name, are the effects of
the symbolic structure of sexual difference.
This is not to say that real men and women are fully determined by
these concepts. (Precisely because the phallus is not the penis, there is
no necessary correspondence between anatomy and psychic position-
ing.) If they were, there would be no feminist movements, no chal-
lenges to the prevailing order of things. It is to say, however, that the
concepts provide the language through which identities are formed,
the unconscious foundations on which social practices are imple-
mented, but also—since language is mobile and, in Copjec’s terms,
duplicitous—challenged and changed. The operations of fantasy
come into play here as fantasy enables challenge and change. Fantasy
offers historians a way of thinking the history of sexuality beyond the
narrow confines of identity politics, comparative social movements,
and national or transnational sexual cultures.55
 “Flyers into the Unknown” 19

Fantasy
In some uses of the idea of cultural construction, gender is seen as a
simple effect of power; some rational goal is at stake in the assign-
ment of traits and functions to women and men: economic exploita-
tion, political dominance, imperial conquest, interests of state, race,
class, status, or sex. By referring them to gender (literally or meta-
phorically), the hierarchies and inequalities are naturalized, made to
seem part of the order of nature. But how do these appeals achieve
their. effect? What is it that they are appealing to? Fantasy may offer
an answer here because people are not simply rational, goal-oriented
beings, but subjects of unconscious desire—desire articulated in
terms of, but not defined by, the symbolic, in which the relationship
between signifier and signified can never be clear. Thus people aren’t
mobilized according to purely objective interests, but rather accord-
ing to interests created for them by collective fantasies. Such fantasies
infuse interest with desire and seem to provide an answer to the
impossible question of identity, to the subjects’ quest for wholeness
and coherence, by merging them into a group. Group membership
provides the illusion of wholeness; it appears to give sense to that
elusive kernel of non-sense. Mutual recognition allays the psychic
anxieties of identity.°°
From this perspective, feminist movements are not the inevitable
expression of the socially constructed category of women, but the
means for achieving that identity. The fantasy being appealed to is a
promise of wholeness and completeness, adequate representation; the
terms of appeal and the political, social, and economic interests identi-
fied as objects of need or desire are matters for historical investigation.
None of this is to deny the social fact of feminist movements (or any
other political identity movement), nor to question the existence of
active political subjects (feminists or citizens, for example). It is to sug-
gest that psychoanalysis points us usefully to the unconscious dimen-
sions of these phenomena, to the fact that they owe at least some of
their existence to the operations of fantasies that can never fully satisfy
the desire, or secure the representation, they seek to provide.
The unconscious workings of individual psyches may begin as
what Laplanche calls “enigmatic signifiers,’ nonverbal messages com-
 20 Introduction

municated to infants whose meaning is never clear.s’ But they are

not forged entirely independently of what later becomes conscious
awareness of normative categories and their enforcement. Normative
categories are not direct reflections of the symbolic, nor are they
simply rational statements of desirable identification. Rather, they are
products of historically specific discursive orders, contextually vary-
ing attempts to enact the symbolic, to eliminate the psychic confu-
sion or anxiety that sexual difference generates and that is often
addressed by fantasy. Fantasy weaves together infantile, childhood,
and adult desire in a labile mix, expressed variously in dreams, rev-
eries, and stories. It is made coherent in what Freud refers to as
“secondary revision,” which Francois Duparc defines as the “rear-
rangement of the seemingly incoherent elements of the dream into a
form serviceable for narration. This involves logical and temporal
reorganization in obedience to the principles of noncontradiction,
temporal sequence, and causality which characterize the secondary
processes of conscious thought.’5* It is, of course, as Ben Kafka points
out, precisely these narrations that historians begin with. Reading
back from them with attention to their specificity and idiosyncrasy is
the challenge we face, and for which we need the tools of psychoana-
lytic theory.°?
Normative categories seek to bring subjects’ fantasies in line with
cultural myth and social organization, but they never entirely suc-
ceed. These categories are themselves not free of phantasmatic in-
vestments. When, to take one glaring instance, feminists campaigned
for the Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution in the late
1970s and early 1980s, the opposition regularly offered the specter of
mandatory single-sex public toilets as a warning of the worst dangers
of the amendment. In some lurid scenarios, bathrooms became the
site of rape (violations of privacy, intrusions into women’s private
places, were projected), racial invasion (black men entering white
women’s “rooms”), and miscegenation. Only by maintaining the
boundaries of sexual and racial difference could the catastrophic ful-
fillment of transgressive desire be avoided.
Gender, then, is the study of the relationship between the norma-
tive and the psychic. Gender consists of the historically specific and
finally uncontrollable articulations that aim to settle the confusions
associated with sexual difference by directing fantasy to some political
 “Flyers into the Unknown” 21

or social end: group mobilization, nation building, support for a spe-

cific family structure, ethnic consolidation, or religious practice.°! To
give one example, the analysis of male dominance in its different forms
profits from such a psychoanalytic approach, one that asks how links
between social and psychic anxiety are being forged in the denigration
or exaltation of women’s sexuality in relation to men’s, in the bound-
aries that maintain differences of sex, and in phantasmatic warnings
about the consequences of altering or breaching those boundaries.

The Fantasy of Feminist History

Psychoanalytic theory does not provide a causality to substitute for
cultural construction, at least not in the way I want to use it. Instead,
it reformulates many of my original questions about gender and
opens up new ways of thinking about them. This new approach takes
gender to be the history of the articulations of the masculine /femi-
nine, male/female distinction, whether in terms of bodies, roles, or
psychological traits. It does not assume the prior existence of the
masculine/feminine, male/female distinction, but rather examines
the complicated, contradictory, and ambivalent way it has emerged in
different social and political discourses. Neither does it assume that
normative discourses determine the way subjects identify themselves.
Fantasy disrupts these kinds of correlations, refusing the certainty of
disciplined history's categories. In their place, there is the elusive
pursuit of language, not only as the conscious expression of ideas, but
as the revelation of unconscious processes. We have to ask how, under
what conditions, and with what fantasies the identities of men and
women—which so many historians take to be self-evident—are artic-
ulated and recognized. The categories then will no longer precede the
analysis but emerge in the course of it. Certeau puts it this way:
“History can be construed as the gesture of a new beginning. At least
this is what is shown by the form of history that is already constituted
by Freudian praxis. Finally, it locates its veritable meaning not in the
elucidations with which it replaces former representations, but in the
ever-unfinished act of elucidation.”
It is finally the emphasis on the unknowable and its endless pursuit
that I take from psychoanalysis. One of the most appealing aspects of
this kind of thinking is that it unsettles certainty, calls into question
 22 Introduction

our ability ever finally to know. In the words of William Langer, a

historian of an earlier generation (who scandalized his colleagues
when, in his presidential address to the American Historical Associa-
tion in 1957, he called for a turn to psychoanalysis), “we must be
ready, from time to time, to take flyers into the unknown.”® Neither
our categories of analysis nor the evidence we accumulate can furnish
an ultimate meaning for sexual difference, which explains, among
other things, the anxiety with which established boundaries are po-
liced and the disciplinary power brought to bear on those seen to
transgress established limits. We can ask how sexual difference is
signified, what those significations reveal in their ambivalences and
instabilities, and what effects they have had. We can try to lay bare the
fantasies woven in support of these significations and speculate about
the unconscious wishes they express; we can marvel at the human
capacity to create variations on the themes of sex, sexual difference,
and sexuality; and we can interrogate our own investments in these
stories. There is, of course, a political aspect to this kind of inquiry,
though it is not utopian in any final sense. The elusiveness of sexual
difference is both unrealizable and, for that very reason, historical. It
is a quest that never ends. As such, it interrupts the certainty of
established categories, thus creating openings to the future. Our his-
tories become something like Freud’s description of “a day-dream or
phantasy,’ in which “past, present and future are strung together, as it
were, on the thread of the wish that runs through them.’*
My fantasy of feminist history, the one that animates this book, is
of a quest for understanding that is never fully satisfied with its own
results. It is one in which critical reading replaces the operations of
classification, in which the relationship between past and present is
not taken for granted but considered a problem to be explored, and in
which the thinking of the historian is an object of inquiry along with
that of her subjects. This implies that Professor Parker’s “madness”
and “passion” are to be found on both sides of the analytic process.
And for that reason, as Certeau points out, “analytic practice is always
an act of risk. It never eliminates surprise. It cannot be identified with
the accomplishment of a norm. The ambiguity of a set of words could
never be brought forward solely by the ‘application’ of a law. Knowl-
edge never guarantees this ‘benefit? ”6
 1. Feminism’s History

IN 1974, LOIS BANNER AND MARY HARTMAN published a book of

essays they called Clio’s Consciousness Raised.! Consisting of papers
from the 1973 Berkshire Conference on Women’s History, it was a
rallying cry for many of us, an assertion of our intention to make
women proper objects of historical study. If the muse of history had
too long sung the praises of men (“glorifying the countless mighty
deeds of ancient times for the instruction of posterity”), it was now
time to bestow a similar glory on women.” The second of the nine
daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (the goddess of memory), Clio’s
special province was history (or epic poetry, a historical genre in
ancient Greece). Our challenge to her seemed simple: make women’s
stories central to the memory she transmitted to mortals. In order to
ease her task, we would supply the materials she needed, the histories
of the lives and activities of women.
Of course, no challenge to the gods is simple, nor was our effort
without hubris, for we were presuming to tell Clio what to say. The
muses have meted out dire punishment to those who sought to inter-
fere or compete with them. The Pierides were turned into magpies,
ducks, and other squawking birds for trying to outsing the muses.
24 Chapter One

When the sirens claimed to sing better, the muses plucked their feath-
ers to make crowns for themselves. The minstrel Thamyris was
blinded and sent to Hades for having boasted that he could sing more
beautifully. And, less cruelly, the muses had the last word when Prome-
theus claimed that he, not they, had created the letters of the alphabet.
This could have been a matter of dispute, the chroniclers tell us, “had
not the Muses invented all tales, including that of Prometheus.”
Our goal was not so much to compete with Clio as to become her
agents, though there is always an element of competition in such
identification. Like her, we wanted to tell edifying stories whose
import went beyond their literal content to reveal some larger truth
about human relationships—in our case, about gender and power.
Like her, we wanted to be recognized as the source of those stories.
Like her, too, we wanted all of history as our province; we were not
just adding women to an existing body of stories, we wanted to
change the way the stories would be told. Clio was our inspiration,
but we wanted also to be her, inspiring others to document the
memory we were uncovering.
The last few decades have seen some progress toward these goals.
Of course they haven't been completely achieved: neither women’s
history nor women historians have become fully equal players in the
discipline, and we have by no means rewritten all the stories. Indeed,
the temporal and geographic unevenness of our accomplishment—
far greater success in modern European and American history than in
ancient, medieval, early modern, or non-Western history; far more
success in introducing women into the picture than in reconceiving
of it in terms of gender—clearly shows that there is more to be done.
Still, the gains are undeniable. Unlike Clio, we can’t punish those who
would deny our accomplishment; nor can we afford to be amused by
the folly of those brothers of Prometheus who claim to be the real
innovators, treating us as imitators or usurpers. (We still get angry.)
We can, however, point to an enormous written corpus, an imposing
institutional presence, a substantial list of journals, and a foothold
in popular consciousness that was unimaginable when Banner and
Hartman published their book. Ifwe have not taken over history, we
have claimed a rightful position in it; once viewed as pretenders, we
now have legitimate claim to Clio’s inspiration.
 Feminism’s History 25

But legitimacy, for those who began as revolutionaries, is always an

ambiguous accomplishment. It is at once a victory and a sellout, the
triumph of critique and its abandonment. This is difficult for femi-
nists who, despite all the derision cast on them by socialists in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, have been revolutionaries dedi-
cated to overturning patriarchy, breaking the oppressive chains of
sexism, liberating women from the stereotypes that confine them,
and bringing them onto the stage of history. The realization of at least
some positive change since the early 1970s—which I have just charac-
terized for historians of women as gaining a legitimate claim to Clio’s
inspiration—has produced some ambivalence and uncertainty about
the future. Have we won or lost? Have we been changed by our
success? What does the move from embattled outsider to recognized
insider portend for our collective identity? Has our presence trans-
formed the discipline, or have we simply been absorbed into it?
Ought we to be content with maintaining and reproducing what we
have gained, or should we be responding to new challenges that may
threaten our legitimate standing? Does women’s history have a future,
or is it history? How might we imagine its future? These are questions
also being asked about women’s studies and feminism.
As the millennium approached, a number of forums were orga-
nized in the United States to speculate about the future. To cite only
two examples: In 1997 I edited a special issue of the journal differences
called “Women’s Studies on the Edge”—a title meant to evoke Pedro
Almodovar’s film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Al-
though we chose it playfully, the allusion turned out to be an apt
characterization of how edgy some of us feel when asked to think
about the future.* In i999 the Journal of Women’s History organized
a terrific intergenerational exchange among the Americanists Anne
Firor Scott, Sara Evans, Elizabeth Faue, and Susan Cahn.’ (The four
constitute a lineage: Scott was Evans’s teacher; Evans taught Faue
and Cahn.) In an otherwise rich and wide-ranging discussion, these
historians kept avoiding the topic of the future, although that was the
stated purpose of the conversation. At one point, Scott confessed that
in thinking about “where women’s history should, or might, go from
here,” she found herself “running up against a wall” (“Part 1,” 29).
Faue thought that we needed to “take time out to dream,” to exercise
26 Chapter One

imagination and creativity to get beyond the impasse (“Part 2,” 211).
But Evans summed up what appeared to be a general reluctance
among them. “Ah, the future,’ she sighed. “I agree . . . that this is the
part of the conversation I find most perilous” (205).

Futures

Why would the future of a successful movement be so difficult to

envision?
In some ways we already know the answer—it’s a form of social
movement analysis. An aging generation of feminist scholar-activists
looks back nostalgically on its wild youth, wondering (but not daring
to ask aloud) if all the gains we’ve made were worth it. The institu-
tionalization of women’s history implies its end as a campaign. Our
research and professional activities seem to have lost their purposive
political edge and their sense of dedication to building something
larger than an individual career. The community of feminist scholars,
whose vitality was manifest in fierce divisions no less than in shared
commitments, now seems diffuse. And, at least among historians of
women, the theoretical and political stakes no longer seem as high,
while disagreements seem more personal or generational. If there is
relief at the end of the need to conspire in late-night strategy sessions
and to constantly have to justify one’s scholarship and that of one’s
students to skeptical or hostile colleagues—as well as pleasure in the
quantity, quality, and diversity of work produced under the rubric of
women’s history—there is also a sense of loss. For many of us, being
embattled was energizing; it elicited strategic and intellectual creativ-
ity unmatched by our earlier experiences in graduate school. Inspired
by Clio, we sought to change the received version of history. Appeals
to Clio consolidated our identity as historians and feminists; activism
confirmed agency. We were producers of new knowledge and trans-
mitters of revised memory, fashioning tales to inspire ourselves and
the generations to come—all in the face of opponents more formida-
ble than the Pierides or the sirens, opponents who had the power to
discipline us for what they took to be our pretensions and misdeeds.
No longer insurgents, we have become disciplinarians, and I suspect
that inevitably there’s something of a letdown in this change of iden-
 Feminism’s History 27

tity. It is one thing to criticize disciplinary power from the outside,

another to be inside, committed to the teaching of established bodies
of scholarship. That kind of teaching necessarily seeks to reproduce
feminist history in rising generations of students, but it is often resis-
tant to the kind of critical challenges that was its defining charac-
teristic.
As academic feminism has gained institutional credibility, it also
has seemed to lose its close connection to the political movement
that inspired it. In the 1970s and 1980s, we were the knowledge-
producing arm of a broad-based feminist movement devoted to radi-
cal social change. During the 1990s, there were critical attacks on,
and guilt-ridden condemnations of, the diminished contact between
scholars and the grass roots, as well as injunctions to maintain or
rebuild those ties. But that effort has foundered. This is not, as is
sometimes alleged, because feminist scholars have retreated to ivory
towers; the opposition between academic and political feminism was
always a mischaracterization. Rather, it is because the political move-
ment itself has become fragmented, has dispersed into specific areas
of activism. This does not mean, as some journalists have claimed,
that feminism is dead. In fact, concerns about the status and condi-
tion of different kinds of women have infiltrated many more realms of
law and policy than was the case at the height of the movement, just
as questions about gender have bled into areas of study that were
resistant to feminism in the early days of women’s studies.®
Discontinuous, individually coordinated strategic operations with
other groups have replaced a continuous struggle on behalf of women
represented as a singular entity. This change is tied to the loss of a
grand teleological narrative of emancipation, one that allowed us to
conceive of the cumulative effect of our efforts: freedom and equality
were the inevitable outcomes of human struggle, we believed, and
that belief gave coherence to our actions, defined us as participants in
a progressive movement. We were on the side of redemptive history.
Although discontinuity and dispersed strategic operations are emi-
nently political in nature (and, for a younger generation, a familiar
way of operating), the loss of the continuity that came with the
notion of history as inevitably progressive helps explain the difficulty
an older generation has in imagining a future. They take discontinu-
28 Chapter One

ity to be regressive—the opposite of progressive, which indeed it was

for those who watched fascism in Europe destroy liberal institutions
in the 1930s—when in the twenty-first century, discontinuity seems to
me to be more closely allied to radical (Left) critiques.
Another aspect of the successful institutionalization of women’s
history is the dulling of the critical edge that comes with being on the
margin. There was much debate in the 1980s, perhaps a bit more
among literary scholars than historians, about the ultimate benefits of
integration. Was the absence of women in the curriculum simply a
gap in knowledge that needed to be filled? Or did it reveal something
more pernicious about the patriarchal or phallogocentric organiza-
tion of knowledge itself? What kind of impact would women’s studies
have on the university? Would we simply provide information now
lacking, or would we change the very nature of what counted as
knowledge? And were these necessarily contradictory aims? “As long
as women’s studies doesn’t question the existing model of the univer-
sity,” Jacques Derrida told a meeting of the Pembroke Center seminar
in 1984, “it risks to be just another cell in the university beehive.””
Some feminists insisted that, by definition, a female presence in his-
tory textbooks and history departments, from which women had
usually been excluded, was a subversion of the status quo. Wasn't
becoming visible itself a challenge to the prevailing historical ortho-
doxy that maintained women’s absence from politics and history?
Others of us argued that the radical potential of women’s history
would be lost without a thoroughgoing critique of the presumptions
of the discipline: for example, its notion that agency is somehow
inherent in the wills of individuals; its inattention to language in the
construction of subjects and their identities; and its lack of reflection
on the implicit interpretive powers of narrative. It is significant, I
think, that the lively reform-versus-revolution debate has receded
from discussions among women’s historians. With at least some mea-
sure of reform achieved, the troubling issues now are more mundane:
overspecialization, overproduction, and fragmentation, all of which
undermine the cohesiveness of the community of feminist scholars
and make impossible any mastery of the entire corpus of women’s
history. Even those who do share a common reading list are more
likely to debate the merits of a particular interpretation than to ask
 Feminism’s History 29

how it advances a feminist critical agenda. Preoccupied with the

details of administering programs, implementing or adjusting curric-
ular offerings, supervising undergraduate majors, and placing doc-
toral candidates, we imagine the future as a continuation of the
present rather than as a liberation from it.
Still another reason it is so difficult to look forward is that the
university into which we have been incorporated is itself undergoing
major structural change. Having been critics on the outside, we are
now advocates on the inside, looking to preserve the institution—as
a faculty-governed, tenure-granting, knowledge-producing space of
critical inquiry—from those who would reorganize it according to
corporate models in which, as Bill Readings puts it, “clients are sold
services for a fee.’* The need to prevent the “ruin” of the university
casts feminists more often as defenders of the status quo than as agents
of change. The temptation is to use our analyses of power to shore up
what we've won, protecting it from erosion by chief executive officers
in the guise of presidents and by trustees who treat ideas as com-
modities and scholars as their retailers, rather than producers. There is
a new need to cooperate with colleagues, some of whom were once
our adversaries, on a common agenda committed to the preservation
of the academy as we have known it. In this context, demands for
radical reform of the entire enterprise seem out of place, if not dan-
gerous. Instead, we vigilantly guard the boundaries of our field, pro-
testing unfair distributions of resources, alert to incursions on our turf
from new and sexier areas of scholarship, and wary of surveyors who
might redraw the maps we have followed so well. Our protectionism
sometimes even leads us to collaborate with those administrators who
are intent on commodifying the life of the mind. If we are indeed one
of the cells in the university beehive, our interest now is in maintaining
both the position of that cell and the health of the entire hive. Defense
of the status quo, and of the humanist principles that underlie it, seems
far more urgent than holding onto dreams of radical transformation.
We are, I think, witnessing a version of what Nancy Cott, referring to
the postsuffrage era, called “the grounding of modern feminism”—the
practical implementation, which necessarily falls short, of ideals and
emancipatory claims; the acceptance of what is, instead of a continued
quest for what ought to be; the domestication of fervent desire.?
30 Chapter One

Fervent Desire

Fervent desire is a gift of the muses, a kind of madness that takes over,
igniting and transforming the subject. According to Plato, “it seizes a
tender, virgin soul and stimulates it to rapt passionate expression . . .
but if any man come to the gates of poetry without the madness of
the Muses, persuaded that skill alone will make him a good poet [we
might substitute “a good historian by discipline” ], then shall he and
his works of sanity ... be brought to naught.”!°
Our careful analyses of the structural causes and effects of the rise
and fall of social movements do not leave much room for divine
madness, nor do they let us see its operations. But if we are working
with or as Clio, we need to take it into account. And when we do look
for it, we find evidence that it matters in our ability to imagine the
future. Over and over again, in the cross-generational conversation
published in the Journal of Women’s History, the four historians de-
scribe their attraction to women’s history in terms of passion, signify-
ing the inspiration and arousal elicited by the muses.!! Evans talks of
womens history as “a life-absorbing passion” (11); Faue recounts the
awakening in graduate school of her “passion” for women’s history
(13) and the terrific excitement of sharing “new words, new ideas, and
new experiences jumbled together” in “wild cacophony” (23); Scott
recalls an “impassioned statement” she made at a meeting of the
Organization of American Historians, calling for attention to those
whom traditional historical accounts had overlooked (19); and Cahn
refers to her “passionate” pursuit of feminism and history (15). Look-
ing at the current reduction in tenure-track faculty positions, Evans
worries that students with “a great passion for women’s history” will
be deterred by the job market from following their desire (214).
It is, of course, possible that passion here has a rote, even moraliz-
ing, quality. But I think it actually connotes deep feeling with an
erotic component. The world being evoked by the notion of passion
is the “female world of love and ritual” that Carroll Smith-Rosenberg
so brilliantly described in 1975. Existing within the terms of normative
heterosexuality (indeed, defined by them), it was nonetheless deeply
“homosocial,” and thrilling for that reason.!2 Bonnie Anderson and
Leila Rupp have portrayed international feminist movements in simi-
 Feminism’s History 31

lar terms.'> Women’s history, before its institutionalization, was like

those worlds of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. All that
libidinal energy devoted to women as objects of inquiry, subjects of
rights, students, colleagues, and friends—which was enhanced by the
excitement of trespass. We were boldly claiming a previously denied
right of access to the field of history. Men were present, to be sure, as
targets of anger, as wielders of power whose resistance or indifference
needed to be overcome, even as allies; but they were largely irrelevant
to the experience of the movement. Men were the Other against
whom our political and affective community was defined.
Some of the difficulty we now have in thinking about the future
seems to me to be a symptom of melancholy, an unwillingness to let
go of the highly charged affect of the homosocial world we have lost—
indeed an unwillingness even to acknowledge that it has been lost.
The melancholic wants to reverse time, to continue living as before.
Melancholia, Freud tells us, is a “reaction to the loss of a loved person,
or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one,
such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on.”!4 Unlike mourning,
which consciously addresses the loss, melancholy is an unconscious
process; the lost object is not understood as such. Instead, the melan-
cholic identifies with the lost object and displaces her grief and anger
onto herself. In the melancholic, “the shadow of the object fell upon
the ego, and the latter could henceforth be judged . . . as though it
were .. . the forsaken object.’”!> The judgment is harsh, and the
normal process by which libido, or sexual energy, is directed to an-
other object is interrupted. Turned in on herself, the melancholic
dwells only in the past. To be able to think about the future means to
be willing to separate oneself from the lost object, avow the loss, and
find a new object for passionate attachment.'®
There is no question that when women’s history came of age, the
intensity of the passion associated with the campaign to secure its
legitimacy waned. However much remains to be done in this unevenly
developed field, the early thrills of discovery no longer drive our work
in the same way. For one thing, although women’s studies programs
remain homosocial, the world of history departments, like that of the
university in general, is heterosocial: our world is no longer exclusively
female. For another, the expansion of the field has brought some
32 Chapter One

remarkable innovation. Not only do we now take differences among

women to be axiomatic, having heeded the criticism of women of
color, of Third World women, and of lesbians in the 1980s, but we also
have refined our theory and increasingly substitute gender for women
as the object of our inquiry. The scholarship we produce is thus no
longer uniquely focused on women as a singular category. And this has
meant that the satisfying cohesiveness of the movement—women as
subjects and objects of their own history—has disappeared, ifindeed it
ever existed. I will suggest later that this cohesiveness has largely been
established retrospectively, as part of the nostalgia of melancholy.’”
At one point in their cross-generational exchange,!* Faue uses an
occupational metaphor to characterize the change in the practice of
womens history over the past decades. She suggests that a generation
of artisans and their apprentices had carefully crafted histories “that
had political meaning and sound methodology” (210). They then
faced competition from “other historians” who, either less committed
to feminism or in possession of “hot theories” (or both), flooded the
market with shoddy, mass-produced goods. Although craftswomen
continued to produce work of high quality, it was hard to distinguish
it from the cheap stuff. As a result, the entire enterprise was devalued.
Faue’s colleagues reject the metaphor as inapt—Cahn notes that
“there was certainly no shortage of ‘bad’ history produced by the
older ‘artisanal’ mode” (215)—and Faue doesn't insist on it. (A really
nice aspect of this conversation, enabled by e-mail technology, is its
informality and the willingness of the participants to be tentative,
exploratory, and open.) I find the resort to a model of proletarianiza-
tion telling, not because of its inapplicability to the field of women’s
history—theories of social movements offer more relevant compar-
isons than theories of occupational transformation—but because
workers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and labor histo-
rians repeatedly mourn the precapitalist world we have lost. In Faue’s
use of it, the theme of proletarianization articulates affective loss in
more familiar (and more distancing) economic terms. It is, I submit,
at least partly the inability to acknowledge directly the affective loss—
the passionate idealization of women that drove women’s history and
historians of women—that makes it, in Faue’s words, “so hard to see
through the veil that hides the future from the present” (211).
 Feminism’s History 33

Melancholy
The “veil that hides the future” is Freud’s “shadow of the object”:
melancholy. I take it to mean that we’ve been confused about the
source of our passion, mistaking “women” for the excitement of the
new and unknown. What if our sense that we already know what femi-
nist history is blocks the divine madness, the inspired arousal, that is
precisely an encounter with the unknown? What if we rewrote femi-
nism’s history as the story of a circulating critical passion, slipping
metonymically along a chain of contiguous objects, alighting for a
while in an unexpected place, accomplishing a task, and then moving
on? I use the term “feminism’s history” here to mean not only the his-
tory of feminism and the history written by feminists, but also as a col-
loquial insinuation, as in “well, you know, that woman has a history.’
At least since the eighteenth century, feminism has used history in
different ways and at different times as a critical weapon in the strug-
gle for women’s emancipation. Feminism’s history has offered dem-
onstrations, in the form of exemplary instances from the past, of
women's worthiness to engage in the same activities as men, such as
wage earning, education, citizenship, and ruling. It has provided hero-
ines to emulate and lineages for contemporary activists—member-
ship in fictive families of history makers. Feminism’s history has ex-
posed as instruments of patriarchal power stories that explained the
exclusion of women as a fact of nature. And it has written new his-
tories to counter the lie of women’s passivity, as well as their erasure
from the records that constitute collective memory. It has not only
contested stereotypical versions of woman, it has also insisted on
profound differences among women. And it has formed any number
of alliances, focused on many aspects of power, to advance its ends.
Feminism’s history is both a compilation of women’s experiences and
a record of the different strategic interventions employed to argue
women’s cause. It can, of course, stand on its own; but it is best
understood as a doubly subversive critical engagement, both with
prevailing normative codes of gender and with the conventions and—
since history’s formation as a discipline in the late nineteenth cen-
tury—trules of historical writing. Feminism’s history has been a vari-
able, mutable endeavor, a flexible strategic instrument not bound to
 34 Chapter One

any orthodoxy. The production of knowledge about the past, al-

though crucial, has not been an end in itself but rather—at certain
moments, and not always in the service of an organized political
movement—has provided the substantive terms for a critical opera-
tion that uses the past to disrupt the certainties of the present and so
opens the way to imagining a different future. This critical operation
is the dynamic that drives feminism; in Lacanian terms, it is an
operation of desire, unsatisfied by any particular object, “constant in
its pressure,’ ever in search of a fulfillment that is elusive because
attaining the utopian aim of abolishing sexual difference altogether
would mean the death of feminism.'°
Desire, Lacan tells us, is driven by lack, ruled by dissatisfaction; it
is “unsatisfied, impossible, misconstrued.””° Its existence exposes the
insufficiency of any conclusive settlement; something more is always
wanted. Desire moves metonymically; relations among its objects are
characterized by unexpected contiguities. The movements are lateral,
and they don’t follow a single direction. We might say here that for
feminism, desire is driven by a form of critique—or, better, is itself a
critical faculty. As the German philosophers such as Kant, Hegel,
Marx, and the members of the Frankfurt School defined it, critique
has the same dissatisfied, unconscious, passionate quality. Although
its formulations are rational, its motivations are not entirely known.
Wendy Brown and Janet Halley describe critique as “a disruptive,
disorienting and at times destructive enterprise of knowledge.”?!
They write: “In the insistence on the availability of all human produc-
tion to critique, that is to the possibility of being rethought through
an examination of constitutive premises, the work of critique is po-
tentially without boundary or end” (26). The objects of critique are
the forms and manifestations of ideology and power—their underly-
ing truths and foundational assumptions—and these are as varied and
unpredictable as desire’s objects. As Brown and Halley describe it,
critique (like desire) consists in pursuit: “it embodies a will to knowl-
edge” whose exercise yields pleasure—the pleasure that comes from
contemplation of the unknown (30). For them, “critique hazards the
opening of new modalities of thought and political possibility, and
potentially affords as well the possibility of enormous pleasure—
political, intellectual, and ethical” (29). The fact that pleasure means
 Feminism’s History 35

not just positive affect but passion is indicated by references to a

“kindling spirit,’ “euphoria,” and “pleasure itself as a crucial source of
political motivation” (32).
Conceiving of feminism as a restless critical operation, as a move-
ment of desire, detaches it from its origins in Enlightenment tele-
ologies and the utopian promise of complete emancipation. It does
not, however, assume that desire operates outside of time; rather, it is
a mutating historical phenomenon, defined as and through its dis-
placements. Feminism emerged in the context of liberal democracy’s
proclamation of universal equality, discursively positioned in and as
contradiction—not just in the arena of political citizenship, but in
most areas of economic and social life. Despite many changes in the
meanings and practices of liberal democracy, its discursive hegemony
remains, and feminism is one of its contradictions. By calling atten-
tion to itself as contradiction, feminism has challenged the ways in
which differences of sex have been used to organize relations of
power. Feminism’s historical specificity comes from the fact that it
works within and against whatever are the prevailing foundational
assumptions of its time. Its critical force comes from the fact that it
exposes the contradictions in systems that claim to be coherent—
such as republicanism that excludes women from citizenship; polliti-
cal economy that attributes women’s lower wages to their biologically
determined lower value as producers; medical teaching that conflates
sexual desire with the natural imperatives of reproduction; and exclu-
sions within women’s movements that press for universal emancipa-
tion—and calls into question the validity of categories taken as first
principles of social organization: the family, the individual, the worker,
masculine, feminine, Man, Woman.”
One example from our own times of the critical operation of
feminism is the relationship of women’s history to social history. It is
often said, with a certain sense of inevitability, that women’s history
became acceptable with the rise to prominence of social history. The
emphasis on everyday life, ordinary people, and collective action
made women an obvious group to include. I would put it differently:
there was nothing in social history that made the rise of women’s
history inevitable. Rather, feminists argued, within the terms and
against the grain of behaviorism and new left Marxism, that women
 36 Chapter One

were a necessary consideration for social historians. If they were

omitted, key insights were lost about the ways class was constructed.
While male historians celebrated the democratic impulses of the
nascent working class, historians of women pointed to its gender
hierarchies. Not only did we correct for the absence of women in
labor histories—although we surely did that, showing that “worker”
was an exclusionary category; that women were skilled workers, not
just a cheap source of labor; and that women called strikes and
organized unions, rather than simply being members of the ladies’
auxiliary—we also offered a critique of the ways in which labor histo-
rians reproduced the machismo of trade unionists. This did not al-
ways sit well; indeed, feminists continue to find themselves ghet-
toized at meetings of labor historians. But there was a certain thrill of
discovery as we tried to lead our colleagues to unknown territory. In
the process we did convince some of them to consider the ways in
which gender consolidated men’s identity as workers and as members
of a working class, and the ways in which nature was used not only to
justify differential treatments of male and female workers, but to
regulate family structure and patterns of employment.
In labor history as in other areas of history, from diplomatic to
cultural, Faue comments, “women’s history has ‘defamiliarized’ the
terrain of other historians.’ Defamiliarized is exactly right: the mean-
ings taken for granted, the terms by which historians had explained the
past, the lists of so-called appropriate topics for historical research
were all called into question and shown to be neither as comprehen-
sive nor as objective as had previously been believed. What was once
unthinkable—that gender was a useful tool of historical analysis—has
become thinkable. But that’s not the end of the story. Now a received
disciplinary category, gender is being critically examined by the next
wave of feminists and others, who rightly insist that it is only one of
several equally relevant axes of difference. Sex doesn’t subsume race,
ethnicity, nationality, or sexuality; these attributions of identity inter-
sect in ways that need to be specified. To restrict our view to sexual
difference is thus to miss the always complex ways in which relations of
power are signified by differences. The newly safe terrain of gender and
women’ history is now itself being defamiliarized, as queer, postcolo-
nial, and ethnic studies (among other fields) challenge us to push the
boundaries of our knowledge, to slide or leap metonymically to con-
 Feminism’s History 37

tiguous domains. It may seem premature to branch out before we have

fully consolidated our gains, but that’s the wrong way to think about
feminism’s history. The impulse to reproduce what is already known is
profoundly conservative, whether it comes from traditional political
historians or historians of women. What continues to make feminism’s
history so exciting is precisely its radical refusal to settle down, to call
even a comfortable lodging a home.

The Fantasy of Home

Melancholy rests on a fantasy of a home that never really was. Our
idealization of the intensely political, woman-oriented moment of
recent feminist history and our desire to preserve it, by speaking of it
as the essence of women’s history, has prevented us from appreciating
the excitement and energy of the critical activity that was then and is
now the defining characteristic of feminism. Feminist history was
never primarily concerned with documenting the experiences of
women in the past, even if that was the most visible means by which
we pursued our objective. The point of looking to the past was to
destabilize the present, to challenge patriarchal institutions and ways
of thinking that legitimated themselves as natural, to make the un-
thinkable thought—for example, to detach gender from sex. In the
19708 and 1980s, women’s history was part of a movement that consol-
idated the identity of women as political subjects, enabling activism
in many spheres of society and winning unprecedented public vis-
ibility and, eventually, some success. The Equal Rights Amendment
did not pass, but other antidiscrimination measures did. Title IX had
a tremendous impact, as did affirmative action and campaigns to
identify and punish sexual harassment. Patriarchy did not fall, gender
hierarchies remain, and backlash is evident (evolutionary psychology
is its most recent incarnation), but many barriers to women—espe-
cially to white, middle-class, professional women—have been re-
moved. And the United Nations has called for the entire world to
acknowledge that women’s rights are human rights. Women’s status as
subjects of history, subject producers of historical knowledge, and
subjects of politics seems to have been secured, in principle if not
always in practice.
The public acceptance of women’s identity as political subjects
38 Chapter One

made the historical construction of that identity redundant; there

was nothing new to be championed in this realm. Stories designed to
celebrate women’s agency began to seem predictable and repetitious,
just more information garnered to prove a point that had already
been made. Moreover, the politics of identity took a melancholic,
conservative turn in the last decades of the twentieth century, as
Wendy Brown has so persuasively demonstrated.*4 Victims and their
injuries came to the fore and, though a good deal of effort was
expended on their behalf, the situation of women as wounded sub-
jects does not inspire either creative politics or history. Increasingly,
too, differences among women became more difficult to reconcile in
a single category, even if it was pluralized. “Women,” however modi-
fied, seemed too much a universalization of white, Western, straight
women—a category not capacious enough to alone do the work that
considerations of differences among women required. The emer-
gence of new political movements seemed to call for new kinds of
political subjects; singular identities no longer worked as they once
had for the construction of multiple and mutable strategic alliances.
In this context, a new generation of feminists turned their critical lens
on the construction of identity itself as a historical process. Seeking to
defamiliarize identity’s contemporary claims, they emphasized the
complex ways in which the identity of “women” operates, not just to
signify gender. If race, sexuality, ethnicity, and nationality play equally
significant parts in the definition of “women,” then gender is not a
useful enough category of analysis.
But to tell the story in the way that I have implies a singular
narrative, which distorts the past. We didn’t move neatly from identity
to gender to a critique of subject formation. Feminism’s history in
these years is not a story of a unified assault: Clio brandishing gender
and singing of women. Even as the identity of women was being
consolidated, even as women seemed the primary object of our in-
quiry, there were critical, conflicting voices pointing out the limits of
women and gender as concepts, introducing other objects and the-
orizing different ways of considering the historical significances of
sexual difference. In 1975 Gayle Rubin opened the way for (among
other things) the rethinking and historicizing of normative heterosex-
uality.?> In 1976 Natalie Davis cautioned us to study not women but
 Feminism’s History 39

gender groups, and she refused reductive readings of the symbols of

masculine and feminine, reminding us of the multiple and complex
historical meanings of those categories.”° In 1982 the ninth Barnard
Conference on the Scholar and the Feminist was blown apart by de-
bates about the place of sex in representations of women’s agency.”’ In
1988 Denise Riley suggested that the category of women was not foun-
dational, but historical.?8 In 1989 Ann Snitow pointed out that femi-
nism was divided by irreconcilable desires for both sameness and dif-
ference.” In 1992 Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, hoping to escape
the totalizing effects of simple oppositions between white and black
women, theorized about “the metalanguage of race.” “By fully recogniz-
ing race as an unstable, shifting, and strategic reconstruction,’ she wrote,
“feminist scholars must take up new challenges to inform and confound
many of the assumptions currently underlying Afro-American history
and women’s history. We must problematize much more of what we take
for granted. We must bring to light and to coherence the one and the
many that we always were in history and still actually are today:”° And in
1997 Afsaneh Najmabadi declared her “not-so-hidden pleasure at being
unable or unwilling to identify myself in [recognizable identity terms]
no matter how many times hybridized” and also confounded those
terms in her work on gender and nation building in Iran.3!
I offer these examples with dates attached not to demonstrate a
cumulative process through which our work got smarter or more
sophisticated. Precisely the opposite is the case. The critical question-
ing of prevailing categories both of mainstream and of feminist work
is consistently present, and its object keeps changing; these examples
are illustrations of the metonymic slippage I referred to above. In fact,
in a riot of promiscuous exploration (Faue’s “wild cacophony”),
many objects overlap and coexist, including sexuality, race, symbols
of masculine and feminine, the changing representation and uses of
gender and racial difference, and the intersections of race, ethnicity,
and gender in nation building. It is this critical activity—the relentless
interrogation of the taken-for-granted—that always moves us some-
where else, from object to object, from the present to the future.
Those accounts that insist that women are, have been, and must ever
be the sole subject or object of feminist history tell a highly selective
story that obscures the dynamic that makes thinking the future possi-
 40 Chapter One

ble. Of course there have been strenuous efforts at boundary keeping,

and these selective stories are among them, but they have been of
little avail: heedless of the broken hearts left in its wake, feminist
critical desire keeps moving. This is not a betrayal or a defection, but
a triumph; it is the way the passion of the feminist critical spirit is
kept alive.

Identity
I have been arguing that the primary role of feminist history has been
not to produce women as subjects, but to explore and contest the
means and effects of that subject production as it has varied over time
and circumstance. To rest content with any identity—even one we
have helped produce—is to give up the work of critique. That goes for
our identity both as historians and as feminists: having won entry
into the profession by exposing its politics of disciplinary formation,
it won't do now to settle down and enforce the existing rules, even if
we have helped create some of them. It’s not a matter of an anarchic
refusal of discipline, but a subversive use of its methods and a more
self-conscious willingness to entertain topics and approaches that
were once considered out of bounds. It’s what we don’t know that
entices us; it’s new stories that we yearn to tell, new memories that we
seek to reveal. Our passion for women’s history was a desire to know
and think what had hitherto been unthinkable. Passion, after all,
thrives on the pursuit of the not-yet-known.
Interdisciplinarity has been one of the ways we have learned to tell
new stories. That’s why it has been a hallmark of feminist scholarship.
Women's studies seminars, programs, and departments have been the
proving grounds for the articulation of new knowledge. They have
provided sustenance for research considered untenable in traditional
departments, legitimation for those who might otherwise have been
untenurable. It was questions posed from outside our own disciplin-
ary problematic that often prodded historians such as myself to seek
unconventional answers; it was the engaged response from other
feminist scholars that made the work seem worthwhile. The call of
other muses supplemented Clio’s inspiration. We had at least two
things in common: questions about women, gender, and power and—
 Feminism’s History 41

because simply comparing data about women didn’t get us very far—
a quest for theories that could provide alternative ways of seeing and
knowing. “Theory,” Stuart Hall has famously stated, “makes meanings
slide.’** And it was exactly that destabilization of received meaning
that was feminism’s aim. The exploration of theory—including Marx-
ism, psychoanalysis, liberalism, structuralism, and_poststructural-
ism—and the attempt to formulate something we could call feminist
theory were ways of overcoming disciplinary barriers, finding a com-
mon language despite our different academic formations. Although
many historians of women, echoing their disciplinary colleagues,
worried that theory and history were incompatible, in fact it was
theory that enabled the critique of a history that assumed a singular
knowing subject (the historian) and considered some topics more
worthy of investigation than others. Whether or not it is now widely
acknowledged, some commonly accepted axioms of feminist histor-
ical analysis are in fact theoretical insights about how differences are
constructed: there is neither a self nor a collective identity without an
Other (or others); there is no inclusiveness without exclusion, no
universal without a rejected particular, no neutrality that doesn’t
privilege an interested point of view; and power is always at issue in
the articulation of these relationships. Taken as analytic points of
departure, these axioms have become the foundation of an ongoing
and far-reaching critical historical inquiry.
Feminist history thrives on interdisciplinary encounters and has
incorporated some of the teachings of theory, but it has rightly con-
sidered its primary focus to be the discipline of history itself. (After
all, it’s Clio who turns us on.) The tension between feminism and
history, between subversion and establishment, has been difficult and
productive; the one pushing the limits of orthodoxy, the other polic-
ing the boundaries of acceptable knowledge. Whether or not we
know it, the relationship is not one-sided but interdependent. Femi-
nism transforms the discipline by critically addressing its problematic
from the perspective of gender and power, but without the disciplin-
ary problematic there would be no feminist history. Since the prob-
lematic changes (only partly because feminism transforms it), femi-
nist history changes as well. After all, memory is not static, nor is
Clio’s inspiration. Feminism’s history is always articulated in critical
42 Chapter One

relation to the discipline of history. Where is the feminist critique of

cultural history? Of rationalist interpretations of behavior? What are
the limits of now-accepted disciplinary understandings of gender?
What are the histories of the uses of the categories of difference—
racial, sexual, religious, ethnic, national, and so on—that historians
take to be self-evident characterizations of people in the past? These
questions, relentless interrogations of accepted knowledges and ap-
proaches to them, are the signs of an active, future-oriented feminist
critical desire.°4
If we relate to our discipline as a kind of critical gadfly, we do the
same to our colleagues in other disciplines and in newer areas of
interdisciplinary study. It is we who introduce the difference of time
into the categories employed by queer, postcolonial, transnational,
and global studies. Strategic affiliations aren’t without their critical
dimensions; feminist historians specialize in the temporal dimension.
We're relativists when it comes to meanings; we know they vary over
time. That makes us particularly good cultural critics. We can histor-
icize the present’s fundamental truths and expose the kinds of invest-
ments that drive them, in this way using the past not as the precursor to
what is (typically the task of official history), but as its foil. Here we are
double agents, practicing history to deepen and sharpen the critiques
of new oppositional studies, while slyly repudiating the discipline’s
emphasis on continuity and the unidirectionality of causality, from
past to present. There’s a great future for double agents of this kind and
a certain thrill in the job. It’s destabilizing both to those we engage with
and to ourselves. There’s no worry that our identity will become fixed,
or our work complacent; there are always new strategic decisions to be
made. To be sure, there are risks involved when orthodoxies on the
Left and the Right are challenged. But those are the risks that have
characterized feminism’s history from the beginning, the source of
both pleasure and danger, the guarantee of an opening to the future.
Inderpal Grewal, Caren Kaplan, and Robyn Wiegman call their series
of feminist scholarship at Duke University Press Next Wave Provoca-
tions, suggesting that there’s no end to feminism’s history—the pas-
sionate pursuit of the not-yet-known.*+
 Feminism’s History 43

Critique
“Ah, the future”—it is perilous only if one denies feminist agency.
Feminists are not only political subjects but also desiring subjects
and, as such, subjects who make history. This notion of agency as
impelled by a quest for what we cannot ultimately know—by desire—
is not mine, nor is it new. In 1983 Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and
Sharon Thompson edited a book of essays called The Powers of De-
sire: The Politics of Sexuality.3> Its major points are that women are not
only political beings but also sexual beings and that the study of sex-
uality—from many perspectives—opens up “an area for play, for ex-
perimentation.’ The editors also associate feminist scholarship with
desire; and “desire,” they write, pointing to a distant horizon where
“we might see what is coming in our direction,’ “is ever renewed”
(43). I have extended this argument beyond the topic of sex and
sexuality to characterize feminist agency itself. Our agency—our de-
sire—is critique, the constant undoing of conventional wisdom; the
exposure of its limits for fully satisfying the goals of equality. It drives
us to unforeseen places. You never know what will next draw our
attention or our ire. Critique, as desire, provides no map. It is rather a
standard against which to measure the dissatisfactions of the present.
Its path can be seen only in retrospect, but its motion is undeniable.
Historical study is a particularly effective form of feminist critique.
Some ancient representations of Clio show her with a trumpet and
a clepsydra (a water clock), perhaps heralding the passage of time.
Time conceived as fluidity or flow—a particularly feminine represen-
tation—is not easily contained. Clio is also shown with writing imple-
ments, books, and scrolls, referring to the fact that she introduced the
Phoenician alphabet to the Greeks. If Clio offered the tools of knowl-
edge production, our task is to use them. We are not gods and thus
cannot, like her, tell true tales, so we are driven by our critical fac-
ulty—which she inspires and arouses—always to revise, always to
reach beyond our grasp for new knowledge, new stories to tell.
Since Clio has from the beginning been our inspiration, it’s impor-
tant to learn some things about her that aren’t so well known. The
muses had no permanent home: they danced on Mount Olympus,
but Mount Helicon was also their haunt. And they did not sit or walk,
44 Chapter One

they flew: “Wherever they go they may go flying; for in such a way
goddesses usually travel, as King Pyreneus of Daulis, who attempted
to rape them, too late learned. For he perished when he leapt from
the pinnacle of a tower trying to follow the flying Muses who escaped
him.”%” Those who fly escape the dangers of domination, the tyranni-
cal powers of orthodoxy. Flight is also a positive course, a soaring; it
traces the path of desire. When melancholy is left behind, that path
opens for us. And passion returns as it readies itself for its latest
pursuit of what has not yet been thought.
 2. Fantasy Echo
History and the Construction ofIdentity

THE TITLE OF THIS CHAPTER is not a technical term. In origin it

was a mistake, the result of a student’s inability to understand some
French words spoken in heavily accented English by a German-born
professor of history. The student, who also had no familiarity with
some of the grand themes of modern European intellectual history,
tried to capture the sounds he had heard and render them phonet-
ically, echoing imperfectly, though not unrecognizably, the professor’s
reference to the designation by contemporaries of the last decades of
the nineteenth century as the fin de siécle. There were enough clues in
the student’s final exam for me eventually to figure out what he meant.
(I was a teaching assistant for George Mosse at the University of Wis-
consin then—it was 1964 or 1965). There was something about the
student’s choice of words that appealed to me—perhaps their sheer
linguistic creativity or perhaps the fact that they could be construed to
have a certain descriptive plausibility. In any case, I never forgot them.
Now, in the wake of our own fin de siécle, the words “fantasy echo” seem
to have extraordinary resonance, offering a way of thinking not only
about the significance of arbitrary temporal designations (decades,
46 Chapter Two

centuries, millennia) but also about how we appeal to and write

history. Although I have no idea who the student was who coined the
phrase (and I would bet that he has long since forgotten his desperate
improvisation), it might be that “fantasy echo” could become one of
those clever formulations that also does useful interpretive work.

Identity and History

For a while I have been writing critically about identity, insisting that
identities don't preexist their strategic political invocations, that cate-
gories of identity we take for granted as rooted in our physical bodies
(gender and race) or our cultural (ethnic, religious) heritages are, in
fact, retrospectively linked to those roots; they don’t follow predict-
ably or naturally from them.! There’s an illusory sameness established
by referring to a category of person (women, workers, African Ameri-
cans, homosexuals) as if it never changed, as if not the category, but
only its historical circumstances, varied over time. Thus women’s
historians (to take the example I know best) have asked how changes
in the legal, social, economic, and medical status of women affected
their possibilities for emancipation or equality; but they have asked
less often how these changes altered the meaning (socially articulated,
subjectively understood) of the term “women” itself. Few feminist
historians (Denise Riley is the exception here) have heeded the advice
of Michel Foucault to historicize the categories that the present takes
to be self-evident realities.2 Even though, for Foucault, the “history of
the present” served a clear political end (denaturalizing the categories
on which contemporary structures of power rested and so destabiliz-
ing those structures of power), those who resist his teaching have
taken historicization to be synonymous with depoliticization. This
synonymity is only true, however, if historical rootedness is seen as a
prerequisite for the stability of the subject of feminism, if the existence
of feminism is made to depend on some inherent, timeless agency of
women.
While historians have been quick to acknowledge Eric Hobsbawm’s
reminder that tradition is an “invention” that serves to inspire and
legitimize contemporary political action by finding precedents and
inspiration for it in the past, they have been slow to apply this idea to
 Fantasy Echo 47

categories of identity—or at least to categories of identity that have

physical or cultural referents. Hobsbawm’s writing on this topic came
as part of the reassessment of Marxist (or, more accurately, Stalinist)
historiography, with its ahistoric notions of workers and class struggle,
and it had an important influence on the historicizing of those con-
cepts (there has been little work, though, among labor historians on
the question of how the “invention of tradition” operates). In the field
of women’s history Hobsbawm’s intervention has been largely ig-
nored; there, an increasing number of histories of feminism are pro-
ducing continuous histories of women’s activism, heedless, it would
seem, of their own inventions. This may be a result of the fact that it is
harder to historicize the category of women, based as it seems to be in
biology, than it was to historicize the category of worker, always under-
stood to be a social phenomenon, produced not by nature, but by
economic and political arrangements. It may also stem from the greater
difficulty those who write about women (as opposed to workers) have
had in dispelling stereotypes about women’s apolitical natures and their
consequent lack of political participation. Thus there exists the tempta-
tion to pile up counterexamples as demonstrations of women’s political
capacity and to neglect the changing, and often radically different,
historical contexts within which women as subjects came into being.
But even those who grant that collective identities are invented as
part of some effort of political mobilization haven't attended to how
the process of invention works. In Only Paradoxes to Offer, I tried, in
the last section of each of the biographical chapters, to demonstrate
that feminist identity was an effect of a rhetorical political strategy
invoked differently by different feminists at different times.* These
sections constitute a critique of the notion that the history of femi-
nism, or for that matter the history of women, is continuous. I offer
instead a story of discontinuity that was repeatedly sutured by femi-
nist activists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries into a vision
of uninterrupted linear succession: women’s activism on behalf of
women. The identity of women, I argue, was not so much a self-
evident fact of history as it was evidence—from particular and dis-
crete moments in time—of someone's, some group's, effort to identify
and thereby mobilize a collectivity.
The argument I advanced in those chapter sections constituted for
48 Chapter Two

me a way of pursuing Foucault’s genealogical agenda of critically

intervening in disciplinary debates about identity and the writing of
history. But it also left aside questions about how identity was estab-
lished, how women with vastly different agendas identified with one
another across time and social positions. What were the mechanisms
of such collective and retrospective identification? How do these
mechanisms operate? In looking for ways to answer these questions I
am tempted to try to make fantasy echo do serious analytic work.

Fantasy
“Fantasy echo” has a wonderfully complex resonance. Depending on
whether the words are both taken as nouns or as an adjective and a
noun, the term signifies the repetition of something imagined or an
imagined repetition. In either case the repetition is not exact, since an
echo is an imperfect return of sound. Fantasy, as noun or adjective,
refers to plays of the mind that are creative and not always rational.
For thinking the problem of retrospective identification it may not
matter which is the noun and which the adjective. Retrospective
identifications, after all, are imagined repetitions and repetitions of
imagined resemblances. The echo is a fantasy, the fantasy an echo;
the two are inextricably intertwined. What might it mean to charac-
terize the operations of retrospective identification as a fantasized
echo or an echoed fantasy? It might mean simply that such identifica-
tion is established by the finding of resemblances between actors
present and past. There is no shortage of writing about history in
these terms: history as the result of empathetic identification made
possible either by the existence of universal human characteristics or,
in some instances, by a transcendent set of traits and experiences
belonging to women or workers or members of religious or ethnic
communities. In this view of things, fantasy is the means by which
real relations of identity between past and present are discovered
and/or forged. Fantasy is more or less synonymous with imagina-
tion, and it is taken to be subject to rational, intentional control; one
directs one’s imagination purposively to achieve a coherent aim, that
of writing oneself or one’s group into history, writing the history of
individuals or groups.> The limits of this approach for my purposes
 Fantasy Echo 49

are that it assumes exactly the continuity—the essentialist nature—of

identity that I want to question.
For that reason I have turned to writings, informed by psycho-
analysis, that treat fantasy in its unconscious dimensions. Substan-
tively, it may be that certain shared fantasies—the ones Jean Laplanche
and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis deem “primal fantasies”—provide funda-
mental terms for sexed identities. These fantasies are the myths cul-
tures develop to answer questions about the origins of subjects, sexual
difference, and sexuality. Primal fantasies of sexual difference (which
assume the female body has been castrated) may provide a ground of
unconscious commonality among women who are otherwise histor-
ically and socially different. But this can’t account either for the subjec-
tively different perceptions women have of themselves as women or for
the ways in which at certain moments “women” become consolidated as
an identity group. I want to argue that the commonality among women
does not preexist its invocation but rather that it is secured by fantasies
that enable them to transcend history and difference.
It seems more useful, therefore, to consider fantasy as a formal
mechanism for the articulation of scenarios that are at once histor-
ically specific in their representation and detail and transcendent of
historical specificity. There are three aspects of fantasy (not all of
which are necessary characteristics) that are useful for my purposes.
The first is that fantasy is the setting for desire. “Fantasy,” write
Laplanche and Pontalis, “is not the object of desire, but its setting. In
fantasy the subject does not pursue the object or its sign: he appears
caught up himselfinthe sequence of images. He forms no representa-
tion of the desired object, but is himself represented as participating
in the scene.”’ In the fantasized setting the fulfillment of desire and
the consequences of this fulfillment are enacted. “Fantasy” Riley de-
fines as “sustained metaphoricity. To be in fantasy is to live ‘as if?
Some scene is being played out; and any act of identification neces-
sarily entails a scenario.”* The second formal aspect is that fantasy has
a double structure, which at once reproduces and masks conflict,
antagonism, or contradiction. In Freud’s classic essay “A Child Is
Being Beaten,” fantasy simultaneously enacts the individual’s trans-
gressive wish and punishes the wisher. The beating is both the fulfill-
ment of the child’s erotic desire for the father and punishment for it.’
50 Chapter Two

In Slavoj Zizek’s analysis of ideology, filtered through a Lacanian lens,

fantasy maintains and masks divisions within society. It does so in
some instances by attributing to reviled others (Jews are one classic
example) the causes of one’s own (or a group’s) lack of satisfaction:
“they” have stolen “our” jouissance. The we-versus-they construction
consolidates each side as an undifferentiated whole and effaces the
differences that produce hierarchy and conflict among “us”; it also
articulates a longing for enjoyment that it is beyond the ability of any
ideological system to provide. (Jouissance is crucial in Zizek’s discus-
sion of fantasy; it is that orgasmic sensation that exceeds articulation
and seems, momentarily at least, to satisfy desire. But desire is ul-
timately unsatisfiable since it seeks to restore an imagined wholeness
and coherence, the end of the alienation associated with the acquisi-
tion of individual selfhood.) In another of Zizek’s instances, fantasy
contains the libidinal “obscene supplement” on which power is based
—the underlying and usually unstated erotic appeal of, say, antipor-
nography legislation that depicts exactly what it aims to regulate
and/or repress.'° A third formal aspect is that fantasy operates as a
(tightly condensed) narrative. In Zizek's formulation, the narrative is
a way of resolving “some fundamental antagonism by rearranging its
terms into a temporal succession” (11). Contradictory elements (or,
for that matter, incoherent ones) are rearranged diachronically, be-
coming causes and effects. Instead of desire / punishment or trans-
gression/law being seen as mutually constitutive, they are under-
stood to operate sequentially: the transgressions of desire bring
about the law’s punishment or, to change the example, the advent of
modernity brings the “loss” of traditional society. In fact, the qualities
said to belong to traditional society come into existence only with the
emergence of modernity; they are its constitutive underside. The
relationship is not diachronic but synchronic. Thus the imposition of
narrative logic on history is itself a fantasy according to Zizek: “Actual
historical breaks are, if anything, more radical than mere narrative
deployments, since what changes in them is the entire constellation
of emergence and loss. In other words, a true historical break does
not simply designate the ‘regressive’ loss (or ‘progressive’ gain) of
something, but the shift in the very grid which enables us to measure
losses and gains” (13).
Fantasy is at play in the articulation of both individual and collec-
 Fantasy Echo 51

tive identity; it extracts coherence from confusion, reduces multi-

plicity to singularity, and reconciles illicit desire with the law. It
enables individuals and groups to give themselves histories. “Fantasy,”
writes Jacqueline Rose, “is not ... antagonistic to social reality; it is its
precondition or psychic glue.”!! Fantasy can help account for the
ways subjects are formed, internalizing and resisting social norms,
taking on the terms of identity that endow them with agency. (For
that reason it has informed both pessimistic and optimistic theories
about human subjectivity.)!? And it can be used to study the ways in
which history—a fantasized narrative that imposes sequential order
on otherwise chaotic and contingent occurrences—contributes to the
articulation of political identity. Thus, as I have argued elsewhere, the
history of feminism, when told as a continuous, progressive story of
women's quest for emancipation, effaces the discontinuity, conflict,
and difference that might undermine the politically desired stability
of the categories termed “women” and “feminist.”
In fantasy, narrative operations are not straightforward, precisely
because of the condensed way in which temporality is figured. There
is always a certain ambiguity created by the coexistence of simul-
taneity and narrative. In the fantasy scenario, desire is fulfilled, pun-
ished, and prohibited all at once, in the same way that social antago-
nism is evoked, erased, and resolved. But the fantasy also implies a
story about a sequential relationship for prohibition, fulfillment, and
punishment (having broken the law that prohibits incest, the child is
being beaten); and it is precisely narrative that evokes, erases, and
thereby resolves social antagonism (“we” are responding to “others”
who have taken away our jouissance). The sequence of events in the
scenario substitutes (or stands in) for historical change (which, I
would argue, is about the existence of difference in time). Repetition
replaces history (or is conflated with it) because the narrative is
already contained in the scenario. Writing oneself into the story being
staged thus becomes a way of writing oneself into history. In this way
the category of identity is retrospectively stabilized. What might be
called the fantasy of feminist history secures the identity of women
over time. The particular details may be different, but the repetition
of the basic narrative and the subject’s experience in it means that the
actors are known to us—they are us.
Still, there is a tension to be explored by historians seeking to
52 Chapter Two

analyze processes of identity formation, a tension between the tem-

porality of historical narrative (which carries with it notions of irre-
ducible difference in time) and its condensation in recurring sce-
narios (which seem to deny that difference). That is where echo
comes in.

Echo

In its most literal sense echo simply repeats what came before, multi-
plying copies, prolonging the sound—identity as reproduction of the
same. But this literalness isn’t even right as a description of the physical
phenomenon. Echoes are delayed returns of sound; they are incom-
plete reproductions, usually giving back only the final fragments of a
phrase. An echo spans large gaps of space (sound reverberates be-
tween distant points) and time (echoes are not instantaneous), but it
also creates gaps of meaning and intelligibility. The melodic tolling of
bells can become cacophonous when echoes mingle with the original
sound; when the sounds are words, the return of partial phrases alters
the original sense and comments on it as well. Poets and literary
scholars have made much of this incomplete, belated, and often con-
tradictory kind of repetition. In one translator’s rendition of Ovid’s
story of Echo and Narcissus, where Echo’s effect is to transform others’
meaning, Narcissus cries, “Here let us meet, let us come together,” and
she replies (turning his search for the source of the voice he hears into
her erotic proposition), “Let us come. Together.’!4 Or, when Narcissus
recoils from Echo’s embrace and says, “may I die before I give you
power over me,’ she responds, “I give you power over me,” reversing
the pronoun’s referent and the import of the words.!5 Here an echo
provides ironic contrast; in other instances an echo’s mimicry creates a
mocking effect. In either case, repetition constitutes alteration. It is
thus that echo undermines the notion of enduring sameness that often
attaches to identity. Claire Nouvet reads the story of Echo and Narcis-
sus as a commentary on the way subjects are constructed. When, re-
jected by Narcissus, Echo loses her body, Ovid tells us that she none-
theless remains alive as sound (“There is sound, which lives in her”),16

Although Echo is now a sound, the text still posits her as a subject capable
of containing a sound. But since Echo has lost her body, since there is “no-
 Fantasy Echo 53

body” left, how can the sound be in her? The disembodiment “kills” Echo,
the “other,” by exposing the subjective other as the deceptive embodiment
of an echoing Other. (114)

Echo, in Nouvet’s reading, is the process by which subjects come into

being as “a play of repetition and difference among signifiers” (114).!”
This emphasis on language is no doubt important, but it is also
limited for thinking about the historical processes involved in the
formation of identity. It is precisely by filling the empty categories of
self and other with recognizable representatives that fantasy works to
secure identity. In my use of it, echo is not so much a symptom of the
empty, illusory nature of otherness as it is a reminder of the temporal
inexactness of fantasy’s condensations, condensations that nonethe-
less work to conceal or minimize difference through repetition. (Inex-
act usages of echo capture this occluding operation when they imply
that echo is an exact replication of the original sound.)
For historians, echo provides yet another take on the process of
establishing identity by raising the issues of the distinction between
the original sound and its resonances and the role of time in the
distortions heard. Where does an identity originate? Does the sound
issue forth from past to present, or do answering calls echo to the
present from the past? If we are not the source of the sound, how can
we locate that source? If all we have is the echo, can we ever discern
the original? Is there any point in trying, or can we be content with
thinking about identity as a series of repeated transformations?
The historian who writes about women participates in this echo
effect, sending forth and picking up sounds. Women, as a designated
topic of research, is a plural noun signifying differences among bio-
logical females; it is also a collective term that occludes differences
among women, usually by contrasting them with men. Women's his-
tory implies smooth continuity, but also divisions and differences.
Indeed, the distinctive word “women” refers to so many subjects,
different and the same, that the word becomes a series of fragmented
sounds, rendered intelligible only by the listener, who (in specifying
her object) is predisposed to listen in a certain way. “Women” ac-
quires intelligibility when the historian or the activist looking for
inspiration from the past attributes significance to (identifies with)
what she has been able to hear. If the historically defined subjectivity
54 Chapter Two

that is identity is thought of as an echo, then replication is no longer

an apt synonym. Identity as a continuous, coherent, historical phe-
nomenon is revealed to be a fantasy, a fantasy that erases the divisions
and discontinuities, the absences and differences, that separate sub-
jects in time. Echo provides a gloss on fantasy and destabilizes any
effort to limit the possibilities of “sustained metaphoricity” by re-
minding us that identity (in the sense both of sameness and selfness)
is constructed in complex and diffracted relation to others. Identifica-
tion (which produces identity) operates as a fantasy echo, then, re-
playing in time and over generations the process that forms individ-
uals as social and political actors.

Two Fantasies of Feminist History

Although many fantasies have been produced to consolidate feminist
identity, two seem to me particularly prevalent, at least in Western
feminist movements since the late eighteenth century. One, the fan-
tasy of the female orator, projects women into masculine public
space, where they experience the pleasures and dangers of transgress-
ing social and sexual boundaries. The other, the feminist maternal
fantasy, seems at first to be contrary to the orator in its acceptance of
rules that define reproduction as women’s primary role (an accep-
tance of the difference the equality-seeking orator refuses). But the
fantasy, in fact, envisions the end of difference, the recovery of “a lost
territory” and the end of the divisiveness, conflict, and alienation
associated with individuation.'* It is a utopian fantasy of sameness
and harmony produced by maternal love.
These fantasy scenarios are not permanent fixtures of feminist
movements, nor does the use of one preclude an appeal to the other.
In fact, in the examples I cite below, the same woman places herself at
different moments in each scenario. (This may be because they are
related fantasies, the one seeking separation from, the other a return
to, the mother.)!° The fantasies function as resources to be invoked.
Indeed, they might be said to have the quality of echoes, resonating
incompletely and sporadically, though discernibly, in the appeal to
women to identify as feminists.
 Fantasy Echo 55

Orators

In the annals of the history of feminism, one iconic figure is that of a

woman standing at a podium giving a speech. The scenario is similar
whether the depiction is reverent or caricatured: the woman’s arm is
raised, she’s talking to a crowd, their response is tempestuous, things
might be out of control. The tumult acknowledges the transgressive
nature of the scene, since in the nineteenth and early twentieth cen-
turies women were excluded, by social convention if not law, from
speaking in public forums. The scene itself might be read as a trope
for feminism more generally: an exciting—in all the senses of that
word—intervention in the (masculine) public, political realm.
In French feminist history the primal scene was staged by Olympe
de Gouges: “If women have the right to mount to the scaffold, they
ought equally to have the right to mount to the rostrum.”?° Gouges’s
fate—execution by the Jacobins in 1793—linked the possibility of pun-
ishment by death to women’s demands for political rights and their
exercise of a public voice (substituting for her logical argument a story
of transgression and its subsequent punishment). Her own experience
with public speaking was not remarkable, and it rarely seems to have
literally approximated the fantasized scenario that echoed down the
generations of feminist militancy. It is reported that she unsuccessfully
tried several times to gain the podium in the National Assembly in the
early 1790s and that she addressed a largely female audience at a
meeting of the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women in 1793.
Gouges’s most noted interventions were her voluminous writings,
especially her Declaration ofthe Rights ofWoman and Citizen of 1791. Of
course, writing is also an exercise of public voice, and it was for Gouges
a source of enormous pleasure (she had, she once said, “an itch [dé-
mangeaison |to write”).21Moreover, Gouges saw nothing transgressive
in her own public activity because she did not accept the gendered
boundaries of public and private (politics and sex, reason and emo-
tion) that the revolutionaries were implementing, nor did she seek to
remove sex from political consideration. Women needed freedom of
speech so they could identify the fathers of the children who resulted
from sexual encounters, she argued in her Declaration ofthe Rights. The
revolution could use women, she pointed out elsewhere, to “inflame
56 Chapter Two

the passions” of young men being recruited for the army. TheJacobins,
however, defined her actions as inversions of nature and, when they
guillotined her, they explained that she had “forgotten the virtues that
belong to her sex.’”” It was in this way that Gouges’s words about the
scaffold and the tribune became the caption for a feminist scenario
enacted by succeeding generations.
When Jeanne Deroin campaigned as a democratic socialist for a
seat in the legislature in 1849 (despite the fact that women could
neither vote nor run for office under the rules of the Second Re-
public), she told the readers of her newspaper, L’Opinion des Femmes,
that her speech (to a crowd of mostly male workers) had met with
“kind reception.” Yet her deep conviction that equality between the
sexes was the foundation of socialism was not enough, she confided,
to prevent her being overtaken in the course of her speech by “une
vive émotion, which she feared might have weakened the develop-
ment of her ideas and the force of her expression. Indeed, for a
moment these feelings of pleasure and danger caused her to lose her
voice. At another meeting the circumstances were different. As she
ascended to the lectern, “a violent uproar burst forth, at first toward
the entrance to the hall, and soon the entire assembly joined in.”
Though fearful, Deroin held her ground (imagining herself, I imag-
ine, to be Gouges) and derived great satisfaction from it: “fortified by
the intimate sentiment of the grandeur of our mission, of the holiness
of our apostleship and profoundly convinced of the importance ... of
our work, so eminently, so radically revolutionary . . . we accom-
plished our duty by refusing to leave the tribune . . . to appease the
tumultuous crowd.”? Later Deroin explained that “she was excited
[excitée] by a powerful impulse [une impulsion puissante]” that over-
came her natural timidity.** Although she attributed this impulse to
external influences and explained her action as the performance of
duty in the service of a cause, there seems little doubt to me that the
excitement experienced in both scenes is that jouissance evoked by
Zizek—the excess of pleasure associated with the fulfillment of an
illicit wish and its punishment, a punishment that confirms the trans-
gressive nature of the desire.
Madeleine Pelletier (psychiatrist, socialist, suffragist) provides a
version of the scene in her autobiographical novel of 1933. The pro-
 Fantasy Echo 57

tagonist (dressed, like Pelletier, en homme in pants, a collar and tie,

with short cropped hair) nervously takes the podium and forcefully
urges a hooting crowd of male socialist workers to support women’s
rights. (The pleasure at assuming the male position is enhanced and
offset by fear.) When she’s later told by sympathetic comrades that
she'd be more effective if she dressed appropriately—as a woman—
her reaction to “these brutal words” is shock: “It felt like a sort of
moral rape.”*S The clothing of the speaker and the fact that she is
speaking signal her inappropriate femininity, which is punished by
disapproval so strong that it feels like rape. The violation of norma-
tive standards of gender—for Madeleine Pelletier, the joyful ability to
transcend the limits of sexual difference—brings violation in its turn,
a violation that restores gender boundaries.
There is no doubt that Pelletier had read Deroin’s accounts of her
experience, as there is little doubt that Deroin had Gouges in mind.
Pelletier, in fact, had given her protagonist the nom de guerre of Jeanne
Deroin, though Deroin’s notions of womanhood and feminism were
radically different from her own. Moreover, Gouges, whose formula-
tion became a cherished slogan of French feminism, was a courtesan, a
playwright, and of uncertain political sympathies (she was a monar-
chist until the king’s execution in 1792, when she switched her loyalties
to the Gironde and federalism). Opinionated, seductive, verbose, she
was not at all the woman—whose chaste maternity was exemplified by
the Virgin Mary—that Deroin sought to embody in the mid-nine-
teenth century with a gentle loving demeanor, or the femme en homme,
striding to the podium, that Pelletier enacted in the early twentieth
century. These details—of great importance for the historicizing of
identity in general and of women and feminists in particular—were
incidental to the collective identification enabled by the fantasy sce-
nario. Indeed, one of the ways in which feminism acquired a history
was that successive generations of women (activists and historians)
were able to write themselves into these similarly structured scenarios.
It was the shared jouissance, not the specific historical details, that
provided common ground.
Another version, one that shows the international reach of these
fantasy echoes, comes from the German socialist and feminist Lily
Braun, who worked in a political, national, and social context very
 58 Chapter Two

different from the French. “It is so very hard to develop my innermost

thoughts in front of strangers,—it is as if Ihad to show myself naked
to the whole world.””° Nakedness—the exposure of femininity—is at
once pleasurably triumphant (her mere presence says: look, there’s
no mistaking it, a female in male space) and erotically provocative
(undermining the feminist effort to deny the importance of sexual
difference). A variation of this scenario comes from the psychoana-
lyst Joan Riviére describing in a 1927 article one of her patients, an
accomplished professional and public speaker who, after an impres-
sive performance at the podium regularly abjected herself by flirting
with older men in the audience. “All her life,’ Riviére wrote, “a certain
degree of anxiety, sometimes very severe, was experienced after every
public performance, such as speaking to an audience. In spite of her
unquestionable success and ability, both intellectual and practical,
and her capacity for managing an audience and dealing with discus-
sions, etc., she would be excited and apprehensive all night after, with
misgivings whether she had done anything inappropriate, and ob-
sessed by a need for reassurance.’?”
By masquerading as a woman, Riviére’s patient sought to deny the
castrating effects of the impressive and, for her, exciting display of her
intellect. The details of Riviére’s fantasy reverse Braun’s: while Braun
imagines herself exposed as an imposter who only pretends to have
the phallus, Riviére’s patient wants to disguise her possession of the
phallus and the pleasure it gives her by donning the mask of “woman-
liness.” But in both of these cases the fantasy permits the evocation
and containment of pleasurable excess associated with breaching the
boundaries of sexual difference.
The contemporary feminist historian, herself grappling with the joys
and anxieties of exercising a public voice, easily reads herself into these
scenarios even though good historical sense warns that important differ-
ences are being ignored. There is Gouges, whose eighteenth-century
aristocratic pretensions included glorying in her sexuality; Deroin, dem-
ocratic socialist of the 1840s, who adored the idea of maternal chastity;
Pelletier, psychiatrist and anarchist at the end of the nineteenth century,
deriving erotic pleasure from passing as a man; and Riviére’s patient, one
of the New Women of the 1920s, unable to resolve an apparent conflict
between her professional and sexual identities. In all these instances the
 Fantasy Echo 59

very notions of sex and sexuality—to say nothing of women and femi-
nist—are different, and it behooves the historian of women and femi-
nism to point this out. Yet there is also no denying the persistent fact of
identification, for echoing through the turns and twists of history is the
fantasy scenario: ifwoman has the right to mount to the scaffold, she has
also the right to mount to the rostrum. It is in the transgression of the
law, of historically and culturally specific regulatory norms, that one
becomes a subject of the law, and it is the excitement at the possibility of
entering this scenario of transgression and fulfillment that provides
continuity for an otherwise discontinuous movement.

Mothers

The woman as mother is the antithesis of the female public speaker.

While the orator wrestles with her inappropriate masculinity, the
mother embodies acceptable femininity, fulfilling as she does her
designated reproductive role. Despite its apparent endorsement of
normative gender relations, maternity has sometimes served to con-
solidate feminist identification. (Of course, hostility to maternity has
also united feminists, sometimes at the same time, sometimes at
different moments from the positive identification I will describe
here.) Appealing to prevailing ideas of maternity, often in contexts of
pronatalist political pressure, feminists have argued that mothers de-
serve rights because they guarantee the future of the race or the
nation or the species. In these strategic interventions the incentive for
collective mobilization has often rested on the physical sameness of
women’s (reproductive) bodies. Gouges spoke in the name of “the
sex superior in beauty as in courage during childbirth” when she
delivered her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen. Deroin
equated womanhood with an idealized mother, one overflowing with
selfless love: “Women are the mothers of humanity, the most impor-
tant of all work is the production of the human being.””* And some of
the organizers of the most powerful international feminist networks
at the dawn of the twentieth century used maternity as the common
ground for their antiwar movement. French delegate Maria Verone
called for unity at the International Council of Women meeting in
Rome in May 1914 by appealing “to all women of all nations, who
 60 Chapter Two

suffer childbirth with the same pain and who, when their sons die in
war, shed the same tears.”??
There has been much debate among feminists about the wisdom
of invoking maternity as a collective identity. In 1908, as her feminist
compatriots claimed rights based on their motherhood, Pelletier
warned against this strategy: “Never will childbirth give women a title
of social importance. Future societies may build temples to maternity
but they will do so only to keep women locked up inside.’2° More
recently, feminists have worried about whether and how a validation
of maternity might endorse essentialist visions of womanhood. In this
connection there has been no shortage of writing by feminist philoso-
phers and historians wending their way between a recognition of, on
the one hand, the strength of feminist arguments based on mother-
hood and, on the other, the danger such arguments pose for confirm-
ing social stereotypes that attribute gender discrimination to na-
ture.*' In most of this work (with the exception, as I will discuss in
what follows, of some feminists’ attempts to reformulate psycho-
analysis) the figure of the mother is taken literally. I want to suggest
that when she indeed becomes the basis for feminist mobilization
(and this is not always the case in the history of this movement), she
is better understood as a fantasy echo, as the key to a scenario in
which women merge into a vast, undifferentiated collective, the many
becoming one through the power of maternal love.
The paradigmatic scenario is contained in an account by the En-
glish suffragist Emmeline Pethick Lawrence of the International Wom-
en's Conference held at The Hague to oppose war in 191s. There was,
she said, “similarity in personality and dress of the delegates who
occupied the body of the hall. There was nothing in general appear-
ance to distinguish one nationality from another, and looking into our
own hearts we beheld as in a mirror the hearts of all those who were
assembled with us, because deep in our own hearts lies the common
heart of humanity. We realised that the fear and mistrust that had been
fostered between the peoples of the nations was an illusion. We dis-
covered that at the bottom, peace was nothing more or less than com-
munal love.’ Though this writing can surely be explained simply as
good feminist rhetoric in the context of massive imperialist warfare on
an unheard-of scale, such an explanation misses the emotional force of
 Fantasy Echo 61

the appeal. The description condenses the process by which women

recognize their commonality; they are already similar in personality
and appearance, but they are also involved in a process of identifica-
tion that melds them into one. By beholding themselves and one
another “as in a mirror,” they realize that “fear and mistrust” (differ-
ence) is “an illusion,’ and they “discover” that peace is “communal
love.” What the women share is “the common heart of humanity,’ a
metonymic displacement of the womb. The communal love that ema-
nates from this heart is the all-encompassing, selfless, seemingly sex-
less love of mothers for their children. In the scene, everyone loves like
a mother and is loved as a daughter—the reciprocity of love and desire
is assumed. The dissolving of the boundaries between mothers and
daughters constitutes the reclaiming of a certain “lost territory,’ the
pre-Oedipal love of the mother, and it provides what Luce Irigaray and
Julia Kristeva refer to as a nonphallic (and, in the context of patriarchal
symbolism, subversive) jouissance.
Irigaray and Kristeva have suggested (following Lacan on this
point) that it is the “murder” not of the father but of the mother (the
obliteration of her body and the relegation to nature of her undeni-
ably social role of reproduction) that is the founding act of Western
civilization. The maternal fantasy offered by Pethick Lawrence re-
stores the social role of mothers, for they are responsible for life, while
men wage war and cause death. The love that emanates from these
mothers, the positive community it generates, is only one side of the
dual perception (good and bad, loving and hateful, life and death) of
mothers that Melanie Klein theorizes,** and it is radically different
from, and in tension with, the misogynist fantasy that psychoanalysts
tell us associates loss of identity and even death with a mother’s
engulfing love.*4 Fantasies that provide the terms of political identi-
fication are undoubtedly selective; the one I have been describing sets
itself against the other options (bad mothers, the mortal danger of
incorporation) in its appeal to community. In addition, the feminist
maternal fantasy, unlike the fantasy of the female orator, works to
reconcile contradiction (in the way that the pregnant mother’s body
signifies and contains difference) and seems to lack the punishing
dimensions of “A Child Is Being Beaten,” perhaps because it calls on
pre-Oedipal associations between mothers and children.
 62 Chapter Two

Here it may be helpful to follow Irigaray’s reasoning. Offering a

feminist variation on Lacan’s suggestion that woman was associated
with “a jouissance beyond the phallus,’ Irigaray seeks to detach
woman from her definition as a function of man. She posits instead a
sharp distinction between the “world of the flesh” (the body of the
mother) and the “universe of language” (the law of the father). “The
problem is that, by denying the mother her generative power and by
wanting to be the sole creator, the Father, according to our culture,
superimposes upon the archaic world of the flesh a universe of lan-
guage and symbols” that subsume women to men.* Irigaray looks for
a way of establishing an autonomous realm for women by bringing to
light the “jouissance beyond the phallus” that patriarchal law repressed.
She particularly emphasizes the attractions of the mother-daughter
relationship and the positive aspects of identity between these two:
Given that the first body [we/they] have any dealings with is a woman’s
body, that the first love they share is mother love, it is important to
remember that women always stand in an archaic and primal relationship
with what is known as homosexuality. . . When analytic theory says that
the little girl must give up her love of and for her mother, her desire of and
for her mother, so as to enter into the desire of /for the father, it subordi-
nates woman to a normative heterosexuality, normal in our societies, but
completely pathogenic and pathological. Neither little girl nor woman
must give up love for their mother. Doing so uproots them from their
identity, their subjectivity. (44)

Much of Irigaray’s writing is prescriptive; the future conditional

articulates what always seemed to me an original late-twentieth-
century utopian vision: “But if mothers could be made women, there
would be a whole mode of a relationship of desiring speech between
daughter and mother, son and mother, and it would, I think, com-
pletely rework the language [langue] that is now spoken” (52). In fact,
I think there are historical precedents for Irigaray’s formulations,
evidence that corroborates her theoretical insights into the maternal
fantasies that have at certain historical moments consolidated women
under the banner of feminism. These fantasies don’t evoke the mater-
nal body and its flesh directly, if at all; rather, they refer to the
ineffable quality of love. This love both avows and denies an explicitly
 Fantasy Echo 63

sexual longing of and for the mother. As if in deference to patriarchal

rules, it covers over its own transgression.
The invocation of the feminist maternal fantasy is evident in the
1840s and 1850s. In France, romantic Christianity blended with Saint-
Simonian socialism to inspire Flora Tristan and Deroin in their rap-
turous visions of messianic maternal salvation. Tristan called on
women, whose moral likeness, rooted in motherhood, erased differ-
ences of class, education, and wealth, to take the lead in establishing
the “universal union of working men and women.”

Women, whose souls, hearts, spirits, senses are endowed with such sensi-
tivity that ... you have a tear for every sorrow,—a cry for every groan of
anguish,—a sublime enthusiasm for every generous action,—a self-sacri-
fice for every suffering,—a consoling word for every affliction: women,
who are consumed by the need to love, to act, to live; who seek everywhere
for an outlet for this burning and ceaseless activity of the soul which in-
spires you and consumes you, torments you, kills you; women,—will you re-
main silent and hidden forever, while the largest and most useful class, your
brothers and sisters the proletarians, those who work, suffer, weep and groan,
come and implore you to help them overcome misery and ignorance?>’

The passion described is attributed to the soul, but the erotic quality
of this “burning and ceaseless activity ... which inspires ... consumes
... torments... kills” is undeniable. Tristan urged the male workers in
her union to submit to women’s leadership. “I pointed out,’ she
reported, “that we had reached the reign of women,—that the reign of
war, of brute force, had been that of [men] and that now women
could achieve more than men because they had more love, and today
love alone must rule.’>* Here was the theme of “communal love” and
the end of all difference that would sound again in new form in 1915.
In a similar voice, and in Tristan’s wake, Deroin predicted a future
characterized by harmony. Everyone would live peacefully in a large,
social family, united by pure, maternal love: “The time of the reign of
woman is near and humanity will quit the fatal path of progress
through pain, of progress through struggle and poverty, to follow the
providential path of peaceful and harmonious progress, led by the
mother of humanity, Woman regenerated by liberty. For Deroin
and many of her associates, the jouissance of the fantasy came pre-
64 Chapter Two

cisely from the juxtaposition of sex and purity, and the use of roman-
tic, even erotic, language to characterize chaste and selfless maternal
love. The mother, like the saintly mother of Christ, “acts because she
loves. Love of humanity is eternal love.’*°
A later, more secular example of this feminist maternal fantasy
comes from the call of the African American Mary Church Terrell in
1899 to white women to come to the aid of their black sisters, whose
circumstances denied them the same thrill of joy at the contempla-
tion of their children. “So rough does the way of her infant appear to
many a poor black mother that instead of thrilling with the joy which
you feel, as you clasp your little one to your breast, she trembles with
apprehension and despair.’*! Overwhelming pride in one’s children
and the sensual pleasure of holding them (“thrill” and “joy” are sig-
nifiers of jouissance) are the feelings women are presumed to identify
with across the vast differences of race and class. Mother and child,
different and the same, women black and white, are to recognize one
another through maternal love and then join in loving union—all dif-
ferences effaced. The full account of the scene I referred to earlier—
Verone’s 1914 appeal to “all women of all nations, who suffer child-
birth with the same pain’—illustrates the concrete unifying power of
this vision. When Verone spoke, we are told, “a formidable cry of
approval came from the audience, and it redoubled when a German
delegate threw herself into the arms of Verone, and kissed her on both
cheeks."** The reconciling force of maternal love brings a sisterly
embrace; the scene is suffused with love, the healing, binding love of
and for the mother. Through it, the women on the stage and in
the audience become one. Echoing forward, we find Robin Morgan
searching for the common ground of Sisterhood Is Global. Despite
geographic, ethnic, religious, social, racial, and other diversities, she
asks, “do we not, after all, easily recognize one another?”

The underlying similarities emerge once we begin to ask sincere questions

about differences. The real harem tradition included intense female
friendship, solidarity, and high culture. . . . The real “belly dance” is a
childbirth ritual celebrating life; the Rags al Shargi . . . is meant as an
exercise in preparation for labor and childbirth. ... The examples could go
on and on... . Is it any wonder that such words as daring, rebellion,
journey, risk, and vision recur throughout Sisterhood is Global like refrains
 Fantasy Echo 65

punctuating the same basic story: one of deep suffering but also of a
love—for life, children, men, other women, the land of one’s birth, human-
ity itself—a love fierce enough to cleanse the world?

“A love fierce enough to cleanse the world”: though the terms and
practices of motherhood varied profoundly from mid-nineteenth-
century France to late twentieth-century America, they were sub-
sumed—literally, in the fantasy scenario—by this idealization of love.
What I have been calling a feminist maternal fantasy allowed the
return of (what Irigaray and Kristeva differently think of as) a re-
pressed jouissance. Its rearticulation served to consolidate feminist
solidarity in the moment when it was invoked, in history and as
history. Maternal love referred to a desire (her own, her children’s)
distinct from and potentially prior to that which is associated with
heterosexuality, with phallic economies, with men. The world of
women conjured by feminists in this fantasy is one in which women
find pleasure among themselves, or “jouissent d’elles-mémes” in Iriga-
ray’s words.** The historian’s pleasure, it might be added, is in finding
herselfaparty to this scene of feminine jouissance.

Conclusion

I am not seeking to discredit feminism by pointing to the importance

of fantasy in enabling identifications that transcend history and na-
tional specificity. Instead, I want to argue that thinking about the
operations of fantasy deepens our understanding of how a movement
like feminism works and, at the same time, avoids attributing essen-
tialist qualities to it. I am also not suggesting that these women were
not really affected by discrimination, which disenfranchised them
and denied them public access. The anxiety in the repeated scenes of
female public oration, of course, comments on relations of power in
the “real” world. My points are that power is produced in concrete
and particular relationships, that subjects are structured as a function
of those relationships, and that these subjects cannot transcend the
specificity of their circumstances without the simplification fantasy
provides. Similarly, 1 do not mean to argue that mothers lack real
concern for their children’s lives, though I do not think they have a
natural (or indeed even an experientially based) antipathy to conflict
 66 Chapter Two

and war. Instead, concepts of motherhood, and the very experience of

being a mother, have varied by class and culture and historical epoch
and have done so in many more ways than I have been able to discuss
in this short essay. The fantasy of maternal love has provided femi-
nists with a way of establishing a commonality based on unconscious
associations, despite their differences, and this has been its efficacy.
If, as analysts of identity, we think of these fantasy scenarios also as
echoes and thus look for the distortions and diffractions—the indi-
vidual variations of detail and figuration in them—we will be able
to take into account the profound differences in the very being of
women that it is the function of fantasy to efface. In that way we will
deepen our appreciation of how some political movements use his-
tory to solidify identity and thereby build constituencies across the
boundaries of difference that separate physical females from one
another within cultures, between cultures, and across time.
I have restricted my attention in this essay to feminism, whose
history is most familiar to me. But I think fantasy echo has much
wider applicability, and not only to movements built on collective
identities. The term usefully describes the figure of the “white sheik”
detailed in the work of the anthropologist Steven Caton. The white
sheik was a figure used by successive generations of European and
American men to elaborate their relationships (variously as adven-
turers, entrepreneurs, spies, and clandestine military operatives) to
the East by identifying with T. E. Lawrence as depicted (phantas-
matically) in the film Lawrence of Arabia. These men resonate espe-
cially with the scene in which Lawrence dances, clothed in the flow-
ing robes of a sheik (that endow him, if not with outright femininity,
then with an ambiguous alternative to Western masculinity). Here, in
the staging of his jouissance, Lawrence presents the lure of the Ori-
ent. The recurring fantasy scenario, as Caton has described it, was
adjusted and adapted—in the mode of an echo—to different histor-
ical moments in the changing geopolitical ties between East and
West.*s
Fantasy echo is not a label that, once applied, explains identity. It is
rather the designation of a set of psychic operations by which certain
categories of identity are made to elide historical differences and
create apparent continuities. Fantasy echo is a tool for analysts of
 Fantasy Echo 67

political and social movements as they read historical materials in

their specificity and particularity. It does not presume to know the
substance of identity, the resonance of its appeal, or the transforma-
tions it has undergone. It presumes only that where there is evidence
of what seems enduring and unchanging identity, there is a history
that needs to be explored.
 3. Feminist Reverberations

IN MARCH 1942, only a few months after the United States had
entered the Second World War, the chairman of the program commit-
tee for the American Historical Association’s annual meeting, the Yale
historian Stanley Pargellis, wrote to the Hunter College professor
Dorothy Ganfield Fowler in her capacity as secretary of the Berkshire
Conference of Women Historians. He was turning to Mrs. Fowler (as
he addressed her—he referred to all the men mentioned in the letter
as “Professor”) for some advice. The general theme for the 1942
meeting was, fittingly enough, “Civilization in Crisis” and the pro-
gram committee (which initially had managed not to include a single
woman in its ranks) hoped to organize a session on women and the
great crises of civilization. Pargellis thought that if the right scholars
(men or women) could be found, “we might produce an original and
significant session of two or three papers, one on the changing func-
tions of women in the fifth or the sixteenth centuries, and one on the
nature of the problem today.’! Fowler replied with the names of two
scholars: Pearl Kibre, a medievalist, and Mary Sumner Benson, an
Americanist working on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
And, showing herself to be a model of disciplinary rectitude, she
 Feminist Reverberations 69

suggested that the question of women’s status in the present might

best be addressed more informally by members of the audience, since
little reliable material was available for serious research.” The follow-
ing day, Pargellis brusquely turned down her proposal:

Dear Mrs. Fowler, I am glad that you were interested in the subject about
which I wrote you, but must confess that I was disappointed to find that
so little attention has been given to the problem of the way in which the
status of women reflects the character of a civilization. I gather from your
letter that both Dr. Kibre and Dr. Benson have been concerned with
descriptive treatments only, and that there is no one who could handle for
the great critical periods a more interpretive approach. If my understand-
ing of your letter is the right one, I think that we had better abandon plans
for a session upon this important topic.’

Several days later, Fowler wrote back, assuring Pargellis that the
scholars she had recommended were quite capable of interpretive
approaches and offering to have the Berkshire Conference take over
full responsibility for the session.* He replied that “without commit-
ting ourselves in any way,’ the program committee was willing to let
the women historians explore some further possibilities. His letter
went on to outline his expectations in a most condescending manner,
defining terms (“by sweeping change we mean something more pro-
found and more long range than a war”) and time periods (“As for the
American Revolution, we have come to the conclusion that it is of
insufficient significance to stand along with the shift from medieval-
ism to modernity as a period of crisis”).> Fowler replied politely that
she would take all this up with her colleagues at the forthcoming
meeting of the Berkshire Conference, but there is no correspondence
after that.° In any case, there was no annual meeting of the American
Historical Association in December 1942. It was canceled at the re-
quest of the Office of Defense Transportation (the Department of
Homeland Security of its day). Instead, the association published a
series of papers that had been prepared for the meeting; not surpris-
ingly, given this exchange of letters, the topic of women in history was
not included.’
I cite this incident for several reasons. First, it allows us a moment
of self-congratulation for the role of the Berkshire Conference in
 70 Chapter Three

making women and women’s history integral to the profession and

the discipline. We’ve come a long way since the 1940s, at least as far as
some feminist goals are concerned. And I think recognizing that fact
and acknowledging the role of these early pioneers is a good way to
begin this conference. Second (and this is not a reason for celebra-
tion), we are once again in a period of grave crisis, on the brink, it
sometimes seems, of another world war. A generation of women’s
history writing—much of it nurtured by the Berkshire Conference, a
crucible for theoretical and substantive debates of feminism—has
guaranteed that this time we are in a position to provide critical
interpretation. Feminism has taught us to analyze the operations of
difference and the workings of power, and we can extend these analy-
ses to many different arenas. What Wendy Brown has called a femi-
nist analytics of power is one of the lasting results of the second wave
of feminist scholarship. Indeed, one of our early claims—that atten-
tion to women and gender would yield analyses of politics beyond
the relationships of women and men—has been borne out repeatedly.
The feminist analytics of power is my subject here. I want to reflect
on its insights as they apply to the current crisis, to the history of
women and gender, and to the themes of global and local that tra-
verse these seemingly disparate fields.

“Fictitious Unities”

Although the title of the conference where I presented an earlier ver-

sion of these reflections—“Local Knowledge «> Global Knowledge”—
was chosen long before September 11, 2001, it poses a good problem-
atic for a time of crisis, even though it carries none of the sense of
urgency, anger, and despair that many of us have been feeling since
the attacks. The arrows between the two spheres (local and global)
point in both directions, implying interaction and exchange: two-
directional flows of information, people, technology, markets, capital,
natural resources, cultural objects, cultural meanings, and diseases
and their cures. There’s room in our analyses of the global and the
local, if not in these iconic representations, for asymmetries of power,
for domination and resistance, even for interpenetration and hybrid-
ity. What can’t be captured by the title and those benign arrows (they
 Feminist Reverberations 71

are, after all, directional signals, not instruments of aggression) are

the horrific images of terrorist attacks and relentless warfare that we
have witnessed. The Twin Towers imploding, suicide bombs explod-
ing, our weapons of mass destruction seeking to locate and destroy
terrorists and their weapons of mass destruction, tanks crushing
homes with residents still inside, a brutal occupying force wantonly
destroying the infrastructure of an aspiring state. The wrenching
scenes in newspapers and on television: faces contorted in unspeak-
able grief; refugees running and screaming, or silently fleeing smoke
and fire; shattered families mourning their losses; bewildered civil-
ians roaming through ruins, bloodied, homeless, and hungry; furious
orators railing venomously against outside enemies; flags burning
and insignias of hatred scrawled on ruined buildings; bitter accusa-
tions and gunshots exchanged across mined borders—Pakistan, India,
Afghanistan, Israel, Lebanon, New York.’ The threat of nuclear weap-
ons is no longer containable by mutual assured destruction pacts of
the Cold War era, so fears of devastation, once quieted, have re-
turned. We ponder uneasily the connections between blood and oil:
does the spilling of one guarantee the flow of the other? The leaders
of America—now the only superpower—flagrantly violate the rules of
law, domestic and international, that they claim it is their mission to
protect. The USA Patriot Act, signed into law on October 26, 2001,
eliminates judicial overview of the government in its surveillance of
individuals and organizations and its restrictions of their activities; it
authorizes searches, seizures, and detentions that might otherwise be
unconstitutional. We have seen the internment of ethnically marked
suspects on the flimsiest of grounds; the creation of military tri-
bunals; the silencing of critical dissent (including the suspension in
some universities of professors—usually themselves Arab but, in one
case, a translator for an imprisoned Muslim cleric—for expressions of
pro-Palestinian opinions); the unilateral abrogation of international
treaties; flagrant disregard for such instruments of international law
as the Geneva Conventions; and the reckless adoption of cowboy-
style, “go it alone” diplomacy. All this has been justified in the name
of an apocalyptic moral vision, revealed to these born-again cold
warriors, whose actions seem to be intensifying rather than lessening
the possibilities of greater and more dangerous conflicts. Clifford
 72 Chapter Three

Geertz’s apt characterization, “The World in Pieces”—a metaphoric

reference to the fracturing of identities and allegiances at local and
global levels—now has the force of a literal prediction.!° “Peace in the
world,’ went our protest song of the 1950s, “or the world in pieces.”
Stanley Pargellis’s 1942 report to the American Historical Associa-
tion was titled The Quest for Political Unity in World History. Today
such a quest seems naive at best. And no one is offering world unity as
a way out of the current crisis. Or, if they are, it is in stark, binary
terms: alliances of good against axes of evil, Western secular rational-
ism against Islamic religious fundamentalism, modernity against
primitive tribalism, reason of state against the forces of terrorism.
Lines are being drawn and categories produced to give schematic
coherence to the messy entanglements of local, national, regional,
and international politics.
As feminists we have learned to be wary of such categories— Denise
Riley has dubbed them “fictitious unities” because even as they offer
terms for identification, they create hierarchies and obscure differ-
ences that need to be seen.'! (Paradoxically, the fact that they are ficti-
tious makes their effects no less real.) “Men” and “women, we now
know, are not simple descriptions of biological persons, but represen-
tations that secure their meanings through interdependent dichot-
omies: strong /weak, active /passive, reasonable / emotional, public /
private, political/domestic, mind/body. One term gains its meaning
in relation to the other and also to other binary pairs nearby. Indeed,
the Other is a crucial (negative) factor for any positive identity—and
the positive identity stands in superior relation to the negative. Wom-
en’s supposed lack of reason has historically not only been a justifica-
tion for denying them education or citizenship, it has also served to
depict reason as a function of masculinity. The boundaries of public
and private have not reflected the existing roles of men and women but
have instead created them, with the imagined map of gender territo-
ries becoming the referent not only for social organization, but for the
very meanings (social, cultural, and psychological) of the differences
between the sexes. If the meanings of difference are created by con-
trasting categories, within the categories coherent identities are pro-
duced by denying differences. So although the term “women” histor-
ically has served to consolidate feminist movements, it has also made
 Feminist Reverberations 73

race, class, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, and nationality somehow sec-

ondary, as if these distinctions among us (and the hierarchical posi-
tioning that accompanies them) mattered less than the physical sim-
ilarities we share. At least since the 1980s, feminist scholarship has
learned (often quite painfully—think of the bitter challenges posed by
women of color to the hegemony of white women, by lesbians to
mainstream feminism’s normative heterosexuality, and by Eastern Eu-
ropean women to the presumed superiority of Western feminist the-
ory) to make nuanced distinctions along multiple axes of difference;
its theories no longer assume fixed relationships between entities but
treat them as the mutable effects of temporally, culturally, and histor-
ically specific power dynamics. The mantra of “race, class, gender” was
a way of thematizing—and so rigidifying and therefore reducing the
applicability of—what is in fact a much more open analytic approach.
The premises of this approach are what is important, and they are
what inform necessarily detailed readings of specific situations. If
there is something that can be called feminist methodology, it might
be summarized by these axiomatic statements: there is neither a self
nor a collective identity without an Other; there is no inclusiveness
without exclusion, no universal without a rejected particular, no neu-
trality that doesn’t privilege an interested point of view; and power is
always an issue in the articulation of these relationships. Put in other
words, we might say that all categories do some kind of productive
work; the questions are how, and to what effect.
We need this feminist methodology in the current crisis. It should
make us pause at the binary divisions of the world into good and evil;
at the phantasmatic evocation of a centuries-old crusade to the death
by Islam against the West—even when it is offered by reputable
scholars such as Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis.'” How like
those misogynistic fantasies of sexually frenzied women turning the
world upside down these predictions are: reason threatened by pas-
sion, order by disorder, liberal tolerance consumed by rampant fanat-
icism, enlightenment endangered by the dark forces of sex and super-
stition—primal conflicts (figured as castration or incorporation)
depicted as timeless and as foretelling the end of time. Certainly this
way of thinking is the end of history and of politics.
Look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, depicted as the encounter
74. Chapter Three

between two opposing and equal forces: Jews and (Palestinian) terror-
ists. Taking advantage of September u1, Ariel Sharon and others have
written this very particular Middle Eastern conflict into the larger
Manichaean script. Official Israeli and American rhetoric takes no
account of significant details or of the political dynamics of an unequal
relationship: the effects of Israeli occupation (which can only be called
a form of state terrorism), of the steady expansion of Jewish settle-
ments in defiance of Oslo and other accords, of the humiliations and
deprivations visited daily, over the years, on Palestinians within Israel
and in the West Bank and Gaza. Instead, Israel is depicted as an
unwarranted victim of Palestinian rage, drawing on an association of
Jews with the Holocaust, which is not appropriate in this situation. Yes,
there are terrible and inexcusable attacks on Israeli civilians, but the
state of Israel is not a victim; it isa mighty nuclear power, an occupying
force. Without excusing or condoning suicide bombings, we can read
them as weapons of the weak; symptoms of terrible injustices, which
include the denial to the Palestinians of the kind of institutional foun-
dations that would enable them to engage in alternative (and more
peaceful) forms of politics or even more acceptable forms of warfare.
Is it any wonder that those treated brutally reply in kind? That those
left outside the law (Palestinians are not equal citizens within Israel,
nor do they have a state of their own) behave illegally?!* There are
undeniable differences between English suffragists and suicide bomb-
ers, and I don’t mean to equate them in any way, but wasn’t the
message of the English suffragists who set fires and broke windows in
the early 1900s that we shouldn't expect lawful behavior from those
who are not allowed to make laws? And isn’t the idea that violent
feminist actions are proof of women’s hysterical nature analogous to
the treatment of any protest by Palestinians as inherently terroristic—
as if terrorism were an essential trait of Palestinians?
The good-versus-evil opposition doesn’t only wipe out the particu-
lar conditions of this conflict and mask the vast inequalities between
the sides. It also makes the differences within each side—for the
contestations of politics—hard to see or hear. If youre critical of
Israel’s policies, you're anti-Semitic; if you think there’s a case to be
made for Palestine, you're an apologist for terror. In a perverse way, this
reductive categorizing has opened up new space for expressions of
 Feminist Reverberations 75

traditional anti-Semitism—Jews as a group have become a target not

only for those opposed to Israel's actions, but also for racists who have
long hated Jews. And it has deprived of a voice those critics of Israel
who are not anti-Semitic. There have, of course, been attempts to
challenge these categorizations: many Europeans and their leaders
have rejected the simplistic oppositions, calling for a more historicized
understanding of the conflict (though they have been bitterly de-
nounced as anti-Semites by Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon);
and there are a number of petitions signed by Jews who deliberately
invoke their group identity to dissociate themselves from Israel’s pol-
icies. Still the overwhelming pressure, here at least, is to deploy essen-
tialist categories, to homogenize identity, to make difference a matter
of moral qualities rather than of politics and history. As feminists we
know that the ruses of essentialism—whatever guises they adopt—
ultimately perpetuate inequalities and militate against change. Women
need not be the explicit object of debate for us to deploy our analytics of
power to useful effect.
But when women are the object of campaigns by the forces of good
against the forces of evil, it is important that we use our methodologies
to read what’s going on. The cynical attempt to make the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq into crusades on behalf of women’s emancipa-
tion ought not to confuse feminists, and not only because concern for
the rights of women was not exactly a priority of the Bush administra-
tion before September 11. Rather, what informs our skepticism is our
understanding of the ways that oppositional categories work to elimi-
nate contradiction and create the illusion of homogeneity (all of us on
the good side must believe the same things). The conflation of terror-
ism and women’s oppression erases any problems the good side may
face (where there is no terrorism, it follows that there is no oppression
of women), and it rallies the support of some potential internal critics
(such as feminists, liberals, and human rights advocates). “The fight
against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women,”
first lady Laura Bush told the nation in a radio address in November
2001. “The brutal oppression of women,’ she said, “is the central goal
of the terrorists.” Not all Muslims are terrorists, she added (making a
distinction not always observed by the FBI and other parts of the
Department of Justice): “Only the terrorists and the Taliban forbid
76 Chapter Three

education to women. Only the terrorists and the Taliban threaten to

pull out women’s fingernails for wearing nail polish.’* (All bases are
covered here: equality feminists get education, difference feminists get
nail polish!) For good measure, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
joined the chorus, attributing Afghan women’s newfound freedoms to
our “recent military victories against the Taliban.” Not only had re-
strictive dress codes been lifted, he crowed, but the beating of women
for the “crime of laughing in public” had ended.'s (I find it hard to
imagine Afghan women laughing—in public or private—as American
bombs rained down on their villages. And I wonder, too, about what
fixing on women’s laughter in public as a sign of their freedom tells us
about Rumsfeld’s imagination and about his conception of rights.) I
don't mean to imply here that the Taliban treated women well, just
that these simplistic equations of good and evil, virtue and terror, us
and them don't offer credible diagnoses of, or solutions for, the prob-
lems of Afghan (or for that matter any) women. In addition, they pro-
mote a particular vision of women as victims, specifically of “other”
women (Third World, Middle Eastern, or Islamic) as in need of saving
by the West. If we follow our own theoretical insights, this inevitably
creates a hierarchy that promotes and reinforces a sense not just of
Western superiority, but of Western women’s superiority—the old
colonial relationship emerges intact in an operation of domination
disguised as a mission of salvation. Lila Abu-Lughod warns against the
very strong appeal of such rescue campaigns. “When you save some-
one,” she reminds us, “you are saving them from something. You are
also saving them to something. What violences are entailed in this
transformation? And what presumptions are being made about the
superiority of what you are saving them to? This is the arrogance that
feminists need to question.”!¢
Using the salvation of women to justify the war in Afghanistan had
a broader resonance; it not only reconfigured a complex geopolitical
engagement (in which oil pipelines, among other material issues, play
no small part) into a simple battle against terrorism, it also used
recognizable gender references to articulate power relations between
protector and protected. As feminists we are rightly skeptical of turn-
ing our fate over to those who promise protection, who justify their
actions (whether aggressive, repressive, or merely taken without con-
 Feminist Reverberations 77

sulting us) in the name of our security. (Indeed, one of the criticisms
of the Taliban was that they justified their treatment of women as
“protection.”) As Iris Marion Young has argued, the central logic of
this kind of protection is masculinist, and it assumes “the subordinate
relation of those in the protected position. In return for male protec-
tion, the woman concedes critical distance and decision making au-
tonomy.’!” Extending the analysis, Young argues that however benign
it seems, state-sponsored protection denies citizens the role they
ought to play in democratic societies:

Through the logic of protection the state demotes members of a democ-

racy to dependents. State officials adopt the stance of masculine protector,
telling us to entrust our lives to them, not to question their decisions
about what will keep us safe. Their protector position puts us, the citizens
and residents who depend on their strength and vigilance for our security,
in the position of women and children under the charge of the male pro-
tector. Because they take the risks and organize the agency of the state, it
is their prerogative to determine the objectives of protective action and
their means. In a security regime there is no room for separate and shared
powers, nor for questioning and criticizing the protector’s decisions and
orders. Good citizenship in a security regime consists in cooperative
obedience for the sake of the safety of all.’®

The relations established by the logic of protection are multiple

and complex: the protector is the United States and so American
women, too, are positioned as protectors of the rest of the world; but
domestically, women along with most of the population are in the
feminine position of dependency and subordination to the govern-
ment. The administration’s point of view becomes the only true one,
even if the facts have to be fabricated by a special arm of the Depart-
ment of Defense (an activity proposed in the early days of the war in
Afghanistan). One of the premises of feminism over the years has
been that equality for women means better and more democracy.
“Democracy without women is not democracy,” was the slogan of
feminists in the European Union in the 1980s and 1990s. The validity
of this claim seems borne out by Young’s analysis of the security
regime and its logic of protection. Dependency and subordination
are never in the best interests of the protected, for they rule out real
78 Chapter Three

participation, denying agency and silencing those voices that might

have something different to propose.

Reverberations

We need the feminist analysis of categories of identity not only to

detect the differentials of power constructed by binary oppositions
that are purported to be timeless, natural, and universal, but also to
contextualize and historicize these categories. Feminist methodology
has taught us to ask about variation, difference, and conflict whenever
we are presented with neatly contained entities—and not only “man”
and “woman.” We ought to assume, relying on our methodology even
if we lack expertise in the particular field, that there is neither a
uniform Islam, nor a single entity called the Middle East. These are
politically convenient labels that mask the varieties of states and
regimes in the region, as well as of religious movements, including
Islamic feminisms that offer new interpretations of the Koran to
legitimize claims for changes in women’s status. It is these feminisms,
strange to our traditions of secular individualism, that Fatima Gailani
(a member of the Grand Council that deliberated the political recon-
struction of Afghanistan) reminds us, that need a certain recognition
and autonomy. She urged American feminists to press for a US for-
eign policy that would not “save” Afghan women to our values but
would create the kinds of conditions that would permit them to
participate fully in necessarily heated debates about the future of
their own country.!°
We have learned—sometimes with great difficulty—to acknowl-
edge these very different feminisms, to accept the fact that feminism
refers to a multiplicity of often conflicting movements. Speaking of the
global and the local, even using two-directional arrows, doesn’t quite
capture it. There may be a recognizable core of meaning, but feminism
(like any such concept) needs to be understood as if in translation.
Anna Tsing has told us that these are always “faithless translations,”
since linguistic and cultural differences as well as specific uses affect
the meanings of terms.”° Echo may be a better metaphor than transla-
tion for designating the mutability of words or concepts because it is
more mobile, connoting not just a distorted repetition but also move-
 Feminist Reverberations 79

ment in space and time—history.*! Perhaps in these days of cataclys-

mic transmission, it would be better still to talk about reverberations,
seismic shock waves moving out from dispersed epicenters, leaving
shifted geological formations in their wake. The word “reverberation”
carries a sense both of causes of infinite regression—reverberations are
subsequent echoes, successions of echoes—and of effect—reverbera-
tions are also repercussions.
Reverberation occurs to me, I think, because it’s the best way to
characterize circuits of influence these days. It applies well to the case
of France, where in June 2000 feminists succeeded in passing a law on
parity that requires equal numbers of women and men to be candi-
dates for most elections. The events of September 11 and the Middle
East conflict have been a setback for implementation of the parity
law, however. In the 2002 French presidential elections, the right-
wing nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen made a strong enough showing to
secure a place in the second round of the contest. Le Pen’s appeal was
anti-immigrant, which in France means anti-Muslim. Martial Bour-
quin, the Socialist mayor of Audincort, one of the towns that voted
heavily for Le Pen’s National Front, explained that hostility to Muslim
immigrants, who constituted some 15 percent to 20 percent of the
local population, had intensified before the elections. “What hap-
pened in New York, Afghanistan, in the Middle East has deepened
the religious divide” here, he said.?? (France is surely not the only
place in which local tensions have been recast in terms of “insecurity”
in the face of threats of terrorism [which now includes everything
from juvenile crime to movements of resistance within authoritarian
states |and whose electoral results [a strong showing of the far Right]
have had repercussions at home and on the international scene.) In
an effort to stave off legislative victories by Le Pen’s party, the centrist
and left parties in France decided not to implement parity in their
selection of candidates for the elections to the National Assembly in
2002. Since “it’s a matter of winning,” one party leader commented,
the risk of running women is too great. If a temporary setback for
French feminists is one of the repercussions of September 11, there are
other reverberations of the parity movement itself that have been
more positive. Taking up the argument that citizenship means not
just voting but holding office, women from Mexico to the United
80 Chapter Three

Kingdom, and from India to the United States, have been pressing for
laws to increase their numbers as representatives. This is an example
of an idea catching on, being adapted as it moves, working differently
in different contexts.
Reverberation is a good way to think about this global circulation of
feminist strategies, of feminism itself, and also of the analytic term
“gender.” Both “gender” and “feminism” are usually taken to have
Anglo-American origins; indeed, for some critics they are an example
of the one-way trajectory of globalization, in the transmission of goods
or ideas. Thus feminism has been reviled as one of those commodities
“made in the USA’ that corrupts the culture of traditional societies,
and gender (of similar provenance) has been taken to constitute a
threat to the natural or “God-given” distinctions between the sexes. In
fact, neither feminism nor gender are homogeneous even at their
points of origin (if we can even identify such points): the forms they
take and the meanings given to them are adapted to local circum-
stances, which then have international reverberations of their own.
What ultimately unites them, as I have argued in chapter 2, is a phan-
tasmatic identification across temporal and spatial lines of difference.
Take the example of “gender,” a term that emanated from American
feminist circles. Even here, though, there was no fixed meaning beyond
the idea of “social sex.’ Since “sex” connotes both biology and sexual
relations (sexuality), it immediately complicates “gender.” There were
feminists who took sexual difference as a given, the ground on which
gender systems were then built; there were others who took sexual dif-
ference to be the effect of historically variable discursive practices of
“gender.’ The first approach made much of the sex/ gender distinction
and focused on cultural construction—the assignment of roles and the
attribution of traits to sexed individuals—deliberately leaving aside
the question of nature. The research these feminists undertook tended
to be empirical: histories of exemplary women; recoveries of women
writers and artists; statistical demonstrations of occupational and
wage discrimination; and documentation of the sexism of doctors,
priests, educators, and politicians. The second approach rejected the
sex/ gender, nature / culture dichotomy. “If the immutable character of
sex is contested,” writes Judith Butler, “perhaps this construct called
‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was
 Feminist Reverberations 81

always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction be-
tween sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.”23 Research
undertaken from this vantage point asked how knowledge of sex and
sexual difference was produced and institutionalized, and it was often
informed by poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theory.
But the clarity of our empiricist / theoretical divide blurred as femi-
nists around the world took up the term “gender,” sometimes translat-
ing it (often with great difficulty), sometimes leaving it untranslated.
Either way, there were revealing tensions, terrifically interesting sub-
versions that might, for example, turn sex into gender or gender into
sex.* In Eastern Europe different theoretical uses of “gender” had
everything to do with particular political positions. Those looking for
ways to counter rightist conservative notions of the natural or God-
given facts of biology appropriated theories that deconstructed bi-
nary oppositions and emphasized the indeterminacy and variety, as
well as the mutability, of differences attributed to biological sex. In
contrast, those contending with leftist conservatisms that took equal-
ity to mean the obliteration of difference (usually the subsuming of
women into the category “Man”) sought ways of making sexual differ-
ence, and the social inequalities it engenders, a central tenet of their
theorizing and a visible fact of life. For them, statistical documenta-
tion was critical if social policy were to address gender inequalities.
And it didn’t matter that sexual difference (or nature) might be
reified in the process, since the point was to demonstrate that sex was
now, but should not in the future be, a ground for unequal social
treatment. Depending on particular local conditions, feminists in
different postcommunist countries faced different constellations of
these conservatisms; depending on their own politics, they combined
different theoretical insights to formulate their strategies. These new
combinations then echoed across international boundaries, in the
forums of the United Nations and elsewhere, to be picked up and
readjusted in new circumstances for other strategic reasons.
We can tell similar stories about the reverberations of feminism. I
want to tell two. The first is about Julia Kristeva, most often referred to
as a French feminist (along with Héléne Cixous and Luce Irigaray). In
the debates among US feminists in the 1980s, French feminism was
equated with poststructuralist theories of language and psychoanaly-
82 Chapter Three

sis and with an emphasis on difference; it was counterposed to a more

empirical, social-scientific Anglo-American feminism, which empha-
sized equality. This contrast, of course, obscured many things, among
them the numbers of French scholars and activists committed to social
science and equality, and the numbers of Anglo-Americans who em-
braced poststructuralism. More interesting, perhaps, it erased a his-
tory of cross-fertilization that confounds not only the French /Ameri-
can opposition, but the one that came into prominence in the 1990s
between Eastern European and Western feminism. Julia Kristeva was
born and educated in Bulgaria, where she began her career as an
interpreter of Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin developed his historicized
version of structuralism (a variant of the structuralist semiotics of lurii
Lotman and the structuralism of Roman Jakobson, to name only a few
of those working in this field at the time) as a way of challenging
Stalinist dogma. Bakhtin’s emphasis on formal textual readings was
meant to replace the crude sociological characterizations of artistic
and cultural productions used in official Soviet parlance; the sugges-
tion that meanings were shaped dialogically contradicted the commu-
nist state’s belief that language could be policed and signs controlled.
Kristeva moved to Paris in the mid-1960s, bringing Bakhtin’s notion of
polyphony to French structuralist debates, and she coined the term
“intertextuality” to lend (in her words) “dynamism to structuralism.””6
What came to be called French feminism, then, was crucially influ-
enced by philosophical movements opposing communism in Eastern
Europe, and by a theory that posited not the clash of differences but
interaction as the basis for communication.
This history undermines the presumed superiority to Eastern Eu-
ropeans of those Western feminists in the 1990s who offered what they
called (in the singular) “feminist theory” as the solution to the prob-
lems of women in the postcommunist era. The more complicated his-
tory of the 1970s is that while some English and American feminists
were trying to reconcile Marxism and feminism (in the context of the
New Left), Eastern European feminists in movements of resistance
rejected the official theory of communist states by embracing versions
of structuralism and then of poststructuralism. As Miglena Nikolchina
has shown, there was plenty of theory in Eastern Europe before and
after the fall of communism, and some strands of Western feminism
 Feminist Reverberations 83

had already felt its reverberations.”’ But the sharp differentiation be-
tween East and West offered in the 1990s more often attributed theory
to the West, leaving the East to fill in the blanks with empirical data.
(Western foundations—Soros, Ford—exacerbated the problem by
paying for translations of Western feminist writings into Eastern Euro-
pean languages but not Eastern writings into Western languages.)
This East/West divide and its accompanying erasure of history—the
general intellectual history of the region and the particular histories,
both intellectual and political, of the many variants of communism in
Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and so forth—had many repercussions.
They ran the spectrum from tensions in the East/West Feminist
Network to the far more disturbing actions of Catherine MacKinnon
on behalf of raped Croatian women. Lacking knowledge of the intri-
cacies of Yugoslav politics and of the beleaguered multicultural femi-
nist networks operating there, MacKinnon ended up allied with Croa-
tian nationalists, whose concern about raped women stopped at their
own borders and did not prevent them from supporting the rapes of
Bosnian or Serbian women as legitimate acts of war.*® MacKinnon’s
action had repercussions: although she surely drew attention to one
aspect of the outrages of ethnic cleansing, she lost the opportunity to
offer a critique of the virulent nationalism that fueled it, and she made
life more dangerous for those Yugoslav feminists who were trying to
offer that critique. These included feminists known as Women in
Black, who, beginning in 1991, took to the streets in silent protest.
Theirs is the second story about the reverberations of feminism that I
want to tell.
Women in Black (w1B) was started in Jerusalem in January 1988
(at the time of the first Intifada) by women protesting the Israeli
occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Once a week at the same
hour and in the same location—a major traffic intersection—a group
of women dressed in black raised a sign in the shape of a hand that
bore the message: “Stop the Occupation.” The idea spread quickly
to other places in Israel, where Palestinian and Jewish women often
stood together, and then to other countries, where solidarity vigils
were held in support of the Israeli women’s actions. “Around 1990,’
according to an old w1B web page no longer available, “Women in
Black vigils took on a life of their own.’ They were held in many
84 Chapter Three

countries and often had nothing to do with the Israeli occupation. In

Italy, w1B protested the violence of the Mafia; in Germany, they
stood against neo-Nazi attacks on migrant workers. In India, they
called for an end to religious fundamentalists’ mistreatment of
women. Since 1991 in the former Yugoslavia—in Belgrade, Zagreb,
and other cities—wi1B has protested the ethnic nationalism that en-
gulfed the country in wartime and that continues to define politics
there. In May 2000 in Fiji, w1B emerged to protest the overthrow of
the country’s democratically elected government. In 2001 there were
at least 123 regular w1B demonstrations held all over the world, some
in centers of conflict, others in solidarity with vigils elsewhere. Some
of the vigils have endured for years—their members have even held
international meetings—while others come and go as events seem to
require them. Their impact varies, in part depending on their prox-
imity to the violence they protest. Activism is harder and more dan-
gerous for the Women in Black in Israel, Serbia, or Kosovo than it is
for their supporters in London or New York (except, of course, when
the foreign supporters turn up on site, as some did in Ramallah in
2001 or when—as in the aftermath of September 11 in San Francisco—
the supporters become the object of an investigation by the FBI
because of their pro-Palestinian “international connections”).3° The
farther away from specific politics supporters get, the more difficult it
is to aim at clear political targets—as w1B in London discovered
when they assembled to protest the NaToO bombings of Serbia and
Kosovo.*! The abstract goal of peace was easily overcome by other
goals, they learned, and they called off their action when they found
themselves standing next to pro-Milogevié, pro-Serbian nationalist
demonstrators. But it is clear that as an international movement, WIB
has attained a certain recognition as a political force. In 2001 one
woman from Belgrade and another from Kosovo accepted the uN
Millennium Peace Prize for Women on behalf of the international
network of wis. And wiB was nominated for a Nobel Prize by
members of the parliaments of Denmark and Norway.
It is hard to imagine awarding these prizes to a phenomenon that is
not an actual organization. The amazing thing about w1s is that it is
an improvisational strategy, deployed locally rather than as a branch of
any centralized association. w1B is (in the words of the women them-
 Feminist Reverberations 85

selves) “a world-wide network of women committed to peace with jus-

tice and actively opposed to injustice, war, militarism and other forms
of violence,’ not in the abstract but in specific situations. To use their
words again, they are “not an organisation, but a means of communi-
cating and a formula for action.” The practical means of mobilization
are lists of telephone numbers and e-mail addresses, chains of affilia-
tion among individuals. This enables “a form of activism . . . unique
among oppositional parties and groups. ... The activities of Women in
Black developed in various phases according to immediate political
needs, a quick response to everyday political reality.’>> The symbolism
is multifaceted: a concrete manifestation of the body politic (of those
bodies that produce the citizenry of a nation) and their paradoxical
agency in the face of oppressive power—paradoxical because the mute,
nonviolent witness signifies powerlessness while it offers a message of
peace as the only rational alternative to catastrophe. The action is the
same (all women, all in black, standing silently and peacefully in a public
place at a regularly scheduled day and time), but its aim varies depend-
ing on the political context that the women have chosen to address.
They stand as feminists, and they make no claim to be natural-born
peacemakers. Yet they invoke a certain commonality: “women dressed
in black as in New York, the fashion center of the world, and at the same
time as in more primitive times where women’s duty was to dress and
mourn in black.”** They do argue that women “are often at the receiving
end of gendered violence in both peace and war, and [that] women are
the majority of refugees.” But it is their feminist analysis, not their
feminine nature, that leads them to see “masculine cultures as specially
prone to violence” and that gives them “a particular perspective on
security” and war.
wiB deploys what I have been calling the feminist analytics of
power in concrete (and different) political contexts. The group’s ac-
tions contradict official pronouncements about enemies and friends,
refusing to accept—and thus make real—membership in the “fictitious
unities” offered by their leaders. Instead they literally demonstrate the
complex realities of politics that acknowledge interconnected histo-
ries. Thus in Israel, wiB unites Palestinian and Jewish women in
defiance of the idea that they belong to necessarily antagonistic sides.
In Belgrade, w1B embraced multiethnic alliances, reminding their
 86 Chapter Three

fellow citizens of the fact that Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians had for
several generations lived side by side, intermarried, and shared citizen-
ship until nationalist aggression drove them apart. In August 2001, the
Serbian wIB called for an end to armed violence among Albanians,
Turks, Serbs, and Macedonians in Macedonia. At the time of the
NATO bombings in 1998, they were attacked as “Serbia’s inner en-
emies,’ “quislings” in the service of the United States, and their dem-
onstrations were banned. Their annual report that year was a “con-
fession of guilt” for seven years of activism in opposition to ethnic
homogenization and militarism. The report was based on or became
the basis for (I’m not sure which) a poem, “Confession,” written by
Jasmina TeSanovic*> who explains how she had come to write it. On
October 9, 1998, in Belgrade
the last anniversary standing of Women in Black took place.... It hada
grave ceremonial character, on the verge of civil war, of the renewed threat
of NATO bombs. . . . The women dressed in black were standing in the
ritual circle with long mottoes written on long flags whilst the new sym-
pathizers and participants were talking among themselves. .. . I had a
concrete feeling that an opposition existed in my town, in my country, and
that Women in Black gave us form, public space and language. The
conceptual action of this anniversary was a table with 100 papers on each
of which was printed in big letters 1 cCONFESS.26

Here is the poem that was based on these papers. It is a clear demon-
stration of applied feminist methodology that is at once familiar to us
and distinctive; we hear it as an echo, we feel it as a reverberation.

I CONEESS:
I,Jelena, 12 years of age, confess only to life
Jaccuse
That in 1991 I was against war, and I am now
I simply confess
That I will never be loyal to these authorities and
that I love Sabahet and Mira and Vjosa and Ana
To everything you wrote
That I am loyal to non-violence, solidarity, friendship and
that I am disloyal to all forms of authoritative power, violen
ce, hate
That I can no longer stand it and that I can’t take it anymore
 Feminist Reverberations 87

That I have lived two lives, one in Sarajevo and one in Belgrade
That I did not wish for all that happened to us, but
I could not stop it
To all the charges, I confess that I am a traitor in every sense
That I am a traitor of the dominant militaristic values in Serbian
society
That I will protest against all forms of violence, war and
discrimination
That I sang Bosnian songs and danced Albanian dances throughout
the whole war
That I hate war, violence and killing
I confess, but I also accuse
That violence in Kosovo cannot stop in the presence of the Serbian
police.
But it can with international forces which will allow peace and
process of negotiation
That there is no way I will go to the army.
Put militarism in the trash where it belongs
I confess that I will not give up my convictions, even if I wind up in
prison
That from the beginning of the peace movement
I have been an active participant in all anti-war gatherings
That I will organize yet one more anti-war campaign
if you keep up this
bullshit
That I am European, a citizen of the world and that Iam
an irreconcilable
opponent to this regime
That I respect the human rights of the Other and that first and
foremost I consider myself
a citizen
That I do not recognize war, discrimination, criminals and
hopelessness
That for seven years I have plotted against this Nazi regime
That I am bitter about the fact that the authorities in Serbia and
Yugoslavia constantly wage war
That conflicts should be resolved through negotiation and not
violence
No passaran!°”
88 Chapter Three

What is embodied here is not just dissent from the ruling power of
the state (a refusal to sanction its actions ceremonially and in practice:
“I will never be loyal”; “I am a traitor”), but active transgression of its
boundaries (“I sang Bosnian songs and danced Albanian dances’; “I
am European, a citizen of the world”; “I have lived two lives, one in
Sarajevo and one in Belgrade”). These are agents of resistance (re-
sponsible citizens) who insist that there are, have been, and will be
again democratic political alternatives to the regimes under which
they have been forced to live.
What is striking about w1B, in contrast to many earlier feminist
peace movements, is that it does not rely on a claim about the same-
ness of women or the unity of feminists. Instead, w1B’s existence as “a
means of mobilization and a formula for action” presumes fundamen-
tal differences among feminists: differences of context, history, and
understandings of the feminine and of feminism itself. International
gatherings, like the one held in Novi Sad to mark the tenth anniversary
of the Serbian vigils, have drawn as many as 250 women from sixteen
countries. These meetings provide a chance for the exchange of infor-
mation and the identification of new targets, but there is no attempt to
elaborate a common platform beyond an opposition to militarism and
violence. The recognition of difference is fundamental, even as the
form of protest and the name taken to describe the protesters is the
same. According to the Women in Black website, “Each group is
autonomous, each group focuses on the particular problems of per-
sonal and state violence in its part of the world.” wis embodies
feminism as a situated strategic operation; it is not a question of global
combined with local, but of echoes and reverberations that traverse
the world. Without explicitly acknowledging the importance of imag-
ined solidarities—fantasies that bridge differences, that find shared
desire in different settings—these women enact scenarios that bring
those solidarities into existence.>*

The Traces of History

I take Women in Black to be an example of the feminist analytics of
power in action, only one of the reverberations of the last decades of
the theorizing and honing of our methodologies.*? (I do not mean to
 Feminist Reverberations 89

endorse it as the best or most creative form feminist politics can take;
I offer it only as a good example of feminist reverberations.) Here is a
movement that is not narrowly restricted to things of interest to
women, but that takes the domain of large-scale politics as its own. It
punctures inflated dreams of national unity; exposes the toxicity of
ethnic cleansing; and insists on the possibility of mutual recognition,
rather than the dissolution of differences. It refuses to accept prevail-
ing arrangements of power as natural or inevitable, insisting that
better alternatives be considered. And, to recall the slogan of an
earlier era, it “speaks truth to power’; the gesture of silent witness
sharply rebukes those who would render us dependents by claiming
to rule on our behalf.
But in this gesture—the standing still of women, all in black, silent
and disapproving—there is also an undeniable echo of an earlier his-
tory: a feminist politics that rested on the moral infallibility of women
who, as mothers, put the interests and care of others above their own.
The appeal to “all women of all nations, who suffer childbirth with the
same pain” launched the Women’s International League for Peace and
Freedom as the First World War began; it informed the many peace
movements of the first and second waves of feminism; and it is still, for
some, what makes global sisterhood possible.* Although w1B stu-
diously avoids any call to action or claim to unity on the ground of
maternalism, the echoes of this essentialism in these women-only
demonstrations still seem audible. And they are testimony to the fact
that reverberations are not only contemporaneous (running horizon-
tally, circling the globe), but historical (running vertically, through
time).*1 Feminism is constituted by its methods, theory, and history.
We carry our pasts into the present, but never entirely. If we have
extended the reach of our politics well beyond protests against gender
discrimination, we have echoed, but not restated, an old feminist claim
that women’s interests were society’s interests. There is repetition, but
not seamless continuity because the repetition itself makes a differ-
ence, is a difference. Perhaps it is precisely an awareness of the inev-
itability and omnipresence of difference that distinguishes our under-
standing from that of our predecessors—difference as a fact of human
existence, an instrument of power, an analytic tool, and a feature of
feminism itself.
90 Chapter Three

The difference, though, is not a sharp contrast but a succession of

echoes, reverberations. The Berkshire Conference was one of those
reverberations. It took its name and inspiration from a hardy band of
women determined to foster collegiality and intellectual exchange
among themselves and to improve their situation within the Ameri-
can Historical Association. Although we can identify with Dorothy
Fowler’s resistance to Stanley Pargellis, admire her persistence, and
envy her patience (at least I do), our feminism is different from hers.
We live in a different world: postcolonial, post-Cold War, postmod-
ern. It’s hard to find a way to detail the differences that separate the
two periods without resorting to the binary thinking I’ve been crit-
icizing. Only the distance of time and the myopia that accompanies it
lets us describe Fowler’s task as simpler than ours, our tools as sharper
than hers. That’s why reverberations are a better way of thinking
about our relationship to feminist history. The reverberations of fem-
inism have not usually been earth shattering, but they have created all
kinds of disturbances, both laterally and longitudinally. We relish
these disturbances because at their best they are intransigent and
transgressive, paradoxical and subversive. And they always leave ef-
fects in their wake: sometimes visible, sometimes imperceptible, both
conscious and unconscious, these are realignments and rearrange-
ments that are social, political, and personal. They affect our very
beings—as women, as citizens, and as situated strategic actors making
a difference in our worlds.
 4. Sexularism
On Secularism and Gender Equality

THE TITLE OF THIS CHAPTER began as a typographical error.’ Each

time I wrote secularism, I hit an x instead of a c. It happened so many
times that I thought I should try to figure out what was going on. It is
true that the two keys are adjacent on the keyboard, but they require
different fingers in the touch-typing method I was taught years ago.
So I wondered, thinking of Freud, if this wasn’t a message from the
unconscious, a slip of the finger if not of the tongue. The mistake, if it
was one, did convey something of what I was thinking about this large
and unwieldy topic: that in recent invocations of the secular, the
issues of sex and sexuality get entangled in the wrong way.
The most frequent assumption is that secularism encourages the
free expression of sexuality, and that it thereby ends the oppression of
women because it removes transcendence as the foundation for social
norms and treats people as autonomous individuals, pleasure-seeking
agents capable of crafting their own destiny.” In substituting imperfect
human initiative for the unquestioned truth of divine will, we are told,
secularism broke the hold of traditionalism and ushered in the demo-
cratic modern age. The definitions of modernity are quite varied, but
92 Chapter Four

they typically include individualism, which in some accounts—femi-

nists’ among them—is equated with sexual liberation. History is re-
markably absent from these accounts, except as teleology: the univer-
sal idea inevitably expands its applications and effects over time.
These days, secularism comes up frequently in discussions of Is-
lam, which is said to hold on to values and ways of being that are at
odds with modernity. In contemporary debates about Muslims—
which focus on whether they can be integrated into Western so-
cieties, whether their culture is fundamentally at odds with “ours,”
and whether their values are compatible with political democracy—
secularism is usually the unquestioned standard of judgment. It is
taken to be an idea, either timeless or evolving, that signifies a univer-
sal project of human emancipation specifically including women.
Whether the reference is to Iranian theocracy, the punitive behavior
of the Taliban, or to immigrant populations in Europe, there is a
particular emphasis on the plight of women in head scarves, veils, and
burgas. For ideologues of French republicanism justifying a ban on
Islamic head scarves in public schools, primordial values—or at least
those inherited from the French Revolution—are what is at stake.
The head of the commission recommending the ban on head scarves
said: “France cannot allow Muslims to undermine its core values,
which include a strict separation of religion and state, equality be-
tween the sexes and freedom for all.”? Similarly, a Swiss federal court,
ruling against a teacher who wanted to wear the hijab to class, argued
that “it is difficult to reconcile the wearing of a headscarf with the
principle of gender equality—which is a fundamental value of our
society enshrined in a specific provision of the Federal constitution.”
Feminists in France and elsewhere have made similar arguments,
perhaps epitomized by Elisabeth Badinter, who maintains that for
women, “the headscarf is a terrible symbol of submission,’ associated
with the “religious imperialism” that the secular state was designed to
combat.’ It is as if the arrival of secularism had solved the problem of
sexual difference in history, bringing in its wake an end to what
Tocqueville referred to as “the oldest of all inequalities, that between
man and woman.”° From this perspective, religious communities and
societies are relics of another age, and veiled women, with their
sexuality under wraps, are the quintessential sign of backwardness.
 Sexularism 93

In this chapter I call into question the simple oppositions—mod-

ern/traditional, secular/religious, sexually liberated / sexually op-
pressed, gender equality/patriarchal hierarchy, West /East—from
three different perspectives. The first has to do with the history of
secularization, which I argue makes it clear that the equal status of
women and men was not a primary concern for those who moved to
separate church and state. Here, we might find in my typos an uncon-
scious association that takes the form of a metonymic slippage: from
secularism to sexism. The second perspective is the notion of individ-
ual agency that so often informs discussions of the emancipatory
effects of secularism. We could say that my unwitting substitution of
an x for a c marks as a mistake the elision of the secular and the sexually
liberated—their assumed synonymity. And finally I argue that, from a
psychoanalytic perspective, secularism has not resolved the difficulties
that sexual difference poses for social and political organization. It
could be that the very trouble we have in pronouncing the title of this
chapter—“Sexularism”—captures something of the persistent prob-
lem of trying to reconcile sexual difference and gender equality, even
in a so-called secular age.

History
The French Revolution is one of the founding moments of modernity:
a product of the Enlightenment, a political transformation of gigantic
proportions that substituted the rule of reason—and thus of law—for
the superstitions of priests and the power of kings. Among the many
processes launched by the elected representatives of the people was
secularization. The mighty Roman Catholic Church in its French
incarnation was nationalized by the state; priests who swore allegiance
to the French Republic became the state’s paid agents, while the clergy
who did not swear were left to perform illicit masses underground;
and signs of religious devotion (statues of saints, crucifixes, church
bells) were replaced by allegorical embodiments of secular concepts
(liberty, fraternity, equality, the social contract, philosophy, reason,
virtue) in idealized classical forms. Even words of consolation were
laicized in at least one cemetery: “Death is eternal sleep” denied all
possibility of a heavenly afterlife. The revolutionaries organized fes-
94 Chapter Four

tivals as substitutes for religious pageants; artists, musicians, writers,

actors, and playwrights were mobilized in a huge propaganda effort
aimed at instilling allegiance to the new order of things.
One example was the Féte of Unity and Indivisibility, orchestrated by
the painter Jacques-Louis David and the composer Frangois-Joseph
Gossec on August 10, 1793. Its five stations took citizens through what
the art historian Madelyn Gutwirth describes as a “pseudo-masonic
procession of initiation.” The Fountain of Regeneration was at the first
station, that of nature. Gutwirth describes it on the basis of a print in the
Bibliothéque Nationale: “A huge statue of an Egyptian Hathor, seated
between her two mastiffs, was erected, from whose breasts—chastely
covered by her crossed arms—streamed the milk (we recall it was
merely water) of rebirth... . [T]he immediate benefactors of her
largesse [were] the distinguished legislators of the state, lined up before
her, to make symbolic consumption of her bounty.’ Gutwirth provides
an incisive psychoanalytic reading of this scene and of many other
instances she cites that were marked by an abundance of breast imagery
(especially, but not only, during the Revolution’s Jacobin phase):
The sheer sterile aridity of this derivative, trumped-up breast imagery,
divorced from its real subtexts both of transcendence—the ties linking sex,
birth, death, and eternity—and of the warmth of fleshly human affinities,
mark it as a fetishistic phenomenon. In the midst of the Jacobins’ struggle
to assert human equality, its men insisted to the last on the premise that
signs of otherness can be exploited to express an ideal. A desperate insis-
tence on the repetition of the forms of sexual dimorphism of other ages
characterizes its major representations. The Revolution divorces the
breast from its context; that is, from the women’s powers of intention,
heart, and mind. The Revolutionaries’ preoccupation with the breast is
the indicator of a gender split in the new republican mentality so deep as
to defy repair. Women’s foreignness to republican culture was reified by its
representation. Increasingly locked into repetitive verbal and visual struc-
tures, by the era of Thermidor the new French political culture had
definitively thrown away all grounds for anything akin to parity between
women and men, even in difference.?

Looking at several other representations, especially a popular image of

Republican France Offering her Breasts to all Frenchmen, which she
 Sexularism 95

labels a “democratic pinup,’ Gutwirth concludes that the “figuration of

the breast” no longer serves as it once did, as a sign of universal charity;
instead “it has been restored as an adjunct to male eroticism.”!°
If Gutwirth cites what might be seen as the more benign (because
abstract) representations of the feminine, Richard Cobb provides
evidence from reports of the work of the “people’s armies.” He writes
that the de-Christianizing campaigners “at times came near to misog-
yny” in their association of women with priests. To take just one of
the many examples he offers, a commissioner was reported to have
“thundered against fanaticism, and in particular against women, who
were more easily seduced by it; he said that the Revolution had been
made by men, and the women should not be allowed to make it
backtrack."
I have cited Gutwirth and Cobb because their material permits me
to join the two themes of secularism and gender equality. Contrary to
so many claims, I want to argue that not only is there no necessary
connection between them, but that the equality that secularism prom-
ises has always been troubled by sexual difference, by the difficult—if
not impossible—task of assigning ultimate meaning to bodily differ-
ences between women and men. Those who insist on the superiority
of secularism compared to religion, as if the two categories were in
eternal opposition rather than discursively interdependent, tell a story
of the evolution of modernity. From their perspective, there may be
interruptions and distractions, setbacks and confusions, but the sec-
ular ideal—synonymous with progress, emancipation, and freedom
from the strictures of religiously based traditionalism—inevitably pre-
vails in the end. Such is the view propounded by the philosopher
Charles Taylor in A Secular Age. Discussing “Locke’s egalitarian imagi-
nary,’ Taylor notes that it was “at the outset profoundly out of synch
with the way things in fact ran. ... Hierarchical complementarity was
the principle on which people’s lives effectively operated—from king-
dom... to family. We still have some lively sense of this disparity in the
case of the family, because it is really only in our time that the older
images of hierarchical complementarity between men and women are
being comprehensively challenged. But this is a late stage in a ‘long
march’ process.”!”
Of course, the evidence I have offered from the French Revolution
96 Chapter Four

could be used to substantiate this “long march” view of things. In-

deed, it has been argued that after a rocky start, due to remnants of
law and custom from the ancien régime, the notion of individual
rights spread from groups of elite men to all members of society. The
pace of progress was uneven but inevitable, in this view, even if it took
centuries to come to fruition.’*
I want to challenge this story and suggest that the “long march”
view is, instead, a feature of the discourse of secularism. I agree with
Talal Asad who, disputing Taylor’s Hegelian teleology, characterizes
the “long march” story as a myth of liberalism: “What has often been
described as the political exclusion of women, the propertyless, colo-
nial subjects in liberalism’s history can be re-described as the gradual
extension of liberalism’s incomplete project of universal emancipa-
tion.”!* Calling for a critique of the idealized secular in the form of a
genealogy of secularism, Asad comments that “the secular is neither
singular in origin nor stable in its historical identity, although it works
through a series of particular oppositions,’ among them the political
and the religious, the public and the private.’ To this list Iwould add
the opposition between reason and sex. In the idealized version of
secularism, the consignment of the passions to a private sphere makes
reasonable conversation and conduct possible in the realms of the
public and the political. To put it another way, the hierarchies of the
private sphere are the referents for organizing the public sphere.
In this idealized secularism, there is a link between religion and sex
that needs further exploration, not because the religious and the
erotic are one (though that may be something others want to dis-
cuss), but because secularization in the Christian lands of the West
proceeds by defining religion as a matter of private conscience, in the
same way and at the same time that it privatizes familial and sexual
matters. Of course, the public/private distinction was not a clear one,
but rather a hypothetical boundary requiring constant regulation by
state authorities. The family was deemed a private institution, the site
of emotion and intimacy, and as such it was also considered key to
public order. Laws defined the terms of marriage, divorce, inheri-
tance, and what counted as acceptable sexual practices, even though
these were thought to belong to the province of religious moral
teaching. Religious institutions were subjected to similar regulations
 Sexularism 97

by the secularizing states of Western Europe. Indeed, one scholar has

argued: “The historical relationship between family and state sov-
ereignty . . . becomes a source of continual entanglements between
religion and politics.”
The public/private distinction operated within the family and the
state to establish citizenship along the lines of sexual difference.
When reason became the defining attribute of the citizen and when
abstraction enabled the interchangeability of one individual citizen
for another, passion was assigned not just to the marital bed (or the
chambers of the courtesan), but to the sexualized body of the woman.
So it was that both domestic harmony and public disorder were
figured in female form; the “angel in the house” and the unruly
pétroleuse are two sides of the same coin.'” Masculinity was defined in
contrast to both of these representations: men were the public face of
the family and the reasoning arbiters of the realm of the political.
Their existence as sexual beings was at once secured in relation to
women and displaced onto them. The public/private demarcation so
crucial to the secular/religious divide rested on a vision of sexual
difference that legitimized the political and social inequality of
women and men.
It is not simply that religion and sex are to private conscience what
politics and citizenship are to public activity. They are intertwined
categories because in the process of secularization in the West, women
(the embodiment of sex) were—as shown in the French examples I
began with—usually associated with religion and religious belief. In-
deed, the feminization of religion was a phenomenon that drew anx-
ious comment from American Protestants during the nineteenth cen-
tury; the susceptibility of women to priestly influence was long used to
justify denying them the vote in the Catholic countries of Europe; and
women’s role as the bearers and embodiments of tradition, including
customary religious practices, created dilemmas for leaders of revolu-
tions of national liberation in the twentieth century. The discursive
assignment of women and religion to the private sphere was not—in
the first articulations of the secular ideal—about the regulation by
religion of female sexuality. Rather, feminine religiosity was seen as a
force that threatened to disrupt or undermine the rational pursuits
that constitute politics; like feminine sexuality, it was excessive, trans-
98 Chapter Four

gressive, and dangerous. So, to return for a minute to those French

revolutionary armies, we have this vehement comment from a repré-
sentant en mission in the Gers: “And you, you bloody bitches, you are
their [the priests’] whores, particularly those who attend their bloody
masses and listen to their mumbo-jumbo.’*
The danger of feminine sexuality was not taken as a religious phe-
nomenon but as a natural one. Secularists removed God as the ulti-
mate intelligent designer and put nature in his place. They saw nature
not as an outside force, but as an essence that could be inferred from all
living things, humans included. To act in accordance with nature was
to fulfill one’s inherent capacities, and for humans these were deter-
mined by sex. The major political theorists from the seventeenth cen-
tury on assumed that human political actors were men. They did not
cite religious explanations for women’s exclusion from active citizen-
ship; instead, they pointed to the qualities that followed from the incon-
testable biological difference of sex. Thomas Laqueur has documented
the ways in which eighteenth-century medical writing informed politi-
cal theory: “The truths of biology had replaced divinely ordained hier-
archies or immemorial custom as the basis for the creation and distribu-
tion of power in relations between men and women.’!? Men were
individuals, owning that property in the self that enabled them to
conclude contracts—including the founding article of political society,
the social contract. And men could be abstracted from their physical
and social embodiment: that was what the abstract individual was
about. Women, in contrast, were dependent, a consequence of the
dedication of their bodies to reproduction; they did not own themselves
and thus were not individuals. And there was no abstracting women
from their sex. When the French revolutionaries who attempted to
domesticate the Catholic church banned women from political meet-
ings and active citizenship, it was on the grounds of biology: “The
private functions for which women are destined by their very nature
are related to the general order of society; social order results from the
differences between man and woman. Each sex is called to the kind of
occupation which is fitting for it; its action is circumscribed within
this circle which it cannot break through, because nature, which has
imposed these limits on man, commands imperiously and receives
no law.’2°
 Sexularism 99

The point is that both at the originary moments of secularism (in

its democratic or republican forms) and also well into its history,
women were not considered men’s political equals.) The difference
of sex was taken to be a legitimate ground for inequality. As Carole
Pateman puts it succinctly: “Sexual difference is political difference;
sexual difference is the difference between freedom and subjection.’
The US Constitution included an establishment clause in 1791, but
women did not get the right to vote until 1920. The French Revolu-
tion subordinated church to state for a time; the law that enacted
today’s Iaicité was not passed until 1905; and women were enfran-
chised only in 1944. Although the United States and France followed
different paths in the regulation and privatization of religion, the
outcome for women was the same.
In these countries, although women are now voters, there are still
only small proportions of them in legislative bodies—today women
account for some 19 percent of the deputies in the French National
Assembly and about 17 percent in the US House of Representatives.”
Moreover, even after enfranchisement, civil and family laws remained
on the books that placed women in a dependent, inferior position,
despite their formal legal rights. In the United States, although there
were statutes that recognized married women’s independent contrac-
tual rights, well into the twentieth century judges continued to apply
common-law notions that defined marriage in terms of a wife’s do-
mestic service to her husband.” Similarly, in France, provisions of the
civil and criminal code dating from the Napoleonic era remained in
effect until they were revised in the period 1965-75. Until then, hus-
bands controlled their wives’ wages, decided whether or not they
could work for pay, and determined unilaterally where the family
would live. Married women could not have individual bank accounts,
and their sexual transgressions were punished more severely than
men’s. For example, women’s adultery warranted imprisonment,
while men were subject to criminal action only if they introduced
their mistresses into the family domicile. In these countries, the glass
ceiling was evident everywhere, even in a time of changing sexual
norms—no more so than during the financial turmoil of 2008-10, as
men in dark suits and ties gathered around tables in boardrooms and
government offices to devise a fix for the latest crisis of capitalism.
100 Chapter Four

If all of what I have described so far can still be accommodated by

the “long march” story, other factors make it more difficult. The formal
enfranchisement of women did not end their social subordination.
Even when, after years of feminist agitation, women in these democ-
racies won the right to vote, references to a biologically mandated
sexual division of labor were used to place them in a socially subordi-
nate relationship to men. In many countries, the enfranchisement of
women was conceived of as the extension of group, not individual,
rights. The formal rights of the citizen for women did not translate into
social and economic equality; citizenship did not change the norms
that established women as different. They might gain formal political
equality, but substantively—in the family, the marketplace, and the
political arena—they were hardly equal. The political theorist Wendy
Brown puts it this way: “Women’s formal political equality is neither
the sign nor the vehicle of their integration. To the contrary, that
equality is founded in a presumption of difference organized by a
heterosexual division of labor and underpinned by a heterosexual
familial structure, all of which attenuate the need for tolerance and at
the same time underscore the differences between formal and substan-
tive equality:° If in recent years there has been a sexual revolution—
what Eric Fassin refers to as an extension of democratic logic to the
realm of sex and sexuality—this has yet to translate into equality across
the board.Ӣ Indeed, it is striking that the very same French politicians
who in 1999 ridiculed feminist demands for a law granting equal access
to elective office for women and men (“It’s a concert of vaginas,’ one
senator commented, on hearing feminist demands), became great ad-
vocates of women’s equality when it came to talking about Muslims in
2003.” It is precisely the remaining gender (and other) discrimina-
tions in secular societies that are obscured when secularism and reli-
gion are categorically contrasted. That is because gender—the assign-
ment of normative roles to men and women—is most often taken as an
entirely social phenomenon; the psychic dilemmas presented by sex-
ual difference are not taken into account. When they are, we may find
that processes of secularization have, historically, served to intensify
rather than relieve the dilemmas that attend sexual difference.
In order to see whether or not this is the case, we have to approach
the history of secularization not as a singular, evolutionary process,
 Sexularism 101

but with a series of questions that separate its many strands. There
are a number of different histories that need to be written from this
alternative perspective, but they all aim at eliciting the changing
meanings of the term “secularism” as well as its relationship to sex
and sexuality. One such history has to do with state formation in the
West and the state’s contest for power with religious institutions—the
most literal aspect of the process of secularization. Here the effects of
privatizing religion need to be thought of in relation to the privatiza-
tion of the domestic sphere and to the ways in which states regulated
these domains. A second has to do with the dissemination of secular
ideals elsewhere: what they were, and how they became a template
for modernity outside the West. A third has to do with sexuality:
changing representations of male and female, masculinity and femi-
ninity; and the political and social histories of the relations between
men and women. A fourth would consider demography, the way
concerns about rising or falling birthrates moved the rulers of nations
to pursue policies directed at regulating marriages and defining what
counted as a family. A fifth would take science, medicine, and tech-
nology into account and ask how developments in these areas made
possible changes in norms governing sex and sexuality. A sixth would
look at economic development, bringing together the state, the mar-
ket, and gender, especially the way theories of political economy
envision and so implement sexual divisions of labor in the market and
the family. These different strands, of course, intersect and influence
one another, but not in the way the “long march” story imagines.
Rather, the intersections are disparate, discontinuous, and contin-
gent; they don't all fall into line at the same time and in the same way.
That is why we need histories to illuminate and account for them;
only then will a genealogy of secularism be possible. When we have
such a genealogy, we will have revealed the very recent origin of the
discourse that takes sexual emancipation to be the fruit of secularism.
This discourse is located in our particular historical context, one in
which the hyperbolic language of a “clash of civilizations” and a
“crisis” of secularism has come to characterize what ought to be
more-nuanced discussions about the complex relationships within
and between Islam and the West.
102 Chapter Four

More History
In this chapter I cannot begin to illustrate what the genealogy of
secularism would look like, but I can offer some starting points for
conceptualizing it.

Secularization The history of secularization in the Christian West is

tied to the emergence of the nation-state and to the separation of
politics from religion. Whether the theorists of what we now call
secularism and the politicians who sought to implement it aimed to
place denominational struggles outside the realm of national and
international politics, to deny political authority to ecclesiastical lead-
ers, or to subordinate the power of churches to state control, they
addressed the relationship between the institutions of church and
state with little reference to the relationships between women and
men. A case in point is the French law of 1905 that separated church
and state, one of the exemplary laws of modern European secularism.
The law never mentioned gender at all, as it spelled out the boundaries
of separation between church and state. Liberty of individual con-
science is the first article of the law of separation; the second pertains
to the republic’s refusal to recognize or underwrite any particular
religion. There are rules prohibiting religious icons on public monu-
ments; rules about paying chaplains for their services in schools, hos-
pitals, and prisons; attempts to define what constitutes a recognizable
religion; and the creation of a police des cultes to enforce the provisions
of the law. As the state brings religious institutions under its control, it
often refers to the Conseil d’Etat for advisory judgments. (The Con-
seil d’Etat is the highest administrative court in France, whose task is
to deal with the legality of actions taken by public bodies.) For eighty
years, none of the judgments relating to the law of 1905 concerned
gender equality, while other rulings of the Conseil did refer to the
status of women and to discrimination against them, focusing on the
different institutional contexts—workplace, school, university—in-
volved. Gender equality comes into focus in relation to secularization
for the first time in 1987 when, seeking to bring French practice into
conformity with the European Convention's prohibition of sex dis-
crimination, the Conseil decides that Catholic women’s religious or-
 Sexularism 103

ders must be treated in the same way as those of men.?8 Even when
offering its first opinion about the legitimacy of banning Islamic head
scarves in schools in 1989, the Conseil did not raise the question of
gender equality. Rather, it framed its decision in terms of threats to the
public order and proselytizing in a public school. (In 1989 it found
neither to be in evidence.) In 2004, on the eve of passage of the head
scarf ban, a report by the Conseil noted that its previous decisions had
been less influenced than they now would be by “questions linked to
Islam and to the place and status of Muslim women in society. The
question of women’s equality as a feature of the separation of church
and state was a new one for this body that had been offering guidance
for nearly a century on the meanings of the law of 190s. It came up only
in the context of heated debates about the place of North African
immigrants in French society.

Imperialism In the process of Western secularization, the status of

women became a concern of modernity in association with imperialist
adventures. Colonial powers often justified their conquests in terms
that made the treatment of women—their segregation and sexual ex-
ploitation, but not their equality—an index of civilization. Well before
women won the vote in France, descriptions of life in North Africa
stressed the superiority of French gender relations compared to those
of the Arabs. Julia Clancy-Smith describes it this way: “In the imperial
imagination, behind the high walls of the Arab household, women
suffered oppression due to Islamic laws and customs. As the colonial
gaze fixed progressively upon Muslim women between 1870 and 1900,
Islam was moved by many French writers from the battlefield into the
bedroom.”»? In Algeria, as early as the 1840s, one way of distinguishing
between what the French took to be the superior Kabyles (who were
singled out to be aides to colonial administrators because they were
seen as more like the French) and the Arabs was the two groups’
treatment of women. Paul Silverstein describes the construction of
what he calls the “myth” of Kabyle superiority this way: “According to
scholars, the Kabyles continued to hold their women in high respect;
Kabyle women were masters of the household, went in public un-
veiled, and generally ‘have a greater liberty than Arab women’; they
count more in society.’*! And at the height of the Algerian war for
104 Chapter Four

independence (1954-62), the wives of French colonial administrators

organized women’s associations aimed at freeing native women from
the constraints of Islamic law. A ceremony in 1958 that involved the
unveiling of Muslim women was meant to display the civilizing mis-
sion in action; France was not, as the nationalists claimed, an op-
pressor, but—in this scenario—a liberator.” The removal of the veil
proved it. We can see here the similarities to justifications offered by
the Bush administration for the war in Afghanistan—as a mission of
liberation from “Islam” for women there—even as it pushed an agenda
that compromised hard-won rights for women at home, often in the
name of Christian religious truth.
Algerian nationalists, many also committed to some form of mo-
dernity, found it hard to offer their own form of emancipation
to women while resisting the imposition of colonial ideals. Frantz
Fanon, who was a member of the National Liberation Front, com-
mented: “The tenacity of the occupier in his enterprise to unveil the
women, to make of them an ally in the work of cultural destruction,
had the effect of strengthening traditional patterns of behavior.’
Fanon’s essay “Algeria Unveiled” —struggling as it does with the need
to insist on the integrity of a traditional Algerian culture against
French attempts to absorb it, on the one hand, and the desire to
modernize that culture, on the other hand—reveals the ways in which
the pressure of contingent historical forces shape political and social
outcomes.** Fanon may have thought that participating in the revolu-
tion would somehow raise women to men’s level, but in fact indepen-
dence did not bring about an egalitarian sharing of political respon-
sibilities between women and men.°° And the confusion about how
to nationalize secular modernity remained a key aspect of politics for
several decades. Those familiar tropes of the danger of women’s re-
ligious attachments and the need to rein in their zeal—implicitly if
not explicitly understood as sexual—were evident in forms specific to
Algeria’s history. They took another turn during the civil war in the
early 1990s, when resurgent Islamist forces insisted on women’s re-
ligious practices (embodied in the wearing of the veil) as a way of
containing female sexuality and so of resisting Western materialism.

Exporting Modernity Exporting secularism as a product of moder-

nity did not only exist under the aegis of colonial domination. In
 Sexularism 105

nineteenth-century Iran, Afsaneh Najmabadi argues, influences from

the West led to anxiety about sex and masculine sexuality. Well before
the shah’s reforms in the twentieth century, “the modernist project of
female emancipation—centered on the desirability of heterosocializa-
tion, unveiling women and encouraging them to socialize with men,
and transforming marriage from a sexual contract to a romantic one
—was premised on (and productive of )the disavowal of male homo-
eroticism. It was also pushed for eradication of same-sex practices
among males.’*° Emancipation did not guarantee liberation, since the
romantic marital contract still assumed a division of labor in which
the home and its private functions were the woman’s domain, while
the public world of politics was the man’s.
Lest these patterns be associated solely with liberalism, the Rus-
sian Revolution offers another kind of example. After the Bolsheviks
came to power, women were granted complete civil, legal, and elec-
toral equality, yet they remained secondary figures in the Communist
Party and the government. They had greater economic opportunity
than in the past, to be sure, but although women were encouraged to
join the workforce, they were rarely found in top administrative or
leadership positions. In iconic representations, the secular, rational,
and physically potent young male worker stood for the revolution
and the future, while the religious, superstitious “baba’—the old
woman wearing a babushka—embodied its antithesis. Writing in
1978, the historian Richard Stites reported that Alexandra Kollantai
had complained in 1922 that “the Soviet state was run by men and
women were to be found only in subordinate positions.’ “And so it
has remained,” he concluded, “for the most part until this day.”>”

Agency
In definitions of secularism, the idea of equality is often linked to the
autonomous agency of individuals, the preeminent subjects of secu-
larism. They are depicted as freely choosing, immune to the pressures
that traditional communities bring to bear on their members.
Thus, Riva Kastoryano defends the ban on Islamic head scarves in
French public schools by invoking the need to protect women’s auton-
omy from politically motivated religious authorities: “Law alone can-
not help to liberate the individual—especially when the individual is a
106 Chapter Four

woman—from community pressures that have become the common

rule in concentrated areas like banlieues in France. Still, such a law is
important for liberating Muslims from Islam as a political force that
weighs on Muslim migrant communities wherever they are settled.’**
Like many French secularists, she assumes that communal pressures
are always negative forces, and that the only reason a woman would
wear a head scarf is because she is forced to.
In fact, where there has been testimony from women in head
scarves, their emphasis has been on choice, on their religiously in-
spired individual agency. And in the more general debates about
religion and secularism, historians have reminded those feminists
who equate religion, patriarchy, and the subordination of women that
the first wave of feminism drew on deeply held religious principles for
its arguments. Indeed, it was white Protestant women who staffed the
temperance, abolition, peace, and purity movements, gaining a space
in public life as voices of Christian morality.*° Their arguments rested
on biblical passages and on their interpretations of theological texts.
Second-wave feminism often forgets this fact in its antireligious, secu-
lar emphasis. The historical insight to be gained here is not an evolu-
tionary one—feminism did not evolve from religious to secular—but
a contextual one: what distinguished the eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century movements from the late-twentieth-century ones?
One of the interesting things about recent scholarship on religion
has been its critical examination of the nature of religious agency,
some of which has been conducted in the light of theoretical work on
the constitution of subjects. The writings of the historian of religion
Phyllis Mack on Quaker women in eighteenth-century England and
of the anthropologist Saba Mahmood on women in pietistic Islamic
sects in late twentieth-century Egypt both in different ways call into
question the secular, liberal concept of agency as “the free exercise of
self-willed behavior,’ the expression of a previously existing self.*°
Mack argues that in order to understand the extraordinary actions
undertaken by Quaker women, “we need a conception of agency in
which autonomy is less important than self-transcendence and in
which the energy to actiin the world is generated and sustained by a
prior act of personal surrender.’*! In contrast, Mahmood suggests
that “agentival capacity is entailed not only in resistance to norms,
but in the multiple ways one inhabits those norms.” She reminds us
 Sexularism 107

of Foucault’s definition of subjectivation: “The very processes and

conditions that secure a subject’s subordination are also the means by
which she becomes a self-conscious identity and agent.”*3 Foucault
analyzed liberal subjects in these terms; Mahmood suggests that the
definition also applies to religious subjects, and this leads her to a
strong critique of the insistence on individual autonomy in some
secular feminist emancipatory discourse.
Mack explores the Christian paradox of freedom in servitude to
God. She writes that Quaker women “defined themselves as instru-
ments of divine authority,’ who found in self-transcendence the “free-
dom to do what [was] right.’*+ She continues: “The contradiction
between the ideal of self-transcendence and the cultivation of a com-
petent self was resolved by turning the energies of the individual
outward, in charitable impulses toward others.’45 In contrast, Mah-
mood maintains that the pietistic Islamic women she studied did not
see their religious practice as a means of expressing a self, but of
embodying a virtuous life, one that aspired to attain the ethical stan-
dards of the “historically contingent discursive traditions in which
they [were] located.’4* For some Muslims, Talal Asad notes, this
tradition posits “a collective body of Muslims bound together by their
faith in God and the Prophet—a faith that is embodied in prescribed
forms of behavior.’*”
These traditions, according to Mahmood, are not throwbacks to
the past, but “modern,” and they need to be understood as such. “The
relation between Islamism and liberal secularity,’ she writes, “is one of
proximity and coimbrication rather than of simple opposition or...
accommodation; it therefore needs to be analyzed in terms of the
historically shifting, ambiguous, and unpredictable encounters that
this proximity has generated.”** Mack refuses to position her Quakers
against the secular Enlightenment; rather, she says that there was “a
new kind of psychic energy; a spiritual agency in which liberal notions
of free will and human rights were joined to religious notions of indi-
vidual perfectability, group discipline, and self-transcendence, and in
which energy was focused not on the individual's interior state but on
the condition of other deprived groups.’”? Eighteenth-century Quak-
ers operated within a discourse of individual choice, while twentieth-
century Muslims defined their practice in terms of community.
Whether addressing themselves to the needs of others, or subsum-
108 Chapter Four

ing themselves to a set of ethical requirements, these religious women

acted within a set of normative constraints. Neither Mack nor Mah-
mood denies that gender inequality is a feature of these religious
movements; indeed, Mahmood acknowledges her own initial repug-
nance for the “practices of the mosque movement . . . that seemed to
circumscribe women’s subordinate status within Egyptian society.’*°
But she goes on to insist on the importance of understanding not only
what is involved in the social conservatism of piety movements, but
also the sources of our own secular feminist desire to condemn them
as instances of forced subordination or false consciousness before we
understand what they are about: “By tracing .. . the multiple modiali-
ties of agency that informed the practices of the mosque participants, I
hope to redress the profound inability within current feminist political
thought to envision valuable forms of human flourishing outside the
bounds of a liberal progressive imaginary.’S!
In the heat of the controversies over head scarves, less attention
has been paid to the explanations by women who wear them than to
the critics who condemn them as a sexist sign. Since they take the
sign to have only one meaning, the critics see no need to ask women
why they cover their heads; moreover, any answer that disputes their
interpretation is dismissed as false consciousness. There’s a kind of
reverse fundamentalism at play here, with secularists insisting on
their perception of it as the single truth about the veil. “I am a
feminist and I am allergic to the head scarf’ a French teacher tells a
Muslim student, as she orders her to remove her hijab. When the
girl replies that she has chosen to wear it against the wishes of her
parents, the teacher tells her that “in removing your head scarf, you
will return to normality.” “What does that mean?” the girl asks. “What
is normal in a class where students are allowed to wear dreadlocks?
That is apparently normal, but not my head scarf.’S3
This kind of outspoken challenge is an indication of a certain
agency: a strong assertion of the right to have one’s religion recog-
nized as a continuing aspect of self-construction—even if that self has
been given over to, or realized through, submission to God.5+ The
various testimonies offered by young women in head scarves invoke
the theme of choice to explain their turn to what Asad calls embodied
forms of prescribed behavior. This is partly strategic, since the dis-
 Sexularism 109

course of liberal individualism is the dominant one in secular nations.

But it is also a way of challenging that discourse, by linking choice not
with emancipation but with a decision to submit. Here are two exam-
ples from France: “It’s my choice, after all, if I don’t want to show off
my body.’’S “I wear the veil to submit to God—and I am totally
responsible for my submission—but that also means I submit myself
to no one else, even my parents. . . . Igive myself to God and this God
promises to protect and defend me. So those who want to try to tell
me what to do, to hell with them.’5° And the New York Times re-
counted the story of Havva Yilmaz, a Turkish girl who, against the
wishes of her parents, dropped out of school rather than remove the
head scarf she had chosen to wear at age sixteen. “Before I decided to
cover, I knew who I was not,” she explained. “After I covered, I finally
knew who I was.’’’ The sociologist Niliifer Géle says that what is at
stake in comments like this one is the personal appropriation and
reversal of a sign of what modernity sees as inferiority and a sign of
women's oppression—in this case, the head scarf: “It expresses the
exteriorization and the wish to turn the stigma into a sign of power
and distinction for [Muslim] women.’5®
The defense of their right of religious expression has led many of
these women to public activism, but not the kind usually associated
with Islamist radicals who seek to impose their way of doing things
on everyone else. Neither is there an endorsement of state-mandated
covering for women, as in Saudi Arabia or Iran. Rather, the campaigns
protest the forms of discrimination that the women experience in
their countries—a discrimination that takes the head scarf as its ob-
ject but is also about religious, ethnic, social, and economic differ-
ence. The women’s goal is not to force everyone to do as they do, but
to be recognized as legitimate members of a national community. In
Turkey, Yilmaz led a movement to end the ban on head scarves in uni-
versities. “How can I be part of a country that does not accept me?”
she asked. Although an attempted revision of the law by the prime
minister was overruled by the Turkish Constitutional Court in June
2008, Yilmaz and her friends vowed to continue: “If we work together,
we can fight it.’”5? The Collectif des Féministes pour l’Egalité, founded
in France in 2004, affirmed the right to wear or not to wear a head
scarf; dedicated itself to the fight against sexist discrimination; and
uo Chapter Four

refused any single model of emancipation: “We fight against the

obligatory veil and against obligatory unveiling, for the right to have
our heads uncovered or covered; it is the same fight: the fight for
freedom of choice and, more precisely, for the right of each woman to
dispose of her body as she wishes.’®! These are recognizable liberal
democratic values—freedom of choice and women’s control of their
bodies—placed in the service of embodied forms of religious obser-
vance. Said one of the members of the Collectif, “I am a French
woman of Western culture and the Muslim religion.”
The message here is clearly mixed: discourses of religious devotion
and embodied ethical deportment combine with assertions of mod-
ernist notions of individual rights and pluralist democracy. They are
as susceptible to change as any other discourses. Although the fight is
about religious expression in public places, the neutrality of the state
is assumed. Indeed, bans on head scarves are taken to be a violation
of state neutrality and of the citizen’s freedom of religious conscience.
There is also no tolerance for the argument that the state must
protect women from religious conservatives who would force them to
veil. These young women (and most of them are young) consider
that to be a form of paternalism in contradiction to principled com-
mitments to equality; it is as objectionable in its way as state regula-
tions that would mandate wearing the veil.
The argument against state paternalism was offered in 2005 in a
case before the Grand Chamber of the Council of Europe (Sahin v.
Turkey) in an eloquent dissent by one of the judges, Francoise Tul-
kens of Belgium. The majority upheld the Turkish court’s ruling that
the ban on head scarves in universities was consistent with the state’s
secular values and with the equality before the law of women and
men. Judge Tulkens disagreed, pointing out that no connection be-
tween the ban and sexual equality had been demonstrated by the
majority:

The applicant, a young adult university student, said—and there is noth-

ing to suggest that she was not telling the truth—that she wore the
headscarf of her own free will. In this connection, I fail to see how the
principle of sexual equality can justify prohibiting a woman from follow-
ing a practice which in the absence of proof to the contrary, she must be
taken to have freely adopted. Equality and non-discrimination are subjec-
 Sexularism 111

tive rights which must remain under the control of those who are entitled
to benefit from them. “Paternalism” of this sort runs counter to the case
law of the Court, which has developed a real right to personal autonomy.
Finally, if wearing the headscarf really was contrary to the principle of the
equality of men and women in any event, the State would have a positive
obligation to prohibit it in all places, whether public or private.

It is precisely in defense of a certain vision of individual agency that

Judge Tulkens and others I have cited protest state bans on head scarves.
But this is a vision that—implicitly in Tulkens’s dissent, explicitly in the
comments of young women in hijab—acknowledges a distinction be-
tween self-governance and autonomy, a distinction that Asad associates
with the Islamic umma: “The sharia system of practical reason morally
binding on each faithful individual, exists independently of him or her.
At the same time, every Muslim has the psychological ability to discover
its rules and to conform to them.”** Submission, then, in this view of
things, is—paradoxically—a choice freely made. That is the point of
this ironic question from a woman protesting the French ban: “If my
veil is a ‘symbol of oppression; must I then conclude that I’m oppres-
sing myself?”°s
Many of the women defending their right to wear a head scarf
admit that not all covered women freely choose to wear it. But that is
no different, they insist, from women who feel pressured by boy-
friends or husbands to conform to the dictates of Western fashion,
or—to take an extreme example—from prostitutes forced by their
pimps to wear miniskirts and heavy makeup. There are a range of
explanations for any woman's choice of clothing, so why insist on only
one meaning for wearing the veil?°
Agency, then, is not the innate property of an abstract individual,
but the attribute of subjects who are defined by—subjected to—
discourses that bring them into being as both subordinate and capa-
ble of action. It follows that religious belief does not in itself deny
agency; rather, it creates particular forms of agency whose meanings
and history are not transparently signaled by the wearing of a veil. If
one of those meanings has to do with the idea that women are
subordinate to men, comments a Muslim woman, this is not a prob-
lem confined to Islam: “Male domination is so widespread, why is it
more likely when a woman wears a veil? It’s not an issue of the veil or
u2 Chapter Four

of Islam, it’s the relationship between men and women that’s a rela-
tionship of domination.’ From this perspective, Islam is but a vari-
ant on Tocqueville’s “oldest of all inequalities,’ and secularism is not
the antithesis of religion but instead provides a different framework
within which to address the problem that sexual difference seems to
pose for modern subjects.

Sexual Difference

These brief citations of very different histories contain a recurring

theme: sexual difference, seen as a natural distinction rooted in physi-
cal bodies, is the basis for representing the alternatives between past
and future, superstition and rationality, private and public. The irrec-
oncilability of these options is underscored by linking them to women
and men—a fundamental division that seems to admit of no ambigu-
ity, even if the roles the sexes actually play don’t fall so neatly into one
category or another. To the extent that these representations assuage
deeply rooted, even unconscious, anxieties, they secure the plausibil-
ity of the secular. To the extent that they structure the meanings of
secularism, they feed into its normative expectations; indeed they
contribute to the production of sexed secular subjects. In this area, the
observations of psychoanalysis—which is, after all, a critical commen-
tary on the rationalism of the secular—are useful. Indeed, it might be
argued that the best theorizing we have of sexuality and sexual subjec-
tivity in modern secular societies occurs in the writings of Freud and
his followers.
The enigma of sexual difference is at the heart of psychoanalytic
theory. Despite norms that attempt to prescribe behaviors for men
and women that are said to conform to their bodily requirements,
confusion remains about the very issues that secularism supposedly
laid to rest. The confusion is expressed in fantasy, but also in conflict-
ing attempts to impose definitive meaning. How should we define the
pleasure that liberal subjects are said to be free to enjoy? What is the
relationship between individual rights and the operations of desire?
Whose desire is at issue—Men’s? Women’s? Both? Neither?—in a
sexual relationship? Is Lacan’s comment that “there is no such thing
as a sexual relationship” simply a pessimist’s gloss on love, or an astute
 Sexularism 113

diagnosis of the asymmetry between male and female desire in mod-

ern societies?
Like Freud, Lacan begins with the assumption that psychic identi-
ties do not correspond to anatomical bodies: masculinity and femi-
ninity, male and female, are psychic positions rather than expressions
of innate biological makeup. They are, moreover, not clearly defined
ways of being, even if there are social norms that presume to offer
irrefutable definitions. Instead, there is a gap between anatomy and
its sexuation, and thus between psychic and social (or cultural) pro-
cesses of subjectivation, the former casting doubt on the prescrip-
tions of the latter. That gap—the lack of fit between physiology,
sexuality, and desire—can never be closed, and it explains the recur-
ring and perhaps perpetual difficulty of pinning down the meanings
of sexual difference. Sexual difference is an intractable problem.
The problem is compounded by an asymmetry between the dif-
ferent sexual positions (male or female) that precludes a complemen-
tary, parallel, or even inverse relationship. When Lacan said that
whatever position a subject ended up in precluded a relationship with
another subject, he did not mean by this that people don’t have sexual
intercourse—of course they do. Rather, he meant—as Bruce Fink
puts it—that there is “no direct relationship between men and women
insofar as they are men and women. In other words, they do not
‘interact’ with each other as man to woman and woman to man.
Something gets in the way of their having any such relationship;
something skews their interactions.”©’ That something is the phallus,
the signifier of desire.
According to Lacan, the child’s individuation is accompanied by
an imagined loss of wholeness, of the time when all demands were
satisfied by an Other whose attention focused exclusively on the
child. Coming into language and separation from the primary paren-
tal figure (usually the mother) both involve a certain alienation, the
loss of what seems in retrospect to have been the pleasure (jouis-
sance) associated with total fulfillment. This imagined loss or lack is
what Lacan means by castration. Desire is the impossible wish to
recover the loss or replenish the lack; its signifier is the phallus.
Masculine and feminine subjects differ in their relationship to the
phallus. The masculine subject is wholly defined in terms of symbolic
114 Chapter Four

castration, understood as the father’s prohibition of the child’s in-

cestuous wish to reunite with his mother—a wish that nonetheless
continues to animate his fantasies, and that he deflects onto other
objects (referred to by Lacan as “object (a)”). The power of that wish
comes from the belief that there can be an exception to castration: the
symbolic father, the source of the prohibition, is imagined not to be
governed by his own law, and this exception suggests the possibility
that castration can be avoided or negated. Lacan puts this in terms of
an antinomy, or contradiction: on the one hand all men are castrated;
on the other hand, there is one who is not castrated, not limited by
the law (this is the “phallic exception”). But if one is not castrated,
there may be others (any of those who identify with the father) —or
so the fantasy goes, holding out the possibility of plenitude or full
presence to masculine subjects. In contrast, the feminine subject
assumes that, like her mother, she is already castrated. She neither
reacts to a prohibition, nor can she identify with an exception. There-
fore, she does not share man’s fantasy of attaining full presence.” But
she is animated by desire, and this is articulated in relation to the
phallus (“a woman generally gains access to the signifier of desire in
our culture via a man or a ‘masculine instance; that is, someone who
comes under the psychoanalytic category ‘Men’”)—but not en-
tirely.”1 Lacan posits another jouissance for women that, at least
partly, “escapes the reign of the phallus,” but this is not generalizable
in the way the male exception is.”” Masculinity is thus associated with
the universal (an all-encompassing wholeness, the possibility of iden-
tifying with the phallus), and femininity with the particular (no sig-
nifier of desire is equated with women; they are defined in their
differences from it).
If we take Lacan's theorization of modern sexed subjects to be
located in modernity’s history, we can ask a series of questions that
can be answered historically: How does the identification of mas-
culinity with the universal and of femininity with the particular con-
nect to secularism’s ideas of public and private, to the abstractions of
citizenship, and to the definition of women as “the sex”? Are these
timeless attributes of sexual difference or the specific characteristics
of secular subjects, which would mean the identifications are histor-
ically based patterns of psychic development? Are there unique ways
 Sexularism 115

in which secularism addresses sexual difference? Does it matter if

God or nature or culture is the foundation on which the explanations
for sexual difference rest? How does it matter? Are there particular
approaches to sexuality that can be called “secular”? Are they neces-
sarily linked to gender equality in its substantive as well as its formal
implementation? Or is gender equality, paradoxically, undermined by
psychic processes associated with secularism, which insist on the
irreconcilable differences between men and women, the spheres that
separate them? What have secularists meant by equality? How has
this meaning changed over time? And what has equality signified in
relation to psychic anxieties about the meanings of sexual difference?
Thinking about sexual difference in this way—as an irritant to expla-
nations that assume economic, social, and political practices are com-
pletely rational—lets us move beyond the emancipatory story that
secularism has learned to tell about itself.

Conclusion

I am not arguing that there is no difference between what are called

secular and religious societies in their treatment of women. Of course
there are differences, differences that matter for the kinds of possibili-
ties open to women (and men) in the course of their lives. But to
what extent are the differences a matter of “secularism” or “religion”?
When looked at historically, it is clear that the differences are not
always as sharp as contemporary debates suggest (religious influences
persist in societies called secular), and that the sharpness of the
distinction works to obscure the continuing problems evident in so-
called secular societies by attributing all that is negative to religion.
This approach also assumes that, unlike secularism, religion is not
affected by changing historical circumstances and is not itself a mod-
ern phenomenon, when of course it is. One of the big problems for
secularism obscured in this way is the idea of equality—or, to put it
more precisely, the idea of the relationship between equality and
difference. What is the measure of equality in the face of difference?
How can we reconcile the very different forms of equality—political,
substantive, and subjective—and the fact that one does not neces-
sarily guarantee the other? This is a problem that liberal secularism
116 Chapter Four

has struggled with in the course of its long history, not only in
reference to women and men. One effort at resolution—the one we
are now witnessing in dramatic form in relation to Islam—is the
displacement of the problem onto unacceptable societies with other
kinds of social organization. It is this displacement that I have called
into question, insisting instead on a more nuanced and complex
historical approach to the two supposedly antithetical concepts: the
religious and the secular. Such an approach not only offers greater
insight into both sides of the divide, but it also calls into question the
divide itself, revealing its conceptual interdependence and the politi-
cal work that it does. This then opens the way to thinking differently
not only about others and about ourselves, but also about the nature
of the relationship between us—the one that exists, and the alterna-
tive one we may want to construct.
 5. French Seduction Theory

THE BICENTENNIAL of the French Revolution provided politicians

and scholars with an opportunity not only to celebrate the inaugural
chapter of the French Republic’s history, but also to think anew about
the meaning of national identity. Amid paeans to liberty, equality, and
fraternity; critiques of Jacobinism; condemnations of the Terror; and
revisions of previous histories of the entire event, there emerged an
unprecedented appreciation of the legacy of absolutism and aristoc-
racy. It came from a small group of influential Parisians clustered
around the publishing house Gallimard, the journals Le Débat and
L Esprit, and the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur. In books and articles,
they fashioned what might be called an ideology of aristocratic re-
publicanism, which refused liberal notions of formal equality and
democratic notions of social equality in the name of inherently un-
equal differences of sex. The supposedly natural attraction between
men and women, best exemplified by seduction, was offered as a
model for all forms of intercourse, a way of living happily with differ-
ence when there was no possibility for parity in the relationship
between the parties.
The philosopher Philippe Raynaud describes seduction as “a par-
118 Chapter Five

ticular form of equality.’! And the historian Mona Ozouf, in a review

of the literary historian Claude Habib’s book on gallantry (dedicated
to Ozouf ), asks: “Is seduction a French art?” Her answer is unequivo-
cally yes.” In her view, seduction has none of the negative connota-
tions associated with nineteenth-century morality tales of innocent
young women corrupted and then abandoned by their conniving
male superiors. It has nothing to do with Freudian theories linking
hysterical symptoms to repressed desire. Rather, seduction is a game
of honor, marked by “sly and frivolous gaiety,’ in Habib’s words.* To
play is, above all, pleasurable.
This theory of seduction exploits a long-standing literary historical
tradition that vaunted the aesthetic and erotic culture of the French
nobility. By cleverly appealing to distinctive aspects of this culture as
a model for all aspects of social and political life, Ozouf and her
colleagues propose an alternative to what they take to be the dangers
of democracy. Seduction offers not equality, but a naturalized, ahis-
torical version of inequality. Ozouf, insisting on its transcendent
Frenchness, refers to it as “la singularité frangaise.’* Eric Fassin, crit-
icizing this characterization, deems it “the sacralization of sexual
difference ... at the heart of the national project.’
For the advocates of aristocratic republicanism, seduction a la
frangaise became the answer both to domestic claims for social, eco-
nomic, and political equality on the part of feminists, gay and lesbian
activists, and Muslim immigrants and to alternative political systems
elsewhere, whether based on individualism (as in the United States)
or collectivism (as in totalitarian communist regimes). In all of these
bad examples, the end result was said to be a leveling sameness. In
contrast, by insisting on the play of difference between the sexes, the
nationalist intellectuals kept things closer both to nature and to cul-
ture. The apparent contradiction between hierarchy (aristocracy)
and equality (republicanism) was resolved by likening all difference
to sexual difference. Seduction claimed to resolve the ideologically
incoherent amalgam that was aristocratic republicanism; it sought to
counter the leveling tendencies of democracy by an appeal to histor-
ical tradition. In this sense it functioned not as history, but as myth in
Jacques Lacan's definition: “Myth is always a signifying system or
scheme, which is articulated so as to support the antinomies of cer-
tain psychic relations.Ӣ
 French Seduction Theory 119

The myth of seduction challenges both feminist history and the-

ory. It brutally dismisses the idea that inequality between the sexes is
a problem to be remedied, and it offers a fantasized version of history,
one that has little to do with the lived realities either of gender or
power. It’s not enough, though, to try to correct the factual record;
more accurate history does not compete easily with the allure of
fantasy. More useful, it seems to me, is to try to read analytically—
psychoanalytically—in order to explore the political implications and
commitments of this French theory of seduction.

Imagined Communities

The idea of a distinctive national character has a long history, and not
only in France; it is part of the story of the emergence of nation-
states. Nationalist ideologies are “invented traditions” in Eric Hobs-
bawm’s terms, “imagined communities” according to Benedict An-
derson.’ They are constructed discursively in a variety of ways: in
contrast with other nations whose differences establish the home
country’s superiority; by suppressing differences within the nation;
by insisting on distinctive behavioral traits as marks of national mem-
bership; and by manufacturing histories that produce naturalized
lineages as conclusive proof of the existence of a long-established
national family. These histories are the stuff of what I have called
“fantasy echoes” in chapter 2; they provide the scenes for the imag-
inative identification through which a new generation establishes its
rootedness in the past.
The French myth of seduction is particularly interesting because it
departs from the more typical representations of gender and family
that have been used to talk about the organization of states and traits
of national character. In the standard versions, the family is a model for
the state, a hierarchy based on natural difference that justifies the
preeminence of men as national leaders. Women are depicted as the
embodiment of timeless tradition and culture’s authenticity, while
men are history's agents, moving things forward, their actions marking
the stages in a nation’s growth. If relations between the sexes are
addressed, it is usually as a matter of procreation—what it takes to
replenish the population in numbers that will contribute to prosperity
and national well-being. Sex is discussed functionally, in terms of a
120 Chapter Five

strict division of reproductive labor: men’s all-important contribution

starts the process (and often names its end product), but it is women
who bear, nurture, and raise the nation’s children. From this follow the
distinctions between public and private, political and domestic, active
and passive, reason and passion. Sex—as the pursuit of desire, amo-
rous play, and conjugal activity—remains in the realm of the private; it
may be referred to obliquely and evoked metaphorically, but typically
it is not considered a dimension of national character.
French seduction theory offers an entirely different scenario. It
brings the play of sex to the fore as the defining attribute of gender
relations; it concerns neither family nor children. It is governed not
by law but by ritual; it depends not on formal regulations, but on a
mutual understanding of the rules of play. Seduction serves no ob-
vious social function, yet it becomes, in the writings of these national-
ist intellectuals, a model for the workings of society. In their model,
difference is treated as a field of play; the game is not one of sex war
or, for that matter, class struggle. Conflict and coercion are absent
from this vision of seduction. Instead, the different desires of women
and men are given free rein. Scenes of the joyous pursuit of sexual
pleasure invite readers’ identification, stimulating their own desire to
enact those roles and to imagine them as the basis for an alternative
system of political relationships.
Those who tout seduction as a “singular” French trait argue that
its aristocratic provenance does not contradict democratic values:
“The difference between France and other democracies doesn’t have
to do with ‘formal’ equality or with ‘real’ equality; rather it comes
from a certain economy of passion (économie passionnelle), which is
expressed by a half-serious, half-ironic investment in roles reputed to
be traditional.’* Deeply embedded in national character—the fruit of
a fortunate history, in which aristocratic manners were incorporated
into republican practice—is “a special quality of irony that preserves
that which is precious in the difference of the sexes without renounc-
ing the requirement for rights and dignity.”

Eros Is Civilization

The starting point for the project might well have been the bicenten-
nial issue of Le Débat, November~December 1989, in which several
 French Seduction Theory 121

articles were devoted to a reconsideration of aristocratic principles,

privileges, and customs. Raynaud contributed one on the role of
women in aristocratic circles, “Les femmes et la civilité: aristocratie et
passions révolutionnaires.” His aim, he writes, is to provide “a certain
rehabilitation of continental monarchies (aristocratic and absolutist,
but civilized nonetheless) of which France is the classic model.”!°
Briefly, he argues that French absolutism valued, indeed encouraged,
a distinctive kind of civility that gave special recognition to women.
In her own contribution to this story, Les mots des femmes: essai sur
la singularité francaise, Ozouf relies on Raynaud’s argument. France,
she claims, was the “ideal type of a civilized monarchy.’ At court,
women enjoyed an unprecedented freedom: “They are the true mo-
tor of social life.”! Like Raynaud, Ozouf uses the Scottish philoso-
pher David Hume’s comment about court life, where politeness and
generosity were said to work to women’s advantage: “In brief, the
feminine art civilizes men from one end of the social scale to the
other.”!?
Ozouf’s book inspired Habib to pay tribute to French gallantry in
her Galanterie francaise, which Ozouf describes as a “singular inter-
course (commerce) between men and women” that had its heyday all
too briefly, from the mid-seventeenth century into the eighteenth.'*
In an earlier book,!* Habib writes of a time when, as yet another
review by Ozouf puts it, women eagerly read Rousseau because they
understood that he was on their side: “He saw woman as a being
without power; but her weakness was her power, [she was] timid, but
her modesty doubled her voluptuousness. It accentuated the dissym-
metry of the sexes, but in order better to unite them.’ Amorous
consent, Habib insists, was free of crass calculation and had nothing
to do with law or force; it was, rather, the ineffable expression (“mys-
terious” and gentle) of the “natural attraction” between the sexes.
Men paid delicate tribute to women, slowly warming them to “virile
desire.” “This subtle game, played from first encounter to orgasm,
involved learning to decode signs of agreement, to accept nuance and
delay” is how the historian Alain Corbin (almost wistfully) describes
the world of gallantry as portrayed by Habib.’°
These manners were said not to be confined to the nobility, but
trickled down into all levels of social life. Raynaud cites Hume to this
effect: “In a civilized monarchy . . . there is a long chain of people
122 Chapter Five

dependent on one another which extends from the sovereign to the

lowest of subjects; this dependence does not go so far as to threaten
property or depress the people’s spirit, but it inspires in them the
desire to please their superiors and to model themselves on people of
quality and on those with a distinguished education; from this it
follows that the custom of politeness naturally originates in monar-
chies and courts.”!”
The myth, then, is this: in a time now past, there was a moment
when manners and nature were in accord; when despite—or perhaps
because of—the absolute control exercised by the monarchy, men and
women could pursue and fulfill their erotic desires, unfettered by
other considerations. “The taste for pleasure belongs to the nobility,”
Habib writes.'® The absence of conflict is one of the central claims of
the myth. Happy were the days at court when women liked being
women and men liked being men, and when their attraction for one
another took the form of polite and civil encounters. The repeated
use of the word “civility” and its synonymity with civilization is key.
Civility is (literally) the root of civilization and the mode of seduc-
tion—eros was civilization. Between seducer and seduced, there was
“a delightful but ambiguous relationship.’!’ Driven by desire, in pur-
suit of pleasure, the players regarded one another with mutual re-
spect. Despite their reputed weakness, women gained considerable
status from the desire of men to understand what women wanted;
indeed, it was as objects of desire that women acquired agency in the
game of seduction. In Habib’s view, “the force of masculine desire is
what constitutes feminine power.?° Ozouf cites Renan, the architect
of French nationalism, to make the point. The high tone of the
nobility’s discourse, the charm of its women, and its qualities of
sympathy and spirituality, Renan writes, accounted for the “invincible
superiority of France over all other nations.””!
Somehow, according to these historians, what began as an aristo-
cratic practice became inscribed in the nation’s cultural pNa. Despite
centuries of political and social transformation, traces of it endure
today. Thus Ozouf writes: “If the model of fashionable and literate
intercourse has disappeared in fact, it has not disappeared from our
memory, nor—we must come back to this—from our national cus-
toms.’”** For Habib, the definitive proof of the persistence of these
 French Seduction Theory 123

values, despite their steady erosion by the individualism of modern

democracy, is the reaction of the French against the Islamic head scarf:
“France is the only Western country to experience the veil as a prob-
lem.”*3 Even in 2006, France was hardly the “only” country, but Habib’s
comment is strong evidence of the importance of seduction for think-
ing about French national identity in terms of sexual difference.

The Psychic Life of Power

Absolutism Seduction had its ideal moment under the absolute mon-
archy, according to Raynaud and Habib. The age of Louis XIV was
the time when the art was refined; the pursuit of erotic pleasure
reached its apogee. It is important to note—a fact that these histo-
rians don’t mention—that this was also the time of the loss of aristo-
cratic political power as the monarchy consolidated its grip. Richelieu
spoke of the need to reduce the pride of the great nobles, and this was
done systematically by, among other things, attacking the political
role that women had been allowed to play in the past. If there was a
kind of gender equality in seduction, it did not translate into or
reflect the world of politics.
Recent histories, especially those by Eliane Viennot, exhaustively
document the decline in aristocratic women’s power with the consoli-
dation of absolutism.” Viennot is interested in women’s access to
political power, and she demonstrates the formidable role of queens,
regents, mothers, and mistresses during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and
seventeenth centuries. The Valois kings, she maintains, deliberately
relied on noblewomen, who moved freely in court circles and had a
recognized public place. This place was surely not universally ac-
cepted—as demonstrated by the famous querelle des femmes and several
centuries of misogynist writing by disaffected bourgeois, provincial
spokesmen, and foreigners. The “rediscovery” of the Salic law, which
prohibited women from inheriting the throne, is another proof of the
conflict that existed over women’s political role in this early period. Still,
Viennot argues, it wasn’t until the Bourbon monarchs that noblewomen
were definitively barred from politics. In an effort to consolidate monar-
chical power, noblewomen were then depicted as capricious, hare-
brained, and driven only by a desire for luxury and pleasure.”
124 Chapter Five

But it was not only women who were denied power; noblemen
were also cut off from politics and reduced to supplementary, often
frivolous, roles at court. They were, in a sense, feminized—castrated
—having lost the prerogatives that once defined their very being. In
the regime of absolutism, all power was the king’s; everyone else
served to confirm his sovereignty. There was no confusion about who
was in charge, who had the phallus—the signifier of all power. In this
context, seduction was, for the nobility, not politics by other means,
but an alternative game, a compensation for political impotence.
The dynamic of this seduction can be read in Les liaisons danger-
euses, an epistolary novel published in 1782 by a minor noble with a
military commission, Pierre-Ambroise-Frangois Choderlos de Laclos.
The novel shocked contemporaries, some of whom denounced it as
scandalous and diabolical, even as it sold out printing after printing
and was rapidly translated into several European languages. Some
thought it a clever roman a clef, others an exaggerated portrait of the
mores of the court. For us the interesting aspect of the novel is its
portrayal of seduction as a contest between two ultimately impotent
players.
The story of the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Mer-
teuil is one of their repeated seductions of others, an erotic game that
fuels the flirtation between them. There is no gentle commerce here,
and the point of their game is to ruin the object of desire—whether
male or female. Valmont writes to the Marquise to persuade her to
humiliate her latest conquest: “He must be made to look publicly
ridiculous and I'd like to repeat my request for you to do just that.”
Sex is the ultimate, perhaps the only, form of power. The game,
undeniably pleasurable, proceeds through deception, violence, and
the cruel manipulation of others and of each other. But in the end,
perhaps as an allegory of noble impotence, neither party gets what he
or she wants; there is only endless play and death.
Valmont is the male predator women are warned to avoid, but
Merteuil is his equal. She describes herself as “a self-made woman,
who has figured out how to strategically avoid the degradation that
follows from women’s unequal position in the game of love.2” Her
account of herself is a reflection on the fate of her female contempo-
raries: “In fact, in this mutual exchange of the bonds of love, to use
 French Seduction Theory 125

the current jargon, only you men are able to decide whether to
strengthen them or break them. We can consider ourselves lucky
indeed, if, in your flighty way, you prefer to lie low rather than show
off and are content merely to humiliate us by deserting us and not
turn the woman you worshiped yesterday into today’s victim!”?8 Mer-
teuil describes herself as the exception, but she also can be read as a
sign of noble castration more generally. Paired with Valmont, she
reminds us that—in the world of real politics—he, too, is feminized.
Their seductive play is, after all, the same: attractive, capricious,
impossible to avoid, and dangerous when engaged. In this they per-
haps imitate monarchical behavior, but there is a difference: neither
has the phallus, which is the attribute of the king alone.
Seduction is conducted according to a code of manners; civility is
the rule, even as strategies of conquest (often painful) are imple-
mented. But the civility that Laclos depicts is a far cry from that
evoked by Ozouf and Habib. It is a way of relating, to be sure, but it
masks games of cruel deception, the strategies of the weak who want
to appear to be strong. Dissimulation takes place under the cover of
civility; women, warns the elderly Madame de Rosemonde, must not
expect their passion to be reciprocated in kind; instead they must find
their pleasure in the pleasure they give men: “A man enjoys the
pleasure he feels, a woman the pleasure she bestows. This difference,
so essential and so unnoticed, has however a very marked effect on
their respective general behaviour. The pleasure of one partner is to
satisfy his desires, that of the other is primarily to arouse them. For
the man, pleasing is merely a means to succeed whereas for her it is
success itself”? At once a reflection on the unequal relationships of
the gendered players in the game of seduction, this advice can also be
read as a commentary on the rules of politics under absolutism.

Republicanism If aristocratic seduction was defined by its relation-

ship to absolutism, what does it mean to try to reconcile it with
republicanism? This is a legitimate question, since Ozouf and her
colleagues are not simply endorsing styles of erotic encounter (good
manners, civility, pleasure in the chase), they are also insisting that
seduction has important political implications. What might these be
in the absence of an absolute ruler? Does anyone actually have the
126 Chapter Five

phallus when, as is the case in democracies, “the people” and “the

nation” are abstractions? Can this potent symbol of sovereign power
be shared?
In the origin stories told by democratic theorists, a band of broth-
ers kills their father, ending his tyrannical rule and opening the way
for shared governance.*° But there remains ambiguity about where
ultimate power—symbolized by the phallus—now resides. In some
accounts, the exchange of women establishes masculinity and thus an
individual’s sovereign power, but even then, there is the nagging
question of the relationship of the brothers to each other and to the
father’s law, which is taken to be the prohibition of incest that is at the
very origin of society. All the brothers are presumed to be autono-
mous individuals, but what is the relationship between individual
sovereignty and political power? What symbolically confirms political
power? The end of monarchical rule brought with it a dispersed
concept of sovereignty, but as an abstraction embodied in other
abstractions (the individual, the people, the nation, its representa-
tives). Although there would be many attempts to equate the phallus
with the penis and so political power with masculinity, the fit was not
as persuasive as when a single ruler wielded all the power. Indeed, the
penis might be seen as a poor substitute for the large, central, and
singular authority of the king. In any event, making the literal case for
the penis as phallus has required continuous effort, the invention and
reinvention of explanations. And it has not solved the matter of
competition among the brothers. Can one of them ultimately take the
father’s place and so be exempt from, or above, the law? If so, which
one? What are the signs of his exceptionalism? The search for answers
to these questions plays out in the writing of constitutions, in the
structure of political parties, in competition for office, in debates
about the access of women to politics, and in varieties of political
conflict, some of which have shaken the very foundations of the
French nation-state.?!
If, under the monarchy, seduction—representing more generally
amorous relations between the sexes, the enactment of sexual differ-
ence—was a game for the politically impotent, in the democratic
republic, seduction becomes one of the ways of asserting political
power. It is a game in which the lines between the psychic and the
 French Seduction Theory 127

political are blurred, and sexual difference is the key to both. Of course,
even under absolutism, the phallus was a symbol whose psychic imple-
mentation was not bounded by real bodies or real-world politics, but
the fact that it had a concrete referent arguably made a difference in
the relationship between the realms of the psychic and the political.
Without the king, the phallus has no referent; its possession is up for
grabs. No longer a signifier of a power that can be located in the
occupant of the throne, the phallus is instead, in Lacan’s terms, the
signifier of desire instituted by lack. It is that which is constantly sought
after but never possessed; in consequence, the operations of desire are
driven by anxiety even if they give rise to temporary pleasures.
According to Lacan, sexuated subjects are constituted in relation
to the phallus; these are psychic positionings, not biologically con-
ferred identities, although it is sometimes difficult to entirely elimi-
nate biological references when trying to explain these psychic posi-
tionings.** Lack means castration—not in the literal sense, but as
alienation or separation, the loss of that sense of wholeness that
marks an infant’s imaginary connection to its mother, or of that
imagined full presence implied by the idea of an autonomous individ-
ual. Psychoanalytic theory posits the phallus as the contradiction (in
Zizek’s terms, the “obscene underside”) of republican political the-
ory’s concept of the autonomous individual.** In the place of self-
willed, rational actors, there are subjects seeking to restore their
imagined lost wholeness through their interactions with one another.
The quest takes different forms, establishing subjects in dissymmetri-
cal positions, either masculine or feminine. The masculine position
seeks in its love objects a replacement for the phantasmatic lost
mother. The desire of the Other(s) for him serves temporarily to
assuage his loss, to seemingly overcome the paternal prohibition of
incest, which is the origin of separation. The fantasy this enables is at
least the appearance or illusion of possession of the phallus—in its
traditional symbolic representation, as full presence and thus power.
The feminine position both is defined in relation to the masculine
and exceeds it. Access to the phallus (desire) is achieved, phantas-
matically, in a relationship with a man (a relationship in which her
desire serves his), but Lacan adds that women can also be an Other to
themselves, thus escaping full enclosure in the phallic economy.*®
128 Chapter Five

Seduction from a Lacanian perspective, then, would be symptom-

atic of this phallic system—an economy in which the operations of
desire are restless and incessant, and in which sexual difference is
produced through inherently unstable psychic processes. In some
ways, there is an analogy here to democratic political processes, but
only an analogy. These democratic processes can be seen to be driven
by desire, usually articulated as group interests; by contests for a
power that has no settled referent, except the institutions—such as
parliaments, presidents, and courts—in which the abstraction that is
power is said to reside; and by dissymmetries in the positioning of
citizens, the participants in the system, which are the outcome of
previous struggles and long histories.
If this were the argument of aristocratic republicans, it might be
persuasive, tempting us to provide genealogies of seduction over the
longue durée of French history. But, as we shall see, theirs is another
approach entirely, one that seeks to eliminate both the psychic anx-
ieties of sexual difference and the inevitable tensions of democracy.

A Particular Form of Equality

For Ozouf and her colleagues, seduction sheds new light on the mean-
ing of inequality. It is a system of balance in which the so-called natural
differences of the sexes find a certain equilibrium. These differences
ultimately refer to biology; there is none of the Lacanian psychic un-
certainty or instability in the assumption of sexual identity. There are
men and women, and there is a natural attraction between them, in
which each has a different role to play. In fact, women are the civilizing
force, curbing men’s innate brutality. From this women derive their in-
fluence, a compensation for their lack of power. Habib writes that gal-
lantry is “fundamentally inegalitarian. The point of departure of the
relationship is the advantage that woman has over man, of being at the
center of his desires. It’s only a relative advantage: it’s the force of mas-
culine desire that establishes feminine power. The power is unequal;
not all women profit from it. Moreover, it is transitory: one cannot
hope to enjoy it all of one’s life’’>° Women’s role, she continues, is to
“reassure” men that they will not be “gravely injured (gravement lésés)
in the game of love. That was the major function of feminine virtue: it
 French Seduction Theory 129

guaranteed to men—as much as possible—that respect for [of?]

women was not a pure loss.”3” “As much as possible” at once acknowl-
edges and dismisses the Lacanian version in which there is no remedy,
no ultimate protection from the grave injury that is castration. For Ha-
bib, seduction is not the symptom but the resolution of the problem.
The arguments of the aristocratic republicans gesture to the noble
tradition:in which no one, it seemed, questioned their sexual identi-
ties. In which, as Habib puts it, there was “minimal agreement on the
fact that something ‘feminine’ existed.’>* Modernity, in the form of
feminists and homosexual militants, we are told, has compromised
that tradition by claiming that individuals can decide on their own
identities. Habib refers to “the grave disturbance (ébranlement) of
sexual identities” and to “la perplexité sexuelle” that are the conse-
quence of “a society of individuals.” The conversion of feminine
delicacy into claims for legal equality, talk of rights instead of the
gentle murmurings of love, have led to a “brutalization of mores.’ She
writes: “What is lost in the new arrangement is the refinement of
amorous expression. We have lost the secret of it”°—and with it,
women’s ability to tame men’s natural aggressiveness by totally sub-
mitting to their desire. The myth of seduction posits a time before
sexual difference became a problem, and it suggests that there is still
something in French national identity that escapes its difficulties.
Gallantry, seduction’s hallmark, rested on supposedly stable sexual
identities whose inequalities were never protested; indeed, accepting
inequality and working within its limits was the key to the pleasure
that awaited the players in the game of seduction.
Inequality is the key to the importance of seduction for the ideol-
ogy of aristocratic republicanism. Inequality is what Raynaud meant
by “a particular form of equality.’ It is an inequality that he, Ozouf, and
the others at once naturalize and eroticize. The difference between the
sexes allows them to do both. If difference is undeniable, the point is to
accept it. In any case, its inequities are superficial. Here is Ozouf,
reviewing Habib: “The destiny of the two sexes is not symmetrical...
love is never the triumph of the ego; to love someone is to wish for his
well-being, even if it means subsuming one’s personal ends; . . . this
kind of attachment is not servitude. . . . There is, therefore, loving
consent (un consentement amoureux), the fruit of natural attraction.’*
130 Chapter Five

Here, recognition for women is achieved through submission to the

needs and will of one’s superior, always a man. Seduction, which in
more conventional usage denotes submission achieved by force or
trickery, is now redefined as “loving consent.”
Consent is important because it demonstrates the triumph of the
rule of civility over the rule of law. Seduction is preferable to marriage
not only because it emphasizes pleasure, but also because it involves
no contract, no legal obligation. The bonds are established not for
material considerations, but by passionate attraction. That is why
attempts to legislate against sexual harassment are absurd. The police
can never accomplish what only women can do: “civilize masculine
desire.’*! Habib cites Montesquieu on the importance of manners:
“Everything rests on this opposition between manners and laws;
happy is the moderate legislator in a country where manners have
taken the place of laws.’ Citing this same quotation, Ozouf goes on
to argue that it is precisely the superior importance of manners that
has enabled Frenchwomen over the ages to understand “the inanity
of juridical and political equality” when compared to the influence
and pleasure they derive from their part in the game of seduction.”
Habib notes that modern feminism’s quest for recognition as “indi-
viduals equal in rights” destroys the very possibility for a loving
relationship, which rests not on reason, but on passion and the in-
equality of woman and man—an inequality that, because it follows
from the nature of things, nonetheless has its compensations.“
The endorsement of seduction as a form of loving consent, as an
expression of art rather than law, is intended as a repudiation of
feminists, often conflated with lesbians, who consider love to be a
mask for male domination. Ozouf worries that feminism is the new
Marxism. If for Marxism the final conflict was to lead to the end of class
struggle and the leveling triumph of the proletariat, with feminism the
outcome will be even more terrible: “the negation of the differences
between the sexes.” The negation takes two forms: the suppression of
all visible evidence of difference and the radical repudiation of “natural
attraction” by militant homosexuals. Homosexuality is depicted not as
a plausible psychic position, but as an exclusively political project—a
false utopia, “a dazzling promise”; for lesbians, the chimera of “an
island rich in perfect equality” offering “an absolutely novel” “jouis-
 French Seduction Theory 131

sance féminine” —driven by the quest for an alternative to “the alliance

of sex and power” that critics have mistakenly attributed to heterosex-
ual coupling.** Habib notes that during her years in the feminist
movements of the 1970s, “lesbians always struck me as blind elephants.
They were in the shop, but they did not see the porcelain.”*
Despite these disturbing deviations, the aristocratic republicans
believe that France—marked, as a nation, by certain gendered charac-
teristics—has been resistant to the siren call of feminism. For Ray-
naud, this is evident in a variety of indicators—the relative weakness
or “humaneness” of French feminist culture; the absence in univer-
sities of women’s studies programs “devoted to rereading the entire
history of Western civilization from women’s point of view”; the
reluctance of female scholars to denounce canonical philosophy or
literature as evidence of male domination; the historic willingness of
Frenchwomen to accept the “delay” in access to suffrage—all of which
indicate women’s satisfaction with their destiny.*’ If scant evidence is
offered to support these claims (for example, not all Frenchwomen
willingly accepted the delay in access to suffrage; some protested it
loudly) and if they might be explained in other ways (for example, by
the control that educational hierarchies exercise over university cur-
ricula), that is of no concern to Raynaud.
It is a less tangible factor—the “spirit” of things—that really mat-
ters. Raynaud gives some examples:

On the side of seduction, there has never been this massive boycott of the
miniskirt by young Frenchwomen (as there was in the United States
several months ago), we can see, on the contrary, an intentional emphasis
on a sexy fashion aesthetic (that is not necessarily sexist); on the side of
the family, even if there is commitment to equality, there is also a clearer
distinction than elsewhere between the mother and the father; in the
same spirit, we note that, when all tendencies are taken into account,
French psychoanalysis is more comfortably loyal to the “phallocentric”
aspects of Freud’s thought.**

The disclaimers (garments are sexy but not sexist; families seek
equality, but there are clear distinctions between mothers and fa-
thers) attempt to disguise the conservatism of this vision, but it is
clear that French culture remains “loyal” to the organization of sex-
132 Chapter Five

uality around the phallus—by which Raynaud does not mean Lacan's
signifier of desire, but the privileging of men.
The theory of seduction that these writers put forth dispenses
with the uncertainty Lacan attributes to the phallus, insisting instead
that in the game of love (and, as we shall see, in the game of politics as
well) there is no question about where power lies. The appeal of
aristocratic seduction in the age of absolutism lies precisely in the
unequivocal and unchallenged position of the king. The possession of
the phallus is never in doubt. In a move that reveals their mistaken
reading of the past, these writers equate the king’s power with male
power in general. This may be where their story becomes myth,
eliminating the troubling impotence of the nobility’s game, opting
instead for a more harmonious representation of history, and, at the
same time, insisting that—in politics, as in sex—there is a real referent
for the phallus.
Concern about the effects of feminism on men is evident in much
of the writing on seduction, and it is often linked to rejection of an
explicitly American feminism, which provides an ultraradical coun-
terpoint to milder French forms. (Here is one of the ways of estab-
lishing a unique national identity, as a contrast to a reviled Other.)
One example among many—Ozouf and Raynaud also attack Ameri-
can feminism as a kind of sexual Stalinism, and Habib attributes a
crisis over the values of femininity to the publication of Simone de
Beauvoir's Second Sex*”—is a 1997 review by Jacques Julliard, editor of
Le Nouvel Observateur, of an American book, one of those ephemeral
publications that commentators rush to treat as the key to an entire
society. The book was called The Rules, and it offered advice to
women trying to snag a husband. Julliard objected to the reduction of
the game of love to a set of written rules and to the power the book
seemed to assign to women, though he found the approach typical of
the long history of the United States: “The nightmare, par excellence,
on the other side of the Atlantic . . . today, as yesterday, is love. To
eliminate it, they have tried everything. First, repression, that is to say
Puritanism. Then, trivialization, that is to say liberalized practices
with their parade of scientific surveys and sexual gossip. Lastly, the
final solution, that is to say American-style feminism.’*° He had wit-
nessed the effects of this feminism, he reported, during a visit to a
New England college campus: “I can assure you that the unfortunate
 French Seduction Theory 133

boys who ventured into enemy territory had a cowering look—while

the girls could talk about only one thing. Moreover, in order to escape
the alleged lust of these males, the women had managed to hide their
secondary sexual characteristics so well that it felt like Mao’s China,
and not the heart of Massachusetts.’>! So powerful a disincentive was
the effect of this indifferentiation, Julliard commented, that “the sex-
ual assaults these women feared” wouldn't be “so much criminal as
heroic.’ He went on to lament the plight of American men, “those
who suffer most”: “Caught between the feminist party that wants to
castrate him and the matrimonial party that dreams of caging him,
the American male has limited chances of survival. Thus he [compen-
sates]: he makes war and dreams of dominating the planet. For those
of you preoccupied with American imperialism, it’s useless to talk to
their diplomats; better to whisper sweet nothings to their women.’’?
Julliard mounts his attack on American feminism as an implicit
contrast favoring France, which he represents as the nation that isn’t
afraid of sex, knows how to play the game of seduction (“whisper
sweet nothings”), and loves to love. Feminists bear the brunt of his
attack. In his view, as in Ozouf’s, legislating sexual relations results in
castration. For Julliard, whether feminists insist that there are no
differences between men and women or withdraw into an exclusive
lesbianism, the effect is the same. So he issues an implicit warning to
Frenchwomen by suggesting that generalized male violence is a rea-
sonable response to feminism, and that rape is a “heroic” corrective to
sexual indifferentiation. Habib offers another version of this idea
when she insists that it is women who must tame male propensities to
violence: “Because of their physiology, men have the means to associ-
ate, even to confound, aggression and jouissance . . . the dissociation
of the two requires culture and artifice. It’s a question of leading
[men] to renounce predatory sexual pleasure, not by means of repres-
sion, but by persuasion. . . The development of this kind of argu-
ment is the task of every woman.” After all, she adds, in a swipe at de
Beauvoir, “one is not born gallant, one becomes it,’ and it is in
“making herself loved that a woman succeeds in polishing a man.’**
Frenchwomen’s patriotic duty, it would seem, is to stay away from
feminism and thus spare their men the sufferings experienced by
those across the Atlantic.
Julliard’s repeated references to America as l’outre Atlantique se-
134 Chapter Five

cures the connection between sexual practices and national identity.

The global political economy—which seems, among other things, to
be reducing the salience of national boundaries—is driven, Julliard
suggests, by emasculated Americans. The disappearance of clear lines
of sexual difference serves both as a figure of this global homogeniza-
tion and as a comment on its unnatural effects. The causality is
reciprocal: sexual frustration drives American men to conquer the
world, while their actions reproduce in the political and economic
fields the pathology of the psychosexual realm.
Happily, these writers tell us, France has avoided American pathol-
ogy in both the political and the sexual realm. Ozouf thinks that the
men of the French Revolution may have implemented a stronger
form of sexual segregation than existed during the ancien régime
because they intuitively feared that the leveling effects of their radical
democracy would lead to “a world without distinctions . . . an inhu-
man, gray abstraction’*°—the world of Mao’s China evoked by Jul-
liard. Ozouf continues: “The praise of feminine difference protects
democracy from itself’°° The insistence on maintaining the bound-
aries of sexual difference, she says, kept the pattern of aristocratic
seduction alive, even as the monarchy gave way to a succession of
republics and the bourgeoisie eclipsed the nobility. And this, in turn,
not only preserved the erotic side of life but offered a model for the
subordination of all differences. Habib says that the legacy of absolut-
ism made gallantry a compensation for subordination: “The society
of Louis XIV was an ordered society, extremely hierarchical, from
superior to inferior. . . . Gallantry was one of the variations on the art
of accommodating to subordination.’
Ozouf offers seduction as a model for a politics in which there are
no conflicts of power—the nation as an imagined affective commu-
nity: “The threat posed by the real differences spread over French
territory was easily vanquished only because of the deeply rooted
emotional certainty of sharing an essence common to all the French.
... At the same time, everyone could cultivate local differences,
feeling their charm and their value, expressing them coquettishly or
even with great pride, but without a spirit of dissent; differences
without anxiety or aggression, contained within an abstract unity,
and agreeing in advance to be subordinate to it.”5*
 French Seduction Theory 135

The harmony of the past (“differences without anxiety or aggres-

sion”) is meant to correct the present’s emphasis on conflicts of power
and discrimination between men and women and, beyond that,
among social groups. Instead of the intractability of power, with its
spirit of dissent, we are offered the charms of seduction. The aim is to
counter the claims of contemporary activists by proclaiming the exis-
tence of “un génie national” with deep historical roots that these dissi-
dents have misunderstood or want to destroy. Whether the dissidents
are feminists demanding equal access to politics (parité), gay activists
seeking the right to form families (through marriage, adoption, and
access to reproductive technologies), or Muslims defending the hijab
as a legitimate form of women’s religious observance, they are said to
be challenging the very existence of the national community.
Aristocratic republicanism, with sexual difference at its core, in-
sists on subordinating particular differences to an abstract unity and
is meant to serve the strategic purpose of separating “true” French
from “foreign” elements, connecting the proper heirs to their history.
It is not surprising that the connection between seduction (an asym-
metrical relationship between two different subjects) and national
unity (the submersion of all differences into an abstract single iden-
tity) is first located in the monarchy of Louis XIV. While the nobility
played erotic games of simulated power, the king established himself
as the embodiment of the nation. But this idea of the connection
between seduction and national unity also takes republican political
theory into account. Historically, that theory has identified the uni-
versal with the masculine, the particular with the feminine. In effect,
Habib, Ozouf, and the others restate this theory by repeatedly em-
phasizing the need for female subjects (who are particular and dif-
ferent) to subordinate themselves to male subjects (the embodiment
of the universal), willingly and with great affection. The merger of the
two—aristocracy and republic—is achieved by identifying power (the
phallus) with masculinity. The ambiguities of democracy are averted
when men (or those clearly dominant—that is, native, white French
people) are, in effect, made king.
The importance, then, of the theory of seduction is that it offers an
affective model with deep historical roots for politics: “an essence
common to all the French.” The heterosexual couple embodies differ-
136 Chapter Five

ence not as a field of force, but as a shifting play of contrasting and

complementary elements (delightful to experience and to behold).
Within the couple, the natural subordination of women to men repli-
cates the accommodation that any social difference must make in the
interests of national harmony. If force is introduced into the relation-
ship, seduction loses its allure and becomes a violent struggle; mili-
tant homosexuality—in its refusal of difference—is the abhorrent
consequence of the distortion of the natural ties of heterosexual
erotics. By extension, any group that protests its different treatment,
that enters the political arena claiming an equality it has been denied,
is a threat to national integrity. Homophobia thus functions both to
ensure the heterosexual couple’s iconic function and to guard against
the leveling effects of democracy. Tellingly, the very conflicts that
democracy was designed to mediate become, in this conservative
nationalist vision, threats to the social fabric itself.

The Politics of the Veil

The French theory of seduction has been articulated to counter the

claims of various dissident groups in French society. Ozouf and Jul-
liard take feminism as their primary target. So does Habib, but she
adds Muslims to the list of those who are at odds with the French way
of life. French aversion to head scarves, she suggests, has had less to
do with racism or the persistence of Jacobin secularism than with “an
implicit norm about the relations between the sexes—the ascendancy
of feminine beauty and the fidelity of men.’’? Citing the veil as a
repudiation of women’s sexuality, Habib compares it to the adoration
women received at court, where they mixed freely with men. It was
their appearance, so artfully crafted to please and attract, that gave
them entry to the game of seduction. Visibility was vital to the very
meaning of femininity, however artificial the improvements of cloth-
ing, coiffure, and powder. And the tradition of gallantry depended
not only on women’s visibility but on “pleasure and joy in being
visible. . . . Wearing the veil indicates chastity and that signified the
interruption, and even the impossibility, of the gains of gallantry.
There is no possible conciliation” In her review of Habib’s book,
Ozouf made the point more strongly. The aristocratic heritage per-
 French Seduction Theory 137

sisted stubbornly, she suggested, “in the natural inclination of women

not to separate love and sexuality, in their distaste for separation, in
their dream to make their commitments long-term.”*! (This last point
is one of the many times a contradiction arises between seduction as
a transitory game and the desire for permanence, at least on the part
of women.) To the extent that the game of seduction was an essential
French trait, Muslims’ failure to play it meant they could never be
fully French.
Habib’s explanation of French objections to the veil makes sense;
they are the objections of an “open society” to a “closed one,’ a
recognition of differences of cultural style.© I have made a similar
argument about the underlying motive for the head scarf ban in my
book on the issue.®? What makes my argument different from Habib’s,
however, is that she insists that French traditions are more natural, or
at least superior, in their handling of the differences between the
sexes, and also that the closed nature of Muslim society disqualifies
Muslims from membership in the nation. But there is more. In her
eyes, Muslims pose a threat to the continuity of the old tradition of
seduction. Their practices “interrupt” the game, blocking “the cir-
culation of coquetterie and hommage,’ offering another set of rules for
the relations of the sexes—strict separation. The veil “flouts an im-
plicit norm of what ought to be the relations between the sexes—the
ascendance of feminine beauty and masculine allegiance to it.” And,
by condemning “that which has been elaborated through the cen-
turies as a form of coexistence between the sexes,’ Muslims threaten
its endurance.“
In her book, Ozouf cites Montesquieu’s fictional report on the
reaction of two Persians visiting France in the early eighteenth cen-
tury—an example of early Orientalism that she takes to be a reflection
of the real differences between East and West: “Here, a style of
equality between the sexes, and of liberty. No veils, no bars, no
eunuchs. ... Behind the appearance of equality, the reality of women’s
supremacy.’® The Persians take the absence of patriarchal control,
“the power to keep watch over and punish,” to be disastrous for a well-
regulated family, but Ozouf equates sharp lines of segregation with
male domination in ways that powerfully echo the contemporary
discussion of Muslim veils. For her, mixité—the mixing of the sexes in
138 Chapter Five

public space—means greater freedom on both sides, but particularly

for women. As she describes what Montesquieu imagines the Per-
sians saw in Paris, she cannot restrain her delight: “Women with no
inhibition prepare their toilette and their faces with the sole purpose
of seducing; [they are] skillful at changing not only their costume,
but their very bodies; [they are] out of their minds with luxurious-
ness, devoted to the game, breaking off to control the pace of conver-
sation and to cut off the speech of men of science and intellect.”
Erotic attraction gave women a certain superiority, even as they dedi-
cated themselves to the delight of men; they might “cut off” men’s
speech, but there was no threat of castration here; no law could install
this “particular form of equality.”
By rooting contemporary French attitudes in an ancestral habit,
Habib and Ozouf essentialize Frenchness and so write Muslims out
of membership in the national community. Muslims are portrayed as
strangers, an unnatural people with no rightful place in the history of
this nation. The fact that, of course, they do have a rightful place in a
long history of colonial and postcolonial experience is obscured by
the invocation of the seductive ancestors. Muslims’ demands for the
recognition of their rightful place in the representation of the nation
are disqualified because their attitudes and behaviors are too different
to fit in. Their calls for an end to group discrimination also raise the
issue of difference in a politically dangerous way, one taken to be
consonant with the Islamic system of sex segregation. Rather than
subordinate difference to the dominant way of doing things, these
political actors take difference to be an organizing principle. And in
politics they seek to use difference as a lever to alter the structures of
power that marginalize or exclude them. For the seduction theorists,
however, the game of politics, like that of aristocratic seduction, must
be played as if such structures and power did not exist. Those who
don't know the rules of the game are not considered viable players, in
matters of politics as in matters of love. Thus the conclusion is that
France is not denying Muslims’ rights; rather, the Muslims—in their
management of sexual difference and, by extension, of all human
relationships—are disqualifying themselves as French.
 French Seduction Theory 139

The Seduction of the Sign

It might be said that the conservative nationalist intellectuals I have

been discussing are themselves practicing the art of seduction in the
terms that Jean Baudrillard used to describe it in 1979: “It is because
the sign has been turned from its meaning or ‘seduced’ that the story
itself is seductive. It is when signs are seduced that they become
seductive.”®’ In the literary tradition of aristocratic gentility, the intel-
lectuals find a story that leaves out the messy details of betrayal,
power, and exploitation, recasting hierarchies of dependence in terms
of civility and gallantry. They refuse the challenges that have been
posed to social prescriptions for sexual difference, conflating the nor-
mative with the natural, the natural with the cultural, and the cultural
with the national. Rather than the restless and irrepressible move-
ment of desire, seduction becomes a predictable expression of hetero-
sexuality—the only kind of sexual relationship that is plausible and
satisfying.
It is, first of all, sexual difference that is seduced in the story these
intellectuals tell. As if to stabilize the inherently contradictory union
that is aristocratic republicanism, they present the heterosexual rela-
tionship as natural and unproblematic, the only possible resolution to
those primal and unresolved questions about the links between anat-
omy, sexuality, and identity. The tensions and conflicts that attend
relations between the sexes are attributed to contemporary trouble-
makers—such as feminists and homosexuals—who are out of touch
with what history supposedly teaches us are natural human inclina-
tions. These inclinations extend from sex to politics; the hierarchy of
the couple becomes a model for social organization.
In the process, equality is also seduced, turned from its historical
meaning in the French Revolution and the current French Constitu-
tion to represent something else entirely—a game of appearances that
rests on illusion, with no end but mutual pleasure. Equality is not to
be measured by the distribution of jobs, wages, or legal rights, but by
another standard entirely—one that has to do with erotic exchanges
between the sexes, with the rules of the game of seduction.
In this version of equality, the nationalist intellectuals have fash-
ioned a trompe l'oeil, in which the equality of republican theory is
140 Chapter Five

exemplified by aristocratic erotic games marked by asymmetry be-

tween partners, and in which politics are embodied by a (necessarily
French) couple. The trick of these examples, of course, is to demon-
strate that inequalities are, if not actually equality, then a complemen-
tarity of differences always subordinate to the unity of the nation. In
this way, these nationalists have sought to distract their readers from
the difficulties that republicans are having in figuring out how to
reconcile their commitment to universalism with the problem of
long-standing inequities (of wages, resources, social and political ac-
cess, and recognition) in the treatment of groups (women, Muslims,
homosexuals, and others) marked by their difference from the univer-
sal (masculine) individual. If, in the theory of seduction, man and
woman stand for the universal and the particular, and if nature re-
quires her submission to his desire—indeed, rewards her with love for
that willing submission—then the message to France’s others is clear:
play the game with loving consent, and you will reap rewards appro-
priate to your status. The style of engagement—flirtatiousness, gal-
lantry, civility—matters too. It marks you not only as a legitimate
player in the game, but as deeply and incontestably French.
 Epilogue
A Feminist Theory Archive

IN AN ESSAY SHE WROTE IN 2003, which reviewed feminist psy-

choanalytic literary criticism, Elizabeth Weed talked of the energy
and excitement, the sexual sparkle and the sheer pleasure—one might
even say the jouissance—one felt when encountering feminist writing
in the 1970s and 1980s. Citing Janet Malcolm’s 1987 New Yorker review
of In Dora's Case: Freud, Hysteria, Feminism, Weed notes Malcolm's
particular appreciation of the feminist writings in that collection.’ It
is their emancipated tone, the transferential quality of their criticism
(they fantasize wildly and irreverently about the master theorists)
that delights Malcolm—and Weed, who notes: “One might even ar-
gue that it was the unabashedly transferential nature of early feminist
criticism more than its political character that opponents found dis-
concerting. At least until Harold Bloom’s “Anxiety of Influence,’ even
literary criticism, probably the least detached of the critical disci-
plines, could perform its work at a reassuring remove. Academic
feminism changed that. This is not to say that all feminist criticism of
the seventies through the late eighties shone forth with an irresistible,
gleeful energy. But there was a general excitement in that early work.”
142 Epilogue

It is an excitement Weed finds lacking in more recent writing, al-

though she notes that there is much to be admired and learned from
the newer focus on once-neglected questions of race, ethnicity, sex-
uality, and discrimination. As she describes it, the shift from defiant
engagement with fathers to exegeses informed by theories of trauma
and melancholia involves a very different affect, another tone entirely,
and a changed relation to politics. Weed does not write out of nostal-
gia for a lost world, but there is surely a bit of regret in her essay, even
as it appreciates a new generation of feminist literary scholarship.
I think some of that regret became the inspiration for the Feminist
Theory Papers, an archival collection that Weed launched at Brown
University’s John Hay Library. The archive was not conceived of as a
monument either to dead feminists (although a need to find a home
for the papers of the literary scholar Naomi Schor was an immediate
factor in its creation) or to an expired social and political movement.
It was not a compensatory gesture meant to prove that women, too,
deserved a place in the annals of philosophical thought. Nor was it an
attempt to collect the documentation for an authoritative and sys-
tematized version of feminist theory in the way that the earliest
archives were used to authorize the rule of monarchs and nations.
Memory surely was at issue—any archive is a prompt to memory—
but there was no aim to direct or control it for some clearly defined
end. The idea was not to immortalize a certain kind of theorist from a
certain historical period as the embodiment of a one true feminism.
Rather, the point was to insist, in the face of the current backlash
against feminism and theory, that these were not ephemeral moments
but events, in Foucault’s sense of the word—major discursive shifts
with far-reaching and continuing ramifications.
Foucault refers to the archive as “the set of discourses actually
pronounced,” the set that determines what counts as knowledge in a
particular period.’ There is no homogeneity in Foucault's archive, but
a “density of discursive practices, systems that establish statements as
events (with their own conditions and domain of appearance) and
things (with their own possibility and field of use).’* The feminist
theory gathered in this archive is part of a set of discourses, evidence
that there are contests about what counts as knowledge, that knowl-
edge is no sure or commonly agreed upon thing, even within what
 A Feminist Theory Archive 143

might be called a discursive or cultural “system.” Here is Foucault

again: “Far from being that which unifies everything that has been
said in the great confused murmur of a discourse, far from being only
that which ensures that we exist in the midst of preserved discourse,
[the archive] is that which differentiates discourses in their multiple
existence and specifies them in their own duration.’> From this per-
spective, the decision to collect and house the papers of a generation
and more of feminist scholars is an effort to continue the critical work
they (we) engage in by attributing to it value as history. I don’t mean
history in the sense of something dead and gone, but rather some-
thing worth holding onto—a living heritage, if you will, an enduring
legacy. This archive is a living reminder, a rebuke to currently fashion-
able “post” thinking on questions of theory and feminism. It is a post-
post institution. It marks not the exhaustion or the death of feminist
theory, but its continuing vitality.
When she conceived the plan for the archive, Weed (having read
Derrida’s Archive Fever),° wondered if there might be a contradiction
at its core between the conservative tendency of any archive and the
avowed commitment to revolution of the contributors to this one.
What did it mean to contain corrosive critique in acid-free boxes, to
subject it to a host of technological operations (classifying, catalog-
ing, digitizing) and to confine it in categories suitable for an index
(however sympathetically devised)? Would critique survive its im-
prisonment, or would it become domesticated, inevitably succumb-
ing to history’s disciplinary requirements? And even if these were not
objectionable practices, did an attempt to preserve the critical think-
ing of another era undermine the very purpose of critique, which was
to deconstruct the legacies of the past in order to open new ways for
thinking the future? Would putting these papers in an archive impose
the weight of the past, the burden of tradition, on the possibilities for
new thought? Would it confirm the idea that origins—of movements,
ideas, and events—can really be found? Was it possible that what was
once lively critique would become stultifying orthodoxy? These are
troubling questions when posed abstractly, and I suggest that they
could be posed only by philosophers and others who haven't spent
much time in archives. Historians know there is a different reality,
albeit not free of its own difficulties.
 144 Epilogue

The archive that historians work in is not a prison with numbered,

locked cells or, for that matter, a cemetery, where rows of tombstones
inscribed with names and dates convey a sense of finality and closure.
The historian’s archive is not a mournful place, but one where the
living continue to find life. Writing in the New Yorker, Jill Lepore
likened a Cryonics Institute (a place where the dead are frozen, await-
ing their ultimate resurrection) to an archive: “a place where people
deposit their papers—the contents of their heads—when they’re dead,
so that someone, some future historian, can find them and bring them
back to life.” The conceit of cheating death is widespread among
historians. Or perhaps it is better to say that historians make death a
minor episode, something that is transitory rather than final. Meta-
phors abound: there are shadows materialized by light; ghosts given
embodiment; corpses exhumed for a second life. Whispers are heard
from “the souls who had suffered so long ago and who were smothered
now in the past.’$ Jules Michelet, the nineteenth-century French histo-
rian, consummately lyrical, is wonderful to listen to on this. “As I
breathed their dust,’ he writes of his contact with the dead in old
papers and leather-bound parchments, “I saw them rise up. They rose
from the sepulchre . . . as in the Last Judgment of Michelangelo or in
the Dance of Death. This frenzied dance . . . I have tried to reproduce
in [my] work.”? It’s tempting here to think of these dancers experienc-
ing la petite mort—the little death—which in French is synonymous
with jouissance. The orgiastic frenzy of the dancers evokes the image,
as does Michelet’s own obvious pleasure in recounting the story.
Carolyn Steedman has written a book called Dust, a social histo-
rian’s reply to Derrida’s philosophical musings on the archive. (Among
other things, she insists—playing with the reputation of the social
historian for reading literally—that if there is archive fever, it may have
to do with the actual inhalation of dust and with traces of anthrax
clinging to the sheepskin bindings one touches there. This is also, of
course, a metaphor for the persistence of the past, its ability to infect
those who come into contact with it.) In the book, Steedman stresses
the importance of randomness and accident, even in the most care-
fully constructed archives, those whose origins lie with the rationaliz-
_ing impulses of state power: “The Archive is made from selected and
consciously chosen documentation from the past and also from the
 A Feminist Theory Archive 145

mad fragmentations that no one intended to preserve and that just

ended up there.”!° Mad fragmentations sit waiting in the interstices of
assigned categories to engage the imagination of the lonely researcher
who, these days, is not usually looking for origins, but rather documen-
tation for an interpretation she wants to advance. I should add that
researchers are rarely confined by the formal classifying rubrics; they
routinely refuse to be limited by them. Indeed, part of the fun of
archival research is guessing what might be found in a box of papers
whose label is seemingly irrelevant to the inquiry at hand. Historians,
even the most conventional, know that what they are looking for may
not be what some archivist thought it was.
The pursuit of knowledge in the archive is a highly individualized
task, but it’s not lonely. The researcher surrounds herself with the
whispering souls she conjures from the material she reads. If she’s a
good reader, she listens, too, for silences and omissions. She ponders
the apparent order of thoughts and texts. Michel de Certeau, refer-
ring to Foucault, says that “to think . . . is to pass through: it is to
question that order, to marvel that it exists, to wonder what made it
possible, to seek, in passing over its landscape, traces of the move-
ment that formed it, to discover in these histories supposedly laid to
rest, ‘how and to what extent it would be possible to think other-
wise. ”!! It is the historian’s engagement with what she finds there
that makes the archive a dynamic, social place, one in which the
objects of her desire also have something of a life of their own.
The challenge, of course, for all but the most naive empiricists, is
that the texts don’t speak for themselves; the whispers are heard only
through a process of translation, and the very words—spoken or
written—carry different meanings in each of their iterations. The
dead don’t come back to life as they were, but as we represent them.
Michelet thought he was exhuming le peuple and so revealing their
deepest desire, but his—as any history—was a work of projection and
interpretation.!” Barthes adds that it was also a work of incorporation
—Michelet, he wrote, “actually ate history,’ as Christians eat the
blood and body of their savior, and in this way both approach and
transcend death.!? Again, I would offer la petite mort as the apposite
term—the momentary conjunction of the psychic drives of death and
life. Steedman, however, suggests that the “sedentary, airless, and
146 Epilogue

fevered scholarly life spent in close proximity to leather bound books

and documents” means that infection by anthrax actually made
Michelet ill.’*
The problem of the archive, for me, is not that it systematizes and
preserves; it’s the reading practices to which the contents are sub-
jected. The question of representation, not unique by any means to
archival holdings, at once saves us from the threat of stagnation and
threatens the integrity of what is there. I would like to protect the past
from its appropriation by the wrong kind of people: those who read
literally, who are deaf to language’s resonances, who recuperate crit-
ical concepts for normative uses, and who seek to confirm their
identities by locating ancestors who are just like them. My greatest
fears about my own papers are that they'll be used to prove some
ideologically driven point that has never been my own, that the things
I value most will be trivialized, and that the trivial will assume an
undeserved importance. I’d rather be dead than misread. For that
reason, I’ve considered eliminating from the papers I give to Brown
the items that I think are most susceptible to misreading. It’s because
I know history is about representation that I want to control my own.
But I also understand the futility of trying to exercise that control.
It's impossible to foresee what among those papers will lend them-
selves to misuse. More important, my impulse for control contradicts
my commitment to critique. When I think about the uses to which
my artifacts could be put, I become the worst kind of objective
historian, insisting on the transparent meaning of what’s there. My
work has, after all, achieved a certain legitimacy in the world of
feminist theory in which I travel; it’s a legitimacy I want preserved on
my terms. Yet the theory it stands for endorses the notions that no
thinking is immune from critique, that the pursuit of knowledge is an
unending and often discontinuous process, that futures cannot be
bound to or by the past.
Derrida understood this dilemma as he peas plans for the
Collége de Philosophie in the early 1980s:
The most ruthless critique, the implacable analysis of a power of legitima-
tion is always produced in the name of a system of legitimation. ... We
already know that the interest in research not currently legitimated will
only find its way if, following trajectories ignored by or unknown to any
 A Feminist Theory Archive 147

established institutional power, this new research is already underway and

promises a new legitimacy until one day, once again ... and so on. We also
know—and who wouldn't want it?—that if the Collége is created with the
resources it requires and, above all, if its vitality and richness are one day
what we foresee, then it will become in its turn a legitimating instance that
will have obligated many other instances to reckon with it. It is this
situation that must be continuously analyzed, today and tomorrow, to
avoid exempting the Collége from its own analytic work.!s

Unlike an educational institution, which has the task of certifying its

graduates, an archive has no responsibility for the uses made of it. Of
course, archivists try to impose order on the mass of papers they must
process, and they set standards for selection, and thus for inclusion
and exclusion. But they can’t really rein in the imaginations of the
researchers sitting there, inhaling the dust. It’s not only the mad
fragments that draw one’s attention, the odd pieces that dispel the
tedium of scholarly research. It’s also the operations of our psyches—
always incompletely disciplined—that attach us to substitutes for the
lost objects of our childhood, or draw us to outbursts of passion in
forms we don't understand, or lead us to judgments that aren't always
rationally defensible.!° How can we account for our attraction to (or
repulsion from) specific events, philosophies, figures, or, for that mat-
ter, figures of speech? I’m not calling for psychoanalytic testing as a
prerequisite for users of archives. The point is that the archive is a
provocation; its contents offer an endless resource for thinking and
rethinking. Steedman puts it this way: “The Archive, then, is some-
thing that, through the cultural activity of History, can become Mem-
ory’s potential space, one of the few realms of the modern imagina-
tion where a hard-won and carefully constructed place, can return to
boundless, limitless space.”!” I like the way she juxtaposes place—a
definable physical location (the John Hay Library, in the case of the
Feminist Theory Papers)—and space—the illimitable realm of imagi-
nation, where our past, present, and future selves and those of others
intersect unpredictably. I’m not saying that anything goes. Of course
there is discipline; inquiry cannot proceed without it. But it’s the
confrontation, the contrast of discourses—to go back to Foucault for
a minute—that produces excitement and thus new knowledge. As he
says, the archive “is that which differentiates discourses in their multi-
148 Epilogue

ple existence and specifies them in their own duration.”!* I would add
that the user of the archives is part of that discursive mix. The archive
is a place that opens the space in which critique can flourish.
There’s nothing contradictory about housing theory in an archive.
What would we do without the papers of Kant, Hegel, Marx, the
Frankfurt School, Simone de Beauvoir, and dozens of other practi-
tioners of critique? We'd not only know less about how and why they
thought as they did, but we’d be deprived of the practical details of
the articulation of critique (whom they read and wrote to; how they
qualified, expanded, or changed their ideas, and in what political,
social, economic, and personal contexts). And we'd lack the resources
by which to gain insight into the affective side of their thought pro-
cesses. Most of all, though, we'd lose the stuff that imagination thrives
on and by which it pleasures itself. Our own critical faculty gets off,
not only on following their example, but on knowing more about
them and then critiquing and exceeding what they've done.
We can't prevent the dullards from reading our papers, and they
will surely represent us in ways we cannot abide. But the bet one
makes in leaving behind the records of a life (or, for that matter, in
writing a book) committed to critical thought is that some readers
will be moved to think with us, albeit differently. If our own death is
certain, we give the next generation of historians the occasion for la
petite mort—the extraordinary pleasure that comes not only from
exposure to brave and courageous ideas, transgressive acts, and bold
and irreverent behavior, but also from the need to puzzle over these
things in order to understand them in the difference of their historical
moments. Will a new generation of scholars read us differently? Will
they sense the same excitement that so moved Janet Malcolm and
Elizabeth Weed? Will they experience the same pleasure or, indeed,
any pleasure at all?
Jouissance is by definition transitory. In that way, it’s like critique.
And, like critique, it recurs (though never in the same way) if the
circumstances are right. Archives—books too—can’t contain or pre-
serve jouissance, but they provide the materials for its recurrence. In
the process it’s not only the researchers who change, but the materials
as well. The repository of papers then is anything but a dead-letter
office; instead, it is the place and the space from which new ideas can
issue forth without end.
 Notes

Introduction

1. Harold T. Parker, “Review Essay: A Methodological Gem,” Journal of Urban

History 2, no. 3 (1976): 373-76.
2. It is now too late to thank him for his advice. Professor Parker died, at age
ninety-four, in 2002.
3. Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1988), 288.
4. For my objections, see Joan Wallach Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of
Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (1986): 1053-75.
5. See Joan Wallach Scott, “Finding Critical History,” in Becoming Historians,
ed. James Banner and John Gillis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009),
26-53,
6. Certeau, The Writing ofHistory, 343. Thanks to postcolonial history, the “law
of place” is no longer taken for granted. See, for example, Dipesh Chakrabarty,
Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2000); Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa:
Booker T. Washington, the German Empire and the Globalization of the New South
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); and Kathleen Wilson, The Island
Race: Englishness, Empire, and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London: Rout-
ledge, 2003).
7. Certeau, The Writing ofHistory, 288.
8. Ibid., 291.
150 Notes to Introduction

9. Ibid., 303.
10. I am aware of the arguments (from queer theorists and some feminist
theorists) that caution against the use of “sexual difference” as a psychoanalytic,
or indeed any analytic, tool because it seems to assume a fixed relationship
between the physical body, gender, and sexuality that reproduces prevailing
heterosexual norms. For example, Didier Eribon argues that psychoanalysis tout
court is inherently homophobic. See his Echapper a la psychanalyse (Paris: Léo
Scheer, 2005) and Hérésies: Essais sur la théorie de la sexualité (Paris: Fayard,
2003). Only if sexual difference is posited as having inherent and unalterable
meaning is this a problem. My argument is that psychoanalysis in fact disputes
the idea of any possible direct correlation between physical bodies and psychic
identifications. It posits sexual difference as a dilemma that is unresolvable, hence
open to all manner of variations in the way it is lived. The fact that the variations
are at once infinite (fantasy enables this) and constrained (by normative regula-
tion) opens our analyses to historicization of individuals and groups in their
temporally bounded contexts.
u. For a historical overview, see Peter Burke, “Freud and Cultural History,’
Psychoanalysis and History 9, no. 1 (2007): 5-15; Peter Loewenberg, Decoding the
Past: The Psychohistorical Approach (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1983), and Fantasy
and Reality in History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Frank Manuel,
“The Use and Abuse of Psychoanalysis for History,’ Daedalus 100, no. 1 (1971):
187-213.
12. Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of
Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157-210.
13. Natalie Zemon Davis, “‘Women’s History’ in Transition: The European
Case,” Feminist Studies 3, no. 3-4 (1976): 90.
14. Parveen Adams and Elizabeth Cowie, eds., The Woman in Question: m/ if
(Cambridge: m1T Press, 1990); Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the
Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); Donna J. Haraway, Simians,
Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention ofNature (New York: Routledge, 1991).
15. Parveen Adams and Jeffrey Minson, “The ‘Subject’ of Feminism,’ in Adams
and Cowie, The Woman in Question, 99.
16. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,’ in Louis
Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New
York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 127-88.
17. Denise Riley, “Am I That Name?” Feminism and the ices of “Women” in
History (London: Macmillan, 1988),7
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., 5.
20. Ibid., 2.
21. Ibid., 104.
22. Ibid., 102.
 Notes to Introduction 151

23. See, for example, Tania Modleski, Feminism without Women: Culture and
Criticism in a Postfeminist Age (New York: Routledge, 1991).
24. Riley, “Am I That Name?,” 7.
25. Ibid., 50.
26. Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 186.
27. Joan Copjec, “Cutting Up,” in Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, ed.
Teresa Brennan (New York: Routledge, 1989), 229. See also Joan Copjec, Read
My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996).
28. Copjec, “Cutting Up,’ 238.
29. Ibid., 241-42.
30. Ibid., 238.
31. Certeau, The Writing of History, 303.
32. Sigmund Freud, “Constructions in Analysis,” in The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey et al.
(London: The Hogarth Press, 1995 edition), XXIII: 259. All future references to
Freud will be to this standard edition and marked “sx.”
33. Ibid., 263.
34. Ibid., 268.
35. Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-
analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974), 89.
36. Copjec, “Cutting Up,’ 242.
37. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
(New York: Vintage, 1994), 322.
38. Ibid., 330.
39. Ibid., 380.
40. Ibid., 373.
41. Ibid., 379.
42. Ibid., 374.
43. Ibid., 376.
44. Ibid., 394.
45. Ibid., 374.
46. Elizabeth Weed, “Gender and Sexual Difference in Joan W. Scott: From the
‘Useful’ to the ‘Impossible; ” in The Question of Gender: Engaging with Joan W.
Scott's Critical Feminism, ed. Judith Butler and Elizabeth Weed (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2012). There are, of course, scholars who insist that
Foucault cannot be reconciled with psychoanalysis. For example, Eribon writes:
“C’est Foucault ou la psychanalyse” (It’s either Foucault or psychoanalysis;
Echapper a la psychanalyse, 86). Others, however, offer readings that find greater
sympathy for psychoanalysis in Foucault. See, for example, Charles Shepherdson,
Vital Signs: Nature, Culture, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 2000); Su-
zanne Gearhart, “The Taming of Foucault: New Historicism, Psychoanalysis and
the Subversion of Power,’ New Literary History 28, no. 3 (1997): 457-80, a “Reply
to Stephen Greenblatt,’ New Literary History 28, no. 3 (1997): 483-85; Judith
152 Notes to Introduction

Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 1997).
47. Debra Keates, “Sexual Difference,’ in Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Crit-
ical Dictionary, ed. Elizabeth Wright (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992), 402-5.
48. Butler, Undoing Gender, 186.
49. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New
York: Routledge, 1993), 99. ,
so. Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-analysis, 4.40.
51. Elizabeth Weed, “Feminist Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism,’ in The Cam-
bridge Companion to Feminist Literary Theory, ed. Ellen Rooney (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), 262.
52. Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights
ofMan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), and Parité: Sexual Equality
and the Crisis of French Universalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2005).
53. Weed, “Gender and Sexual Difference in Joan W. Scott.’ See also Bruce
Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press, 1995), 104. It is this asymmetry of masculine and feminine
positions that leads Lacan to conclude that “there is no such thing as a sexual
relationship.” I discuss this more fully in chapter s.
54. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York:
Random House, 1974).
55. See “Forum on Transnational Sexualities,’ American Historical Review 114,
no. § (2009), 1250-353.
56. Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997); Renata Salecl,
The Spoils of Freedom: Psychoanalysis and Feminism after the Fall of Socialism
(London: Routledge, 1994).
57. Jean Laplanche, New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, trans. David Macey
(London: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 41-45.
58. Francois Duparc, “Secondary Revision,” in International Dictionary of Psy-
choanalysis, 3 vols., ed. Alain de Mijolla, 3:1558—60 (Framington Hills, Mich.:
Thomson Gale, 2005). See also Francois Duparc, L'Image sur le divan (Paris:
L’Harmattan, 1995); Freud, “The Interpretation of Dreams,’ sz V: 488-508.
59. Thanks to Ben Kafka for this point (made in private conversation) and for
directing me to Duparc.
60. Donald G. Mathews and Jane Sherron De Hart, Sex, Gender, and the Politics
of the ERA: A State and the Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). See
also Jean Walton, Fair Sex, Savage Dreams: Race, Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).
61. We need more theorizing about the creation of collective fantasies and the
use of individual fantasies for political or social ends. It would be useful, for
example, to think about how secondary revision actually works in concrete
 Notes to Chapter One 153

situations. For an attempt to think about fantasy along Lacanian lines, see Zizek,
The Plague of Fantasies.
62. Certeau, The Writing of History, 303.
63. William L. Langer, “The Next Assignment,’ American Historical Review 63,
no. 2 (1958): 284. Thanks to Brian Connolly for pointing me to Langer’s speech.
64. Freud, “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,” sz IX: 148.
65. Certeau, The Writing of History, 304.

1. Feminism’s History
This chapter was originally written for presentation at a panel on “The Future
of Feminist History” at the American Historical Association meeting in January
2003.
1. Lois Banner and Mary S. Hartman, eds., Clio’s Consciousness Raised: New
Perspectives on the History of Women, Sex and Class in Women’s History (New York:
Harper and Row, 1974).
2. Plato, Phaedrus, trans. R. Hackforth (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1952), 57.
3. lam grateful to Froma Zeitlin for the references that provided this informa-
tion.
4. The special issue was differences 9, no. 3 (1997). It was published, with
additional essays, as Joan Wallach Scott, Women’s Studies on the Edge (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2009).
5. Anne Firor Scott, Sara M. Evans, Susan K. Cahn, and Elizabeth Faue,
“Women’s History in the New Millennium: A Conversation across Three Gener-
ations; Part I” Journal of Women’s History 1, no. 1 (1999): 9-30, and “Women’s
History in the New Millennium: A Conversation across Three Generations; Part
Il,” Journal of Women’s History 11, no. 2 (1999): 199-220.
6. This is the case both domestically and internationally, evident most visibly
in the work of the un Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against
Women, or CEDAW. See Francoise Gaspard, “Les femmes dans les relations
internationales,” Politique Etrangére 3, no. 4 (2000): 731-41.
7. Jacques Derrida, “Women in the Beehive: A Seminar,’ in Men in Feminism,
ed. Alice Jardine and Paul Smith (New York: Methuen, 1987), 190.
8. Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1996), 32.
9. Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 1987).
10. Plato, Phaedrus, 57.
u1. Scott, Evans, Cahn, and Faue, “Women’s History in the New Millennium: A
Conversation across Three Generations; Part I,’ 9-30, and “Part II,’ 199-220.
12. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations
between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” Signs 1, no. 1 (1975): 1-29.
154 Notes to Chapter One

13. Bonnie S. Anderson, Joyous Greetings: The First International Women’s Move-
ment, 1830-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Leila Rupp, Worlds
of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press, 1997).
14. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,’ in sz XIV: 243-58.
15. Ibid., 249.
16. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion ofIdentity (New
York: Routledge, 1990), 57-66.
17. For a trenchant analysis of the current state of women’s studies, see Wendy
Brown, “Women’s Studies Unbound: Revolution, Mourning, Politics,’ parallax 9,
no. 2 (2003): 3-16.
18. Scott, Evans, Cahn, and Faue, “Women’s History in the New Millennium: A
Conversation across Three Generations; Part II,” 199-220.
19. Jacques Lacan, “Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the
Freudian Unconscious,’ in Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New
York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 292-324. See also the entry on “Desire” in Dylan
Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London: Rout-
ledge, 1996), 37.
20. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (New
York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 154.
21. Wendy Brown and Janet Halley, eds., Introduction, Left Legalism/Left
Critique (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 28.
22. Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights
ofMan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).
23. Scott, Evans, Cahn, and Faue, “Women’s History in the New Millennium: A
Conversation across Three Generations; Part II,” 20s.
24. Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
25. Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of
Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157-210.
26. Natalie Zemon Davis, “Women’s History’ in Transition: The European
Case,’ Feminist Studies 3, nos. 3-4 (1976): 83-103.
27. The collected papers of the conference appear in Carole S. Vance, ed.,
Pleasure and Danger (New York: Routledge, 1984).
28. Denise Riley, “Am I That Name?” Feminism and the Category of “Women” in
History (London: Macmillan, 1988).
29. Ann Snitow, “A Gender Diary,’ in Conflicts in Feminism, ed. Marianne
Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller (London: Routledge, 1990), 9-43.
30. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and
the Metalanguage of Race,’ in Feminism and History, ed. Joan Wallach Scott
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 202.
31. Afsaneh Najmabadi, “Teaching and Research in Unavailable Intersections,”
 Notes to Chapter Two 155

differences 9, no. 3 (1997): 76, note 6. See also Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with
Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties ofIranian Moder-
nity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
32. Quoted in Wendy Brown, Politics out of History (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2001), 41.
33. See Ellen Rooney, “Discipline and Vanish: Feminism, the Resistance to
Theory, and the Politics of Cultural Studies,” differences 2, no. 3 (1990): 14-28.
34. Robyn Wiegman, “What Ails Feminist Criticism? A Second Opinion,’
Critical Inquiry 25, no. 2 (1999); and “Feminism, Institutionalism, and the Idiom
of Failure,” differences 11, no. 3 (1999-2000): 107-36.
35. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson, eds., The Powers of
Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983).
36. Brown and Halley, Introduction, Left Legalism/Left Critique, 33.
37. Quoted in Carlos Parada and Maicar Forlag, Greek Mythology Link web-
site, “Muses,” 1997, http://www.maicar.com/GML/MUSES.html.

2. Fantasy Echo
1. Joan Wallach Scott, “Multiculturalism and the Politics of Identity,’ in The
Identity in Question, ed. John Rajchman (New York: Routledge, 1995), 3-12.
2. Denise Riley, “Am I That Name?” Feminism and the Category of “Women” in
History (London: Macmillan, 1988).
3. Eric J. Hobsbawm, “Inventing Traditions,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed.
Eric J. Hobsbawm and Terence O. Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1983), 1-14.
4. Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights
ofMan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).
s. For an example, see R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1956).
6. Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, “Fantasy and the Origins of
Sexuality,” in Formations of Fantasy, ed. Victor Burgin, James Donald, and Cora
Kaplan (London: Routledge, 1986), 5-34.
7. Ibid., 26.
8. Denise Riley, The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2000), 13.
9. Sigmund Freud, “‘A Child Is Being Beaten’: A Contribution to the Study of
the Origin of Sexual Perversions,” in sé XVII: 175-203.
10. Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 26-27.
11. Jacqueline Rose, States ofFantasy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 3.
12. Sean Homer, “The Frankfurt School, the Father and the Social Fantasy,’
New Formations 38 (Summer 1999): 78-90.
13.J.Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer.
14. Quoted in John Hollander, The Figure ofEcho: A Mode of Allusion in Milton
 156 Notes to Chapter Two

and After (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 25. See Ovid, Meta-
morphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller and ed. G. P. Goold (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1977), 150-51.
15. Quoted in Hollander, The Figure ofEcho, 25.
16. Quoted in Claire Nouvet, “An Impossible Response: The Disaster of Nar-
cissus,’ Yale French Studies no. 79 (1991): 113.
17. Nouvet rejects as too narrow and too literal a reading of Ovid a possible
feminist interpretation that would take the bodiless Echo, who cannot initiate
sound, as the representative of the feminine—derivative and secondary—in
Western culture. See ibid., 109. See also Naomi Segal, “Echo and Narcissus,’ in
Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, ed. Teresa Brennan (New York: Routledge,
1989), 168-85. Denise Riley has an important discussion of Echo in terms of irony
and identity. Denise Riley, Words of Selves, especially 155-61.
18. Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,’ in The Kristeva Reader, trans. Leon S. Rou-
diez, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 161.
19. Miglena Nikolchina, Matricide in Language: Writing Theory in Kristeva and
Woolf (New York: Other Press, 2004).
20. Olympe de Gouges, Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne
(Paris, 1791), article X, 9.
21. Quoted in Béatrice Slama, “Ecrits de femmes pendant la révolution? in Les
femmes et la révolution francaise: actes du colloque international, 12-13-14 avril
1989, ed. Marie-France Brive (Toulouse, France: Presses universitaires du Mirail,
1989), 2:297.
22. E. Lairtullier, Les Femmes célébres de 1789 4 1795, et leur influence dans la
révolution, pour servir de suite et de complément a toutes les histoires de la révolution
francaise (Paris, 1840), 2:140.
23. Jeanne Deroin, “Compte-rendu du résultat de notre appel aux électeurs”
Lopinion des femmes, supplement to no. 4 (May 7, 1849), n.p.
24. Quoted in Michéle Serriére, “Jeanne Deroin,” in Femmes et travail (Paris:
Matinsart, 1981), 26.
25. Madeleine Pelletier, La femme vierge (Paris: Valentin Bresle, 1933), 186.
26. Lily Braun, Memoiren einer Sozialistin: Lehrjahre, vol. 2, Gesammelte Werke
(Berlin: Hermann Klemm, 1923), 2:455.
27. Joan Riviére, “Womanliness as a Masquerade,” International Journal of
Psychoanalysis 8 (1927): 304.
28. Jeanne Deroin, Almanach des femmes, pour 1853 (London: J. Watson,
1853), 73.
29. Quoted in Christine Bard, Les filles de Marianne: histoire des féminismes
1914-1940 (Paris: Fayard, 1995), 45.
30. Madeleine Pelletier, La femme en lutte pour ses droits (Paris, 1908),
37.
31. See, for example, Donna Bassin, Margaret Honey, and Meryle Maher Kap-
lan, eds., Representations of Motherhood (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1994).
32. Quoted in Jane Addams, Emily G. Balch, and Alice Hamilton, Women at the
 Notes to Chapter Three 157

Hague: The International Congress of Women and Its Results (1915; New York:
Garland, 1972), 143.
33. Hanna Segal, Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein (New York: Basic,
1964).
34. See, for example, Nancy J. Chodorow, The Power of Feelings: Personal
Meaning in Psychoanalysis, Gender, and Culture (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1999).
35. Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge,
trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 74.
36. Luce Irigaray, “The Bodily Encounter with the Mother,’ The Irigaray
Reader, trans. David Macey, ed. Margaret Whitford (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 41.
37- Quoted in Susan K. Grogan, French Socialism and Sexual Difference: Women
and the New Society, 1803-44 (London: Macmillan, 1992), 187.
38. Quoted in ibid., 189.
39. Quoted in Michéle Riot-Sarcey, La démocratie a l’épreuve des femmes: trois
figures critiques du pouvoir, 1830-1848 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994), 275.
40. Jeanne Deroin, La voix des femmes, March 28, 1848, n.p.
41. Quoted in Eileen Boris, “The Power of Motherhood: Black and White
Activist Women Redefine the ‘Political;” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 2
(1989): 36.
42. Quoted in Bard, Les filles de Marianne, 45.
43. Robin Morgan, “Introduction: Planetary Feminism: The Politics of the 21st
Century,’ in Sisterhood Is Global: The International Women’s Movement Anthology,
compiled, edited, introduced, with a new preface by Robin Morgan (New York:
Feminist Press, 1996), 36.
44. Irigaray, “The Bodily Encounter with the Mother,’ 63.
45. Steven C. Caton, “The Sheik,” in Noble Dreams, Wicked Pleasures: Oriental-
ism in America, 1870-1930, ed. Holly Edwards (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2000), 99-117. See also Steven C. Caton, Lawrence of Arabia: A Film’s
Anthropology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 153, 208-9.

3. Feminist Reverberations
This chapter was first written as the keynote address for the Berkshire Con-
ference on Women’s History, June 2002.
1. Stanley Pargellis to Dorothy Ganfield Fowler, March 6, 1942, Papers of the
Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, Schlesinger Library, Mc, 267, Rad-
cliffe College, Harvard University.
2. Fowler to Pargellis, March 18, 1942, ibid.
3. Pargellis to Fowler, March 19, 1942, ibid.
4. Fowler to Pargellis, March 23, 1942, ibid.
s. Pargellis to Fowler, March 27, 1942, ibid.
6. Fowler to Pargellis, April 22, 1942, ibid.
158 Notes to Chapter Three

7. Stanley Pargellis, ed., The Quest for Political Unity in World History, vol. 3,
Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1942 (Wash-
ington: US Government Printing Office, 1944).
8. Wendy Brown, “Power without Logic without Marx,’ in Wendy Brown,
Politics out of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 62-90.
9. I would now add Iraq and Iran to the list.
10. Clifford Geertz, “The World in Pieces: Culture and Politics at the End of
the Century,” in Clifford Geertz, Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on
Philosophical Topics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 218-63.
u. Denise Riley, The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2000), 176.
12. Bernard Lewis, “The Revolt of Islam,” New Yorker, November 19, 2001;
Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).
13. Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
14. Radio address by Laura Bush, November 17, 2001 (http://www.presidency.
ucsb.edu).
15. Quoted in Kathleen T. Rhem, “Women’s Rights a Priority; Humanitarian
Aid Improves,’ American Forces Press Service (http: //www.defense.gov/news /
newsarticle.aspx?id= 4.4432).
16. Asia Source Interview with Lila Abu-Lughod, “Women and Islam: An
Interview with Lila Abu-Lughod,” February 2002. Interview by Nermeen Shaikh.
Available from http://www.ciaonet.org/wps /ablo2/index.html.
17. Iris Marion Young, “The Logics of Masculinist Protection: Reflections on
the Current Security State,” Signs 29, no. 1 (2003): 4.
18. Ibid., 9.
19. Fatima Gailani, comments at a commencement forum on “Women in
Afghanistan,” Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, May 25, 2002.
20. Anna Tsing, “Transitions as Translations,’ in Transitions, Environments,
Translations: Feminism in International Politics, ed. Joan Wallach Scott, Cora
Kaplan, and Debra Keates (New York: Routledge, 1997), 253.
21. See chapter 2.
22. Quoted in Alan Cowell, “In “Hidden Vote’ for Le Pen, French Bared
Growing Discontent,’ New York Times, May 3, 2002.
23. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion ofIdentity (New
York: Routledge, 1990), 7.
24. Miglena Nikolchina, “Translating Gender: The Bulgarian Case,’ The Mak-
ing of European Women’s Studies, ed. Rosi Braidotti (Utrecht, the Netherlands:
ATHENA 2001), 3:92-94.
25. Laura Engelstein, “Culture, Culture Everywhere: Interpretations of Mod-
ern Russia, across the 1991 Divide,’ Kritika 2, no. 2 (2001): 363-93.
26. Quoted in Frangois Dosse, History of Structuralism (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 1997), 2:55.
 Notes to Chapter Three 159

27. Miglena Nikolchina, “The Seminar: Mode d’emploi,’ differences 13, no. 1
(2002): 96-127.
28. Catharine A. MacKinnon, Part III, “Through the Bosnian Lens,” in Are
Women Human?
And Other International Dialogues (Cambridge: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 2006), 141-236. For a critique of MacKinnon, see Vesna Kesic, “Re-
sponse to Catherine [sic] MacKinnon’s article “Turning Rape into Pornography:
Postmodern Genocide,’ Hastings Women’s Law Journal 5 (1994): 267-80.
29. This and what follows is quoted from or based on the Women in Black
website (http://womeninblack.org).
30. Haresh Kapoor, “Women in Black lay down in front of tanks in Ramallah,’
press release, December 23, 2001 (http: //mail-archive.com /kominform@lists
.eunet.fi/msgio982.html); Tim Kingston, “FBI Casting Wide Net in Sept. 1
Attack Investigation,” San Francisco Bay Guardian, October 14, 2001 (http://
www.wluml.org/node/ 650).
31. Cynthia Cockburn, “Being Able to Say Neither / Nor,’ notes for a talk at a meet-
ing organized by Peace Brigades International and the National Peace Council, Lon-
don, April 14, 1999 (http://cynthiacockburn.typepad.com/Blogneithernor.pdf).
32. “Women in Black” (http://womeninblack.org/en/about).
33. Jasmina TeSanovi¢, Me and My Multicultural Street (Belgrade, Serbia: Femi-
nisticka, 2001), 46.
34. Ibid., 43.
35. |met TeSanovi¢ at a conference in Dubrovnik after I had given the talk that
this chapter is based on. It was a very moving experience, another one of those
reverberations I was trying to write about.
36. TeSanovic, Me and My Multicultural Street, 50-51.
37. Ibid., 51-52. See also Ghislaine Glasson Deschaumes and Svetlana Slapsak,
eds., Femmes des Balkans pour la paix: itinéraires d’une action militante a travers les
frontiéres (Paris: Transeuropéennes /RCE, 2002).
38. There are other examples of solidarities based on difference. In France, the
Collectif des Féministes pour |’Egalité brings together Muslim women in head
scarves and secular women (Muslim and “native” Frenchwomen) under the
banner of an end to domination of all kinds: “no forced wearing of head scarves,
no forced removal of head scarves” is their motto. See Ismahane Chouder, Malika
Latréche, and Pierre Tevanian, Les filles voilées parlent (Paris: La Fabrique, 2008).
In Turkey, a similar, though less formal, alliance has emerged between secular and
religious women: “We build our community by transcending dichotomies de-
spite dichotomies and through dichotomies. We build our community by tran-
scending social identities despite social identities and through social identities.”
See “We Care for Each Other,’ first petition, February 29, 2008, and second
petition, September 26, 2008 (http://www.birbirimizesahipcikiyoruz.blogspot
.com/). The process of negotiation of differences is not easy; in both instances,
the question of supporting homosexuals against discrimination creates tremen-
dous, unresolved difficulties.
160 Notes to Chapter Four

39. A recent example of “feminist reverberations” of this kind is the group

called La Barbe (the beard) in France. Founded in 2008 and consisting of around
a hundred women, the group engages in actions (inspired by Guerilla Girls, Act
UP, Yes Men, and Lesbian Avengers) that protest the exclusion of women in
politics, education, business, etc. A small group arrives at, say, a stockholders
meeting, and, donning obviously fake beards, congratulates the group on the
absence of women among them. They have managed to get press coverage (one
can find them on YouTube as well) for their ironic interventions and denuncia-
tions of sexism. The first such actions were developed in a different context in
Turkey. There is a group called Las Bigotonas, founded in 2009, in Mexico. And
there are efforts to adopt this strategy in the Czech Republic. See the Facebook
page for La-Barbe-groupe-daction-féministe. See also www.labarbelabarbe.org.
40. Quoted in Christine Bard, Les filles de Marianne: histoire des féminismes
1914-1940 (Paris: Fayard, 1995), 45.
41. For recent work on global feminist movements, see Peggy Antrobus, The
Global Women's Movement: Origins, Issues, and Strategies (London: Zed, 2004);
Myra Marx Ferree and Aili Mari Tripp, eds., Global Feminism: Transnational
Women’s Activism, Organizing, and Human Rights (New York: New York Univer-
sity Press, 2006); Inderpal Grewal, Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas,
Neoliberalisms (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Valentine Moghadam,
Globalizing Women: Transnational Feminist Networks (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2005); Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders:
Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham: Duke University Press,
2003).

4. Sexularism
1. After I wrote this chapter I was alerted to an online lecture by Ann Pelligrini
at the University of California, Santa Barbara, called “Sexularism: Religious Free-
dom, American Style” (http://www.uctv.tv/ search-details.aspx?showID = 15371).
Pellegrini’s use of the term refers to the ways in which sex—especially the sexual
moralities associated with religious teachings—continue to influence modern
secular societies. See also Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini, Love the Sin:
Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (New York: New York
University Press, 2003).
2. Hence in Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), Martha Nussbaum argues that
“opportunities for sexual satisfaction are an important aspect of bodily integrity,
a central human functional capability,’ and that the secular state becomes the
place where “the truly human” is defined (78-79).
3. Quoted in Dominic McGoldrick, Human Rights and Religion: The Islamic
Debate in Europe (Portland, Ore.: Hart, 2006), 89. On the French head scarf
debates, see Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil. (Princeton: Princeton
 Notes to Chapter Four 161

University Press, 2007). See also John R. Bowen, Why the French Don't Like
Headscarves: Islam, the State, and Public Space (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2006).
4. Quoted in McGoldrick, Human Rights and Religion, 128; see also 206.
5. Quoted in ibid., 266.
6. Alexis de Tocqueville, Souvenirs (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 129.
7. Madelyn Gutwirth, The Twilight of the Goddesses: Women and Representation
in the French Revolutionary Era (New Brunswick, N,J.: Rutgers University Press,
1992), 275.
8. Ibid., 364.
9. Ibid., 36s.
10. Ibid.
u. Richard Cobb, Les armées révolutionnaires: instrument de la terreur dans les
départements, avril 1793—Floréal an II (Paris: Mouton, 1961-63), 1:450.
12. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2007), 167.
13. Pierre Rosenvallon, Le modéle politique frangais: la société civile contre le
jacobinisme de 1789 a nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 2004), 47-55.
14. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stan-
ford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 59.
15. Ibid., 25.
16. Hussein Ali Agrama, “Secularism, Sovereignty, Indeterminancy: Is Egypt a
Secular or a Religious State?,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 52, no. 3
(2010): 519.
17. Carol Christ, “Victorian Masculinity and the Angel in the House,” in A
Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women, ed. Martha Vicinus (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 146-62; Gay Gullickson, Unruly Women of
Paris: Images of the Commune (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).
18. Quoted in Cobb, Les armées révolutionnaires, 450.
19. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 193.
20. Darlene Levy, Harriet Applewhite, and Mary Johnson, eds. Women in
Revolutionary Paris, 1789-1795: Selected Documents, translated with notes and
commentary by the editors (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 215.
21. This is not a new insight, but the fruit of second-wave feminist historical re-
search, which is sometimes forgotten in the context of current debates about
Muslims.
22. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (London: Polity, 1988), 6.
23. For information on women in national legislatures around the world, see
statistics compiled by the Inter-Parliamentary Union (http://www.ipu.org/
wmn-e/classif.htm).
24. Nancy Cott, The Grounding ofModern Feminism (New Haven: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 1987), 185-87.
162 Notes to Chapter Four

25. Wendy Brown, “The ‘Jewish Question’ and the “Woman Question,” in
Going Public: Feminism and the Shifting Boundaries of the Private Sphere, ed. Joan
Wallach Scott and Debra Keates (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 36.
26. Eric Fassin, “The Rise and Fall of Sexual Politics: A Transatlantic Com-
parison,” Public Culture 18, no. 1 (2006): 79-92; and “Lempire du genre. Lhis-
toire politique ambigué d’un outil conceptuel,” L’homme, nos. 187-88, (juillet—
décembre 2008), 375-92.
27. Quoted in Roslyne Bachelot and Geneviéve Fraisse, Deux femmes au
royaume des hommes (Paris: Hachette, 1999), 12.
28. Conseil d’Etat, Réflexions sur la laicité (Paris: Conseil d’Etat, 2004), 295.
29. Ibid., 3.41.
30. Julia Clancy-Smith, “Islam, Gender and Identities in the Making of French
Algeria, 1830-1962,’ in Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender, and Family Life in
French and Dutch Colonialism, ed. Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda (Char-
lottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 154-55.
31. Paul Silverstein, Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, and Nation (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 52.
32. Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the
Remaking ofFrance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 186-92.
33. Quoted in Eddy Souffrant, “To Conquer the Veil: Woman as a Critique of
Liberalism,” in Fanon: A Critical Reader, ed. Lewis Gordon, T. D. Sharpley-
Whiting, and Renée White (Cambridge, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996), 177.
34. Frantz Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled,’ in Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism,
trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove, 1965), 35-67.
35. Marnia Lazreg, The Eloquence of Silence: Algerian Women in Question (New
York: Routledge, 1994), 49; Anouar Majid, “The Politics of Feminism in Islam,’
Signs 23, no. 2 (1998): 351.
36. Afsaneh Najmabadi, “Gender and the Sexual Politics of Public Visibility in
Iranian Modernity,” in Going Public: Feminism and the Shifting Boundaries of the
Private Sphere, ed. Joan Wallach Scott and Debra Keates (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2004), 60.
37. Richard Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism,
Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860-1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1978), 327.
38. Riva Kastoryano, “Religion and Incorporation: Islam in France,’ paper
presented at the Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association, New
York, February 2009, 12.
39. Kathleen Sands, “Feminisms and Secularisms,” in Secularisms, ed. Janet R.
Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 315.
40. Phyllis Mack, “Religion, Feminism, and the Problem of Agency: Reflec-
tions on Eighteenth-Century Quakerism,’ in Women, Gender, and Enlightenment,
ed. Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Pal-
grave Macmillan, 2005), 434.
41. Ibid., 439.
 Notes to Chapter Four 163

42. Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist
Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 15.
43. Ibid., 17.
44. Mack, “Religion, Feminism, and the Problem of Agency,’ 439.
45. Ibid., 454.
46. Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 32.
47. Asad, Formations of the Secular, 229-30.
48. Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 25.
49. Mack, “Religion, Feminism, and the Problem of Agency,’ 445.
50. Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 37.
51. Ibid., 155.
52. Ismahane Chouder, Malika Latréche, and Pierre Tevanian, Les filles voilées
parlent (Paris: La Fabrique, 2008), 30.
53. Ibid., 42.
54. The anthropologist Mayanthi Fernando argues that French Muslim girls in
hijab face an impossible situation. Their religious commitments are realized by
wearing the hijab, and these commitments cannot be privatized as the state
requires. Yet this is a freely chosen religious obligation. Since French secularism
cannot accept the idea of free choice as a choice to submit, the girls are treated
either as dishonest individuals or as victims of communal pressure. See Mayanthi
Fernando, “Reconfiguring Freedom: Muslim Piety and the Limits of Secular
Public Discourse and Law,” American Ethnologist 37, no. 1 (2010): 19-35.
55. Chouder, Latréche, and Tevanian, Les filles voilées parlent, 127.
56. Ibid., 288.
57. Sabrina Tavernise, “Youthful Voice Stirs Challenge to Secular Turks,’ New
York Times, October 14, 2008.
58. Niliifer Géle, Interpénétrations: L’Islam et l'Europe (Paris: Galaade, 2005),
27. Later in the book, she writes: “Today, the return to the Islamic veil signifies
the adoption—voluntary or imposed depending on the case—of a sign of ‘stigma’
on the part of the women who wear it. They are seeking to transform it into a
sign of prestige” (123).
59. Tavernise, “Youthful Voice Stirs Challenge to Secular Turks,’ New York
Times, October 14, 2008.
60. Chouder, Latréche, and Tevanian, Les filles voilées parlent, 310-11.
61. Ibid., 327.
62. Ibid., 238. For a similar Turkish example, see chapter 3 of this book, note 38.
63. European Court of Human Rights, Grand Chamber Judgment: Leyla Sahin
v. Turkey, dissenting opinion of Judge Tulkens, 2005, 15.
64. Asad, Formations of the Secular, 197.
65. Chouder, Latréche, and Tevanian, Les filles voilées parlent, 53.
66. Dounia Bouzar and Saida Kada, L’une voilée, l'autre pas: Le témoinage de
deux musulmanes frangaises (Paris: Albin Michel, 2003), §8—59.
67. Chouder, Latréche, and Tevanian, Les filles voilées parlent, 217.
68. I am aware that there are queer theorists who strongly object to this view.
164. Notes to Chapter Five

As Michael Warner put it to me, “coming from the milieu of queer and trans-
[gender] theory, it’s hard for me to take at face value the kind of psychoanalyt-
ically rooted discourse about dimorphic sexual difference that is so common in
French debates, just as it’s hard for me to think that desire is just the same for
everybody” (personal e-mail correspondence, August 26, 2010). I would argue
that there’s a difference between the literalizing of “dimorphic sexual difference”
by some psychoanalysts and popularizers of psychoanalytic discourse—the no-
tion that anatomy is destiny, to put it briefly—and the theories of Freud and
Lacan and their followers that I have cited. For these theorists, sexual difference is
a problem, not a prescription, and the fantasies it gives rise to permit all manner
of identities, identifications, and practices: queer, straight, transgender, and oth-
ers. And desire, far from being assumed to be “the same for everybody,’ is taken
to be a process whose direction and substance are open questions to be examined
contextually and specifically.
69. Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 104.
70. Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge,
trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998); and Ecrits, trans. Alan
Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977).
71. Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, 113.
72. Ibid., 112.

5. French Seduction Theory

1. Philippe Raynaud, “Les femmes et la civilité: aristocratie et passions révolu-
tionnaires,” Le Débat, no. 57 (November-December 1989), 182.
2. Mona Ozouf, “Un essai de Claude Habib: séduire est-il un art francais?,” Le
Nouvel Observateur, November 9, 2006.
3. Claude Habib, Galanterie frangaise (Paris: Gallimard, 2006), 410.
4. Mona Ozouf, Les mots des femmes: essai sur la singularité francaise (Paris:
Gallimard, 199s).
s. Eric Fassin, “National Identities and Transnational Intimacies: Sexual De-
mocracy and the Politics of Immigration in Europe,” Public Culture 22, no. 3
(2010): 519.
6. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960, trans. Dennis Porter
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1992) Ags
7. Eric J. Hobsbawm and Terence O. Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Benedict Anderson, Imagined
Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread ofNationalism (London: Verso,
1983); Geoff Eley and Ronald G. Suny, eds., Becoming National (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1996).
8. Raynaud, “Les femmes et la civilité,” 181.
9. Ibid., 185.
 Notes to Chapter Five 165

10. Raynaud, “Les femmes et la civilité,” 181.

11. Ozouf, Les mots des femmes, 323, 329.
12. Quoted in ibid., 326.
13. Ozouf, “Un essai de Claude Habib.”
14. Claude Habib, Consentement Amoureux (Paris: Hachette, 1998).
15. Mona Ozouf, “A propos du ‘Consentement Amoureux’: les douces lois de
lattraction,” Le Nouvel Observateur, November 26, 1998.
16. Alain Corbin, “Faites galant,’ L’Express, December 7, 2006.
17. Quoted in Raynaud, “Les femmes et la civilité,” 182.
18. Habib, Galanterie francaise, 51.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., 55.
21. Quoted in Ozouf, Les mots des femmes, 355.
22. Ibid., 347.
23. Habib, Galanterie frangaise, 411.
24. Eliane Viennot, La France, les femmes, et le pouvoir, 2 vols. (Paris: Perrin,
2006 and 2008). See also Eliane Viennot, ed., La démocratie a la francaise ou les
femmes indésirables (Paris: Cahiers du CEDREF, 2002).
25. Viennot, La France, les femmes, et le pouvoir, 1:58.
26. Choderlos de Laclos, Les liaisons dangereuses, trans. Douglas Parmée (Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 163.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., 161-62.
29. Ibid., 292.
30. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, sz XIII:1-163. An overview, with many
eighteenth-century citations, can be found in Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of
the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). See also
Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (London: Polity, 1988).
31. A good discussion of the uncertainty surrounding transitions from absolute
monarchy to more democratic forms is found in Judith Surkis, “Carnival Balls
and Penal Codes: Body Politics in July Monarchy France,” History of the Present 1,
no.1 (2011): 59-83.
32. Jacques Lacan, “Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet,” Yale
French Studies, no. 55-56 (1977): 11-52. “Replace the word ‘king’ with the word
‘phallus, ” Lacan writes of Hamlet's relationship to Claudius, who is both his
uncle and his king, “and you'll see that that’s really the point—the body is bound
up in this matter of the phallus—and how—but the phallus, on the contrary is
bound to nothing: it always slips through your fingers” (52).
33. Jacques Lacan, “The Signification of the Phallus,” in Jacques Lacan, Ecrits,
trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 281-91.
34. Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989); and
The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997).
35. Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge,
166 Notes to Chapter Five

trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998). See also Bruce Fink, The
Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1995).
36. Habib, Galanterie francaise, 55.
37. Ibid., 421.
38. Ibid., 46.
39. Ibid., 44, 51, 93, 77.
40. Mona Ozouf, “A Propos du ‘Consentement Amoureux’: les douces lois de
lattraction,” Le Nouvel Observateur, November 26, 1998.
41. Ibid., 426.
42. Quoted in ibid., 427.
43. Ozouf, Les mots des femmes, 381.
44. Habib, Galanterie frangaise, 77.
45. Ozouf, Les mots des femmes, 385.
46. Habib, Galanterie francaise, 417.
47. Raynaud, “Les femmes et la civilité,” 180.
48. Ibid.
49. Habib, Galanterie francaise, 419.
50. Jacques Julliard, editorial, Le Nouvel Observateur, 2-8 January 1997.
51. Ibid., 25.
52. Ibid., 24.
53. Habib, Galanterie francaise, 432-33.
54. Ibid., 421.
55. Ozouf, Les mots des femmes, 351.
56. Ibid., 360.
57. “Claude Habib,’ Les Echos, June 8, 2007 (www.lesechos.fr/luxe /people /
300180664-claude-habib.htm).
58. Ozouf, Les Mots des femmes, 383.
s9. Habib, Galanterie francaise, 412.
60. Ibid.
61. Ozouf, “Un essai de Claude Habib.”
62. Habib, Galanterie francaise, 412-14.
63. Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2007). See also Chahla Chafiq and Farhad Khoskrokavar, Femmes sous le
voile face a la loi islamique (Paris: Félin, 199s).
64. Habib, Galanterie francaise, 412.
65. Ozouf, Les mots des femmes, 327.
66. Ibid.
67. Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, trans. Brian Singer (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1990), 74.
 Notes to Epilogue 167

Epilogue
1. Charles Bernheim and Claire Kahane, eds., In Dora’s Case: Freud, Hysteria,
Feminism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Janet Malcolm, “J’ap-
pelle un chat un chat,’ New Yorker, April 27, 1978, 84-102.
2. Elizabeth Weed, “Feminist Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism,’ in The Cam-
bridge Companion to Feminist Literary Theory, ed. Ellen Rooney (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), 262.
3. Michel Foucault, Foucault Live: Interviews, 1966-84, trans. John Johnston,
ed. Sylvére Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989), 27. See also Thomas
Flynn, “Foucault’s Mapping of History,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Fou-
cault, ed. Gary Gutting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 28-46.
4. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology ofKnowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith
(New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 128.
5. Ibid., 129.
6. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
7. Jill Lepore, “The Iceman,” New Yorker, January 25, 2010, 27.
8. Jules Michelet quoted in Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural
History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 27.
g. Ibid.
10. Steedman, Dust, 65.
u. Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Mas-
sumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 194.
12. Steedman, Dust, 38.
13. Quoted in ibid., 27-28.
14. Ibid.
15. Jacques Derrida, Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2, trans. Jan Plug
et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 226-27.
16. Jean Laplanche cited in Steedman, Dust, 77.
17. Steedman, Dust, 83.
18. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 129.
et

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en ala,
A
 Index

absolutism, 123-25 Barnard Conference on the Scholar

Abu-Lughod, Lila, 76 and the Feminist, 39
Adams, Parveen, 8 Barthes, Roland, 145
Afghanistan, 75-78, 104 Baudrillard, Jean, 139
agency, 105-12 Beauvoir, Simone de, 18, 133; The Sec-
Algeria, 103-4 ond Sex, 132
American Historical Association, 68— Benson, Mary Sumner, 68
69, 90 Berkshire Conference of Women His-
Anderson, Benedict, 119 torians, 23, 68-70, 90
Anderson, Bonnie, 30 Bigotonas, Las, 160n39
anti-Semitism, 74-75 Bloom, Harold, 141
archives: critique and, 143, 146-48; of Bosnia, 83
feminist theory, 142-43; historians’ Bourquin, Martial, 79
use of, 144-45, 147; research shaped Braun, Lily, 57-58
by, 143, 146 Brown, Wendy, 34, 38, 70, 100
aristocratic republicanism, 117-18, Bush, George W,, 75, 104
129-36 Bush, Laura, 75-76
Asad, Talal, 96, 107, 108, 111 Butler, Judith, 7, 12, 16, 80-81

Badinter, Elisabeth, 92 Cahn, Susan, 25, 30, 32

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 82 castration, 16, 18, 113-14, 127, 129
Banner, Lois, 23 Caton, Steven, 66
182 Index

causality, 12-15 113-14, 127; political expression of,

Certeau, Michel de, 2-4, 10, 12—13, 21, 128. See also fantasy
22, 145 differences (journal), 25
church-state relations, 93, 99, 102-3 Duparc, Frangois, 20
citizenship, 17
civility, 122, 125, 130 Eastern Europe, 81, 82
Cixous, Héléne, 81 East /West Feminist Network, 83
Clancy-Smith, Julia, 103-4 echoes, 52-54, 78-79; fantasy echoes,
Clio (muse of history), 23-26, 40-41, 45-46, 48, 60, 66-67, 119
43 electoral parity, 79
Clio’s Consciousness Raised (Banner equality of men and women: in
and Hartman), 23 France, 79-80, 98-99, 102-3, 117—
Cobb, Richard, 95 40; in Iran, 104—5; Russian Revolu-
Collectif des Féministes pour l’Egalité, tion and, 105; seduction and, 117-19,
109-10, 1§9n38 128-36, 139-40; sexual difference
College de Philosophie, 146-47 and, 17, 100, 117-19, 128-36; in
Conseil d’Etat, France, 102-3 United States, 99. See also sexual dif-
Copjec, Joan, 11-12, 17, 18 ference
Corbin, Alain, 121 Equal Rights Amendment, 20, 37
Cott, Nancy, 29, Eribon, Didier, 150n10
critique: archives and, 143, 146-48; essentialism: feminist critique of, 65,
feminism and, 33-37, 39-44, 143; 75; identity and, 48-49; in Israeli-
jouissance vs., 148; nature of, 34, 43 Palestinian conflict, 73-75; mother-
cultural construction: concept of, 8, hood and, 89; women and, 11, 60
11-12; critiques of, 11-12; of gender, Evans, Sara, 25-26, 30
7-8, 9, 19; subjectivity and, 12-15;
of women, 11 family, 119-20
Fanon, Frantz, 104
David, Jacques-Louis, 94 fantasy: change and, 18; desire and,
Davis, Natalie, 7, 38-39 49; double structure of, 49-50; of
death, historiography and, 144-46, feminist history, 22, 51, 54; histo-
148 riography and, 5, 48-49; identity
democracy: criticisms of, 118, 134; fem- and, 50-51, 54, 66-67; interests cre-
inism and, 35, 77; French version of, ated by, 19; narrative and, 50-51;
120; sexual difference and, 126-28 primal, 48; sexual difference and, 16;
Deroin, Jeanne, 56—S9, 63 significance of, 5; subjectivity and,
Derrida, Jacques, 3, 28, 144, 146-47 13-14; time and, 53. See also desire
desire: civility and, 122; fantasy and, fantasy echoes, 45-46, 48, 60, 66-67,
49; femininity and, 113-14, 127; fem- 119
inism and, 34-35; Lacan on, 34; Fassin, Eric, 100, 118
masculinity and, 18, 113-14, 127; Faue, Elizabeth, 25-26, 30, 32, 36
origins and significance of, 113-14, female maternal fantasy, 54, 59-66
164n68; phallus as signifier of, 18, female orator fantasy, 54-59
 Index 183

feminism: academic, 27; achievements in, 109-10, 159n38, 160n39; gender

of, 25; basis of, 10; critical function equality and, 94-95, 102-4, 109-10;
of, 33-37, 39-44, 143; criticisms
of, imperialism of, 103-4; national
130, 132-33; desire and, 34-35; dif- identity in, 117, 119-20, 129, 134-35;
ferences within, 78, 88; in Eastern republicanism in, 125—28; secular-
Europe, 82-83; in France, 133; ism and, 92-95, 102-3; women and
French, 81-82; future of, 43-44; politics in, 79, 99, 123
historiography and, 41-42; institu- Frankfurt School, 34
tionalization of, 27, 29; passion and, French feminism, 81-82
141-42; political, 27; religion and, French Revolution, 93-95, 98, 117, 134
106; reverberations of, 81-90; sexual Freud, Sigmund, 3; “A Child Is Being
difference and, 130; sociological vs. ' Beaten,’ 49; “Constructions in
psychoanalytic perspectives in, 6 Analysis,” 13; on fantasy, 22;
feminism’s history, 33-37, 41-42 Foucault on, 15; on melancholia, 31,
feminist analytics of power, 70, 85, 88 33; secondary revision and, 20; on
feminist history: critical function of, sexual difference, 16
41-43; discontinuity in, 51; fantasies
of, 22, 51, 54-65; future of, 42; inter- Gailani, Fatima, 78
disciplinarity and, 41-42; principles gallantry, 118, 121-22, 128-29, 133, 134,
of, 41; time and, 42. See also 136-37
women’s history Gallimard (book publisher), 117
feminist methodology: axioms of, 73; Geertz, Clifford, 71-72
binary pairs as object of, 72, 73, 75; gender: citizenship and, 17; concept of,
contextualization and, 78; develop- 4-6, 80-81; cultural construction
ment of, 70; identity and, 78; power of, 9, 19; in Eastern Europe, 81; his-
as object of, 70; skepticism and, 75- torical analysis based on, 36; as the
77; Women in Black and, 85, 88—89 normative and the psychic, 20; psy-
Feminist Theory Papers, 142-43 choanalysis and, 21; reverberations
Fernando, Mayanthi, 163ns54 of, 80-81; sex in relation to, 6-8, 10,
Féte of Unity and Indivisibility, 94 80-81
fictitious unities, 72-73, 78, 85; imag- Gdle, Niliifer, 109
ined communities, 119 Gossec, Frangois-Joseph, 94
Fink, Bruce, 113 Gouges, Olympe de, 56, 58; Declara-
Ford Foundation, 83 tion of the Rights of Woman and Cit-
Foucault, Michel, 1, 3, 145; on archives, iZeN,
$5, 57, 59
142-43, 147—48; on counter-sciences, Grewal, Inderpal, 42
14-15; historical critique and, 10, 46, Gutwirth, Madelyn, 94-95
48; on subjectivity, 14, 107
Fowler, Dorothy Ganfield, 68-69, 90 Habib, Claude, 118, 121-23, 128-31,
France: absolutism in, 123-25; aristo- 133-38
cratic republicanism and, 117-18, Halley, Janet, 34
129-36; court life in, 120-22; femi- Haraway, Donna, 7
nism in, 131; feminist protest groups Hartman, Mary, 23
184 Index

head scarves and veils, 92, 103, 105-6, Jacobins, 55-56

108-12, 123, 136-38, 163n54. Jakobson, Roman, 82
Hegel, G. W. F, 34 jouissance: critique vs., 148; defined,
heterosexuality: normative, 9, 25, 30, 50; female oratory and, 56; as femi-
38, 62; psychological effects of, 62; nist bond, 57, 65; Lacan on, 113-14;
seduction theory and, 136, 139 maternity and, 65; nonphallic, 61,
Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks, 39 62, 114
historiography: archives and, 144-45, Journal of Women’s History, 25
147; certainty as value in, 6; crit- Julliard, Jacques, 132-34, 136
icisms of, 3; death and, 144-46, 148;
discontinuity in, 50; fantasy and, s, Kafka, Ben, 20
48-49; feminism and, 41—42; iden- Kant, Immanuel, 34
tity and, 46-48, 51-52; passion and Kaplan, Caren, 42
madness in, 1-3; psychoanalysis Kastoryano, Riva, 105-6
and, 2-4, 20-22; representation Kibre, Pearl, 68
and, 146; retrospective identifica- Klein, Melanie, 61
tion and, 48. See also feminism’s his- Kollantai, Alexandra, 105
tory; feminist history; women’s Kristeva, Julia, 61, 65, 81-82
history
Hobsbawm, Eric, 46-47, 119 La Barbe, 160n39
homosexuality, 130-31, 136 labor history, 36
Hume, David, 121-22 Lacan, Jacques, 3; on castration, 18,
Huntington, Samuel, 73 113-14, 127, 129; on causality, 12; on
desire, 34, 113-14, 127; feminism
identity: critique and, 40, 46-47; fan- and, 15; on founding of Western civ-
tasy and, 50-51, 54, 66-67; feminist, ilization, 61; on identity, 113; on
54, 57-59; fictitious unities and, 72- myth, 118; sexual difference and, 15-
73; group membership and, 19; his- 18, 112-14; the symbolic and, 16-17
tory and, 46-48, 51-52; Lacan on, Laclos, Pierre-Ambroise-Francois
113; multiple types of, 38; women Choderlos de, 124-25
and, 49. See also subjectivity Langer, William L., 1, 22
imagined communities, 119 Laplanche, Jean, 13, 16-17, 19, 48
imperialism, 103-4 Laqueur, Thomas, 98
individualism, 92, 105-12 Lawrence, T. E., 66
interdisciplinarity, 4, 40-42 Lawrence ofArabia (film), 66
International Council of Women, 59 Le Débat (journal), 117, 120-21
International Women’s Conference, 60 Le Nouvel Observateur (journal), 117
intertextuality, 82 Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 79
Irigaray, Luce, 61-62, 65, 81 Lepore, Jill, 14.4
Islam: in France, 92, 103-6, 136-38; LEsprit (journal), 117
secularism and, 92, 103; women and, Lewis, Bernard, 73-74
92, 103-10, 136-38, 163n54 Liaisons dangereuses, Les (Laclos),
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 73-75, 83 124-25
 Index 185

liberalism: agency and, 106-9; femi- Oedipal conflict, 16, 17

nism and, 35; secularism and, 96 Only Paradoxes to Offer (Scott), 47
Lotman, Iurii, 82 Other, 14, 41, 72-73, 113, 127, 132
Louis XIV, king of France, 123, 134, 135 Ovid, 52
love: game of, 132; maternal, 59-65; se- Ozouf, Mona, 118, 121—22, 128-30, 132,
duction theory and, 130; in United 134-38
States, 132-33
Palestinians, 73-74
Mack, Phyllis, 106-8 Pargellis, Stanley, 68-69, 72, 90
MacKinnon, Catherine, 83 Parker, Harold, 1-2, 22
Mahmood, Saba, 106-8 passion: feminism and, 141-42; in his-
Malcolm, Janet, 141 toriography, 1-3; women and, 97;
Marx, Karl, 34 for women’s history, 30-31, 40
masculinity: desire and, 18, 113-14, 127; Pateman, Carole, 99
language and, 62; political power Pelletier, Madeleine, 56-58, 60
and, 126, 132; protection of women Pethick Lawrence, Emmeline, 60
and, 77; public order and, 97; rea- phallus: desire and, 18, 113-14, 127;
son and, 72, 97; universalism and, male power and, 132; political power
17, 18, 114; violence and, 63, 85, 133 and, 124-27, 132; women, 18, 62,
maternity. See motherhood 113-14, 127
melancholy, 31-33, 37-38
Plato, 30
Mexico, 160n39
m/f (journal), 7
Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand, 13, 16-17, 48
poststructuralism: French feminism
Michelet, Jules, 144-46
and, 81-82; psychoanalysis vs., 3
Minson, Jeffrey, 8
power: critique of, 33-34; feminist an-
modernity: aristocratic republicanism
alytics of, 70, 85, 88; psychic life of,
vs., 129; French Revolution and, 93;
123-28
imperialism and, 103-4; individual-
private-public distinction, 96-97
ism and, 92; secularism and, 91-92;
protection, rhetoric of, 75-77
women’s liberation and, 92, 103-5,
psychoanalysis: criticisms of, 2; de-
109-10
constructive character of, 14-15;
Montesquieu, Baron de La Bréde et
gender and, 21; historiography and,
de, 130, 137-38
2-4, 20-22; poststructuralism vs., 3;
Morgan, Robin, 64
sexual difference and, 2, 5, 15-17,
motherhood: commonality of, 59-61,
112-15, 164n68
63-64, 66, 89; female maternal fan-
tasy of, 54, 59-66; Western civiliza- public-private distinction, 96-97
tion founded on, 61
Quaker women, 106-7
MUSES, 23-24, 30, 40, 43-44
queer theory, 164n68
Najmabadi, Afsaneh, 39, 105
Netanyahu, Benjamin, 75 race: feminism and, 39; motherhood
Nikolchina, Miglena, 82-83 and, 64
Nouvet, Claire, 52-53 rationality, 97-98
186 Index

Raynaud, Philippe, 117-18, 121-23, 129, 124-25; politics and, 118, 120; repub-
131-32 licanism and, 126-28; sex and, 120;
Readings, Bill, 29 sexual difference and, 117-19, 128-
religion: feminism and, 106; sex and, 36, 139
96-97; state’s relation to, 93, 99, September 11 attacks, 70-72
102-3; subjectivity and, 106-9 Serbia, 83
Renan, Ernest, 122 sex: cultural construction of, 7-8, 80-
reproduction, 119-20 81; gender and, 6-8, 10, 80-81; his-
republicanism, 125-28; aristocratic, toriography and, 2-3; religion and,
117-18, 129-36 96-97; secularism and, 91; seduc-
retrospective identification, 48 tion theory and, 120
reverberations, 79-90 sexual difference: concept of, 9, 15-16,
Richelieu, Armand Jean du Plessis, 150n10; equality and, 17; fantasy
duc de, 123 and, 16; feminism and, 130; in
Riley, Denise, 9-11, 39, 46, 49, 72 France, 117-40; French Revolution
Riviere, Joan, 58 and, 134; Lacan on, 15-18, 112-14; as
Rose, Jacqueline, 51 problem, 5, 6, 16-17, 22, 113-14,
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 121 150n10; psychoanalysis and, 2, 5, 15—
Rubin, Gayle, 38; “The Traffic in 17, 112—15, 164n68; secularism and,
Women,’ 6 95-100, 102~3, 112-15; seduction
Rules, The, 132 and, 117—19, 128-36, 139; the sym-
Rumsfeld, Donald, 76 bolic and, 16-17. See also equality of
Rupp, Leila, 30 men and women
Russian Revolution, 105 Sharon, Ariel, 74, 75
Silverstein, Paul, 103
Sahin v. Turkey (2005), 110 Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, 30
Schor, Naomi, 142 Snitow, Ann, 39, 43
Scott, Anne. Firor, 25, 30 social construction. See cultural con-
secondary revision, 20 struction
secularism: church-state relations and, social history, 35-36
93, 99, 102-3; history of, 93-108; Soros Foundation, 83
imperialism and, 103-4; individual- Stansell, Christine, 43
ism and, 105-12; Islam and, 92; mo- state: family as model for, 119-20; neu-
dernity and, 91-93; perspectives on, trality of, 110-11; religion and, 93,
101-5; sexual difference and, 95- 99, 102-3
100, 102-3, 112~15; sexuality and, 91; Steedman, Carolyn, 144-47
tradition and, 91-92, 95, 105-10; Stites, Richard, 105
women and, 92 subjectivity: agency and, 106-11; con-
seduction: absolutism and, 123-25; ci- struction of, 12-14; fantasy and, 13-
vility and, 122, 125, 130; French char- 14; religion and, 106-9. See also
acter of, 118, 120, 123; head scarves identity
and, 136-38; Lacanian perspective suicide bombings, 74
on, 128; political impotence and, symbolic, the, 16-17
 Index 187

Taliban, 75-77 Warner, Michael, 164n68

Taylor, Charles, 95-96 Weed, Elizabeth, 15, 17-18, 141-43
Terrell, Mary Church, 64 Wiegman, Robyn, 42
terrorism: Palestinians accused of, 74; women: concept of, 9-11, 32, 38-39,
September 11 attacks, 70-72; 46-47, 49, 53; cultural construction
women’s oppression and, 75-76 of, 11; differences among, 32, 38, 53,
TeSanovic¢, Jasmina, 86-88 72-73; equality of, 17, 98-100; fan-
Thompson, Sharon, 43 tasy and, 49; French Revolution
time: fantasy and, 53; feminist history and, 94-95; imperialism and, 103-
and, 42; narrative and, 50-52 4; Islam and, 92, 103-10, 136-38,
Title IX, 37 163n54; political representation of,
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 92, 111-12 79-80, 99; “protection” of, 75-78,
tradition: invention of, 46-47, 119; 103-4; secularism and, 92; voting
secularism and, 91—92, 95, 105-10 rights of, 99
Tristan, Flora, 63 Women in Black (w1B), 83-89
Tsing, Anna, 78 women’s history: achievements of, 24,
Turkey, 109-1, 15938, 160n39 37; critical function of, 28-29, 39-
40; discontinuity in, 47; future of,
unconscious, 15, 19-20, 48 25-29; goals of, 24, 37; homosocial-
United Nations, 37; Millennium Peace ity of, 30-31; institutionalization of,
Prize for Women, 84 26-29, 31-32; melancholy and, 31-
United States: criticisms of, 132-34; 33, 38; origins of, 23-24; passion
feminism of, 132-33; women and and, 30-31, 40; social history and,
politics in, 99 35-36; women as category in, 10, 32,
universalism, masculinity and, 17, 18, 46-47, 53. See also feminist history
114 Women’s International League for
universities, 29 Peace and Freedom, 89
USA Patriot Act, 71
US Defense Department, 77 Yilmaz, Havwva, 109
Young, Iris Marion, 77
veils and head scarves, 92, 103, 105—6,
108-12, 123, 136—38, 163n54 Zizek, Slavoj, 50, 56, 127
Verone, Maria, 59-60, 64
Viennot, Eliane, 123
violence: masculinity and, 63, 85, 133;
protests against, 83-88

THEOLOGY LIBRARY
CLAREMONT, CALIF
JOAN WALLACH SCOTT
is the Harold F. Linder Professor
of Social Science at the Institute
for Advanced Study.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Scott, Joan Wallach.
The fantasy of feminist history / Joan Wallach Scott.
p- cm.—(Next wave provocations)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8223-5113-9 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8223-5125-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1, Feminism—History. 2. Psychoanalysis and feminism.
3. Feminist theory. I. Title. II. Series: Next wave provocations.
HQ1122.836 2012
305.4201—dc23 2011021965
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In The Fantasy ofFeminist 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.

“The Fantasy of Feminist History is Joan Wallach Scott’s most important intervention in the field
of gender history since her classic article of 1986. In her usual lucid prose, she invites us to rethink
gender analysis in psychoanalytic terms and thus enrich our analytic vocabulary for understanding
human existence. Her critiques of sexual difference and cultural construction dramatically change
our notions of gender norms. Her elucidation of fantasy as a historical category of analysis is also
groundbreaking. This book is a must-read for all historians and gender scholars.’
—MARY LOUISE ROBERTS, author of Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siécle France
“This elegant collection of Joan Wallach Scott’s recent essays on feminist history and critique is her
best book yet. Relentlessly pedagogical, bracingly reflexive, and breathtakingly creative, each essay
makes good on the book’s premise that ‘psychoanalysis animates the concept of gender for histo-
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rians. The introduction—a perspicacious narrative of feminist theory’s complex relationship with @
sexual difference and psychoanalysis—is worth its weight in gold, and the five essays that follow, a.-
on topics ranging from secularism to seduction theory, are polished gems of historical-theoretical 3% —
inquiry. Together they reinvigorate feminist theory with brilliant new ideas, juxtapositions, and en- Fe
gagements. —w ENDY BROWN, University of California, Berkeley e
N

“Joan Wallach Scott is not merely a historian of gender. Gender also proves a useful tool in her his- y
tory of our present. To preserve its ‘critical edge, she summons psychoanalysis, convincingly argu- eo
ing that gender studies need not be limited to cold reason. From paradox to dilemma, indeed, there _a
is madness in Scott’s method, and it is exhilarating’—ERIC FASSIN, Ecole Normale Supérieure 8 f

JOAN WALLACH SCOTT is the Harold F. Linder Professor of

Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study. 2
Next Wave Provocations _
A Series Edited by Inderpal Grewal, Caren Kaplan, and Robyn Wiegman =a

A John Hope Franklin Center Book @ 7

‘Duke University Press SBN 974-0-&8223-5125-2 a e

Box 90660, Durham, NC 27708-0660

4 f
www.dukeupress.edu 9"780822"351252