Overview

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

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9780822351139

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Reviews

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-Siecle 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 historians.' 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, on topics ranging from secularism to seduction theory, are polished gems of historical-theoretical inquiry. Together they reinvigorate feminist theory with brilliant new ideas, juxtapositions, and engagements. Wendy Brown, University of California, Berkeley

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-Siecle France

Author Information

Joan Wallach Scott is the Harold F. Linder Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study. Her many books include The Politics of the Veil, ParitÉ: Sexual Equality and the Crisis of French Universalism, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man, and Gender and the Politics of History.

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