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THE SUBJECT AND THE WORK OF DIFFERENCE: GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND INTELLECTUAL HISTORY
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 March 2011
Extract
In her epilogue, Tracie Matysik argues that “questions of universalism, difference, and morality beyond the law have returned with a new force” (256). Similarly, in hers, Judith Surkis shows how the recent virulent controversies around the headscarf in republican French schools and their attendant legislation have a genealogy in the vibrant fin de siècle debates on pedagogy, secularism, and citizenship (243–8). Few would argue with Surkis and Matysik's contention that contemporary debates on universalism, citizenship, and secularism which haunt Western liberal democracies have a historical past, yet few have explored this past in such an illuminating manner. By reflecting on these issues, both studies illustrate how intellectual history, far from being the abstract and arcane sub-field of history it is still considered by some critics, has contemporary purchase and speaks to a present that must be thought historically. These authors show how (sexual) difference constituted a central term in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century definition of the nature and social expression of the subject.
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References
1 Both Surkis and Matysik were trained at Cornell University under the aegis of Dominick LaCapra. Along with another recent alumna, Camille Robcis, their work exemplifies a new generation of intellectual historians committed to bringing together the insights of feminist theory, gender, and intellectual history. See, for instance, Robcis, Camille, “French Sexual Politics from Human Rights to the Anthropological Function of the Law”, French Historical Studies 33 (Winter 2010), 129–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Jenkins, Keith, Morgan, Sue, and Munslow, Alun, “Introduction: On Fidelity and Diversity”, in idem, eds., Manifestos for History (New York, 2007), 2Google Scholar.
3 Copjec, Joan, “The Fable of the Stork and Other False Sexual Stories”, Differences 21 (Spring 2010), 68, 65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 See Scott, Joan W., Only Paradoxes to Offer (Cambridge, MA, 1996)Google Scholar; Dean, Carolyn J., The Frail Social Body: Pornography, Homosexuality, and Other Fantasies in Interwar France (Berkeley, 2000)Google Scholar.
5 For an instance of this productive engagement, see Judith Surkis's comment on the occasion of an MIH forum on Jerrold Seigel's Idea of the Self, in MIH 3 (2006), 315–22.
6 On morality and the political see Brown, Wendy, Politics out of History (Princeton, 2001), 30Google Scholar.
7 A project begun in the 1980s, which he reiterates in a recent essay: Dominick LaCapra, “Tropisms of Intellectual History”, Rethinking History 8 (Dec. 2004), 511, 512.
8 Joan W. Scott, “History-Writing as Critique”, in Jenkins, Morgan, and Munslow, Manifestos for History, 35.
9 Rancière, Jacques, L'inconscient esthétique (Paris, 2001), 11Google Scholar.
10 On this point see Scott, “History-Writing as Critique”, 19–38. It is clear that “theory” and its uses still preoccupy many historians and critics. See, for instance, the recent collection Jenkins, Morgan, and Munslow, Manifestos for History, and the latest twentieth-anniversary issue of Differences 21 (Spring 2010): “What's the Difference? The Question of Theory.”
11 Carolyn Dean offers a brief rendering of that “binary” and the ways it has framed the reception of LaCapra's work as well as forms of intellectual history, “Intellectual History and the Prominence of ‘Things that Matter’,” Rethinking History 8 (Dec. 2004), 537–47.
12 Offen, Karen, H-France Forum 2/1 (Winter 2007)Google Scholar, http://www.h-france.net/forum/forumvol2/OffenOnSurkis1.html (italics added). Italics are mine.
13 Riley, Denise, “‘The Social’, ‘Woman’, and Sociological Feminism,” in “Am I that Name?” Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History (London, 1988), 49Google Scholar.
14 Dominick LaCapra, “Resisting Apocalypse and Rethinking History,” in Jenkins, Morgan, and Munslow, Manifestos for History, 161.