Gender and Modern Identity

Gender and Modern Identity Sarah Richardson Powerpoint & Handout available on module webpage

Anne-Louis Girodet’s Portrait of Jean-Baptiste Belley, Ex Representative of the Colonies exhibited in Paris in 1798.

Bayly: ‘the most splendid visualisation of the “universalising intention of the revolution”’ • Belley: a former Senegalese slave who worked to abolish slavery in the colonies. • A representative of the French colonies elected in San Domingue in 1793. • Spoke in debate in in 1794, when a unanimous decision was taken to abolish slavery. Lost seat in 1797. • He is lost from historical records in the struggles of Haitians against the Napoleonic army, which was attempting to reinstate slavery.

Belley is leaning against a plinth of the bust of the encyclopaedist Abbé Raynal, who had died in 1796 the critic of slavery and of colonial policy. • Thus the artist has 'united two very different citizens of the French nation in a Janus-faced double portrait'. • Yet there is no equality between these two figures, rather much ambivalence. • This portrait tells us about modernity - a modernity structured through particular images of masculinity and racial difference.

Bayly and Gender • Gender merits little discussion in Bayly’s book • The binaries of gender, of class and of race are central to the definition of ‘being modern’ • Questions of identity and difference need to be part of our picture of the Making of the Modern World alongside discussions of states and wars and revolutions to enable us to understand what kind of people modern people are.

Gender & Identity • How are the key markers of identity: class, age, gender, sexuality and ethnicity represented? How are identities constructed? • What does the category of ‘gender’ offer to an understanding of modern identity? • Many women’s historians have presented an almost unchanging story of timeless, endemic patriarchy and misogyny. • It has also been assumed that ‘men’ were an unproblematic norm

Historiography of gender identity • the emergence of gender history • the social science approach.

Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (1985)

Distinction between Sex & Gender • Sex is biologically determined • But see Foucault’s History of Sexuality (1976-86) • Laquer’s analysis of the ‘one-sex’ model which was prevalent in science before eighteenth century

Male and Female reproductive organs demonstrating correspondence as drawn by Andreas Vesalius in Tabulae Sex 1558

Gender • Gender is a cultural/social phenomenon. • Gender is what a given society makes of sexual/biological differences. • If sex deals in men and women, gender deals in concepts of femininity and masculinity.

Approach relied on post-strucuturalism and discourse analysis. • Language plays primary role in construction of gendered identity. • Bock: ‘Gender is a “category”, not in the sense of a universal statement but … in the sense of public objection and indictment, of debate, protest, process and trial.’ • Such theoretical methods would initiate new areas of historical inquiry

Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (1987): ‘In particular, our concern has been to give the neglected dimension of gender its full weight and complexity in the shaping and structuring of middle-class social life in this period.’

Social science approach • Categories of gender, race and class are central to any social structure • Importance of rhetoric of ‘separate spheres’ in establishing boundaries • Male dominated public sphere/female dominated private sphere

Critiques of ‘separate sphere’ model • Discourse neither novel to nineteenth century nor applied to one social class • ‘several spheres’ more appropriate model • ‘public’ and ‘private’ were ideological constructs used in different ways rather than fixed, unchanging entities

Critics of ‘gender history’ • Runs the risk of abandoning attempts to ‘get at women’s real experiences in the past’ • Portrays women as lacking ‘agency’ trapped inexorably in a web of discourse

Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight (1992). The narrative of the woman confined to the domestic/private sphere is juxtaposed with other narratives: of women shoppers in Department stores, East End prostitutes, girl victims of white slavery, striking factory match girls, bourgeois charity workers, and emerging feminists.

Masculinity • History of masculinity evolved from work on women’s history • Men’s movement questioned modern patriarchal gender roles • ‘if we live in a man’s world it is not a world that has been built upon the needs and nourishment of men. Rather it is a social world of power and subordination in which men have been forced to compete if we want to benefit from our inherited masculinity’ (Seidler, Rediscovering masculinity) • Historians looked back into history to search out more positive conceptions of masculinity.

Constructions of Masculinity • Men’s behaviour regulated by ‘hegemonic’ definitions of masculinity which marginalise unmanly forms of behaviour. • Egs muscular Christianity • ‘Domestic’ man • Working class masculinity based on waged labour; all male leisure pursuits and compulsory heterosexuality

Victorian Masculinity: which picture is more apposite? Last bare knuckle fight, 1860 – Public man – Rhondda miners – domestic man

Historiography of masculinity • Early work: deviant and contested notions of masculinity, notably homosexuality. • Recent studies: dominant form of masculinity eg adolescence, imperialism, warfare and technology (egs Theweleit, Male fantasies; Dawson, Soldier heroes, Bourke, Dismembering the male) • Focus on Empire has incorporated issues of race and ethnicity

Masculinity and Race Thomas Babington Macaulay on the Bengal people: ‘His pursuits are sedentary, his limbs delicate, his movements languid. … There never perhaps existed a people so thoroughly fitted by habit for a foreign yoke.’

Class and Gender • An understanding of modernity needs to include issues of class and gender (as well as race). • See Catherine Hall’s analysis of Peterloo which considers the gendered experiences of Samuel Bamford and his wife Jemima • Need to analyse the critical interplay between the key markers of class, gender and race Samuel Bamford, 1788-1872

Autobiography/Biography • Does autobiography offer the opportunity to capture perspectives and experiences of those ‘hidden from history’? • Is it an accurate narrative of a life story or a product of fiction or fictions? • Consider issues of memory, reflection, authenticity, truth • Biographical collections such as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography allow these questions to be explored in more depth Revolutionary Russian Women, 1905

Gender and Modern Identity