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Gender, History, and Sovereignty
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2016
Extract
Gender history has a history proper to itself. This is not only to say that the study of gender as a scholarly and institutional practice is bounded by space and time, and that it has an archive of its own, but also that “gender history” as a relatively recent disciplinary innovation is properly gender history to the extent that it exists in relation to and distinct from other histories of becoming man, woman, trans, and so forth. In other words, gender history, regarded as a discursive formation in its own right, constitutes its object in ways that overlap but remain distinct from other conceptions of being and becoming gendered that are spatially and temporally diverse. Seen in this light, it can be said to map onto a history of sovereignty that has privileged particular forms of life and that acts as a limit on gender's analytical and critical value.
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References
NOTES
1 Jacob, Wilson Chacko, Sovereignty in Times of Empire: The Life of Sayyid Fadl b.ʿAlawi (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, in contract)Google Scholar.
2 Afsaneh Najmabadi's intervention across several works informs part of my analysis. See, for example, Najmabadi, , “Are Gender and Sexuality Useful Categories of Historical Analysis?,” Journal of Women's History 18 (2006): 11–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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5 Ibid., 1067. This is the second part of a definition that also proposes seeing gender as a “constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes.”
6 On this point, there is no equivalent to Spivak, Gayatri’s oft misunderstood, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Nelson, C. and Grossberg, L. (Urbana–Champagne, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1988): 271–313CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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8 See, for example, Nova Robinson's contribution to this roundtable.
9 The course correction was necessitated by my participation in a gender and religion conference at York, convened by Joanna De Groot and Sue Morgan. The outcome of the meeting was a special issue of Gender and History titled “Sex, Gender and the Sacred: Reconfiguring Religion in Gender History,” but for me it was also the realization of how easily the event of gender can be made a nonevent. My contribution was “Conversion Trouble: Gender, Religion, and the Problem of Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century,” Gender and History 25 (2014): 287–303.
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11 My reference is to lectures and seminars Judith Butler gave in May 2013 at Cambridge University's Center for Research in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. See also Butler, , Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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13 See Jacob, “Conversion Trouble.”
14 Esmeir, Samera, “At Once Human and Not Human: Law, Gender and Historical Becoming in Colonial Egypt,” Gender & History 23 (2011): 247CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
15 As there is no space to develop this point, I will simply note that history might well need to be a global history.