Gender and Modern Identity

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Gender and Modern Identity

• Sarah Richardson

2
Overview

• Introduction What is modern identity?
• Case study Baylys use of Girodets portrait
• Historiographical trends
• Joan Scott
• Social Science/Davidoff and Hall
• Masculinity
• Class v Gender

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Gender Identity

• How are 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?

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Gender Identity

• Many womens historians have presented an almost
  unchanging story of timeless, endemic patriarchy
  and misogyny.
• It has also been assumed that men were an
  unproblematic norm

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Voices

• Without question, our first inspiration was
  political. Aroused by feminist charges of
  economic and political discrimination . . . we
  turned to our history to trace the origins of
  women's second-class status. (Carroll Smith
  Rosenberg)
• When I started working on women's history about
  thirty years ago, the field did not exist. People
  didn't think that women had a history worth
  knowing. (Gerder Lerner)

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Voices

• Black identity is a narrative, a story, a
  history. Something constructed, told, spoken, not
  simply found (Stuart Hall)

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Anne-Louis Girodets Portrait of Jean-Baptiste
Belley, Ex Representative of the Colonies
exhibited in Paris in 1798.
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Case Study

• Christopher Baylys use of Girodets portrait
  tells us much about history, historians and
  gender identity
• the most splendid visualisation of the
  universalising intention of the revolution

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• Belley former Senegalese slave who worked to
  abolish slavery in the colonies
• 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.
• Lost from records in the struggles of Haitians
  against the Napoleonic army, which was attempting
  to reinstate slavery.

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• Leaning against bust of the encyclopaedist Abbé
  Raynal, critic of slavery and of colonial policy.
  
• 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.

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Bayly and Gender

• Gender merits little discussion in Baylys book
• 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.

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Historiography of gender identity

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

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

• Sex is biologically determined
• But see Foucaults History of Sexuality (1976-86)
• Laquers analysis of the one-sex model which
  was prevalent in science before eighteenth century

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Male and Female reproductive organs demonstrating
correspondence as drawn by Andreas Vesalius in
Tabulae Sex 1558
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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.
• Gender is a social category imposed on a sexed
  body. (Scott)
• Gender is a constitutive element of social
  relationships based on perceived differences
  between the sexes, and gender is a primary way of
  signifying relationships of power. (Scott)

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• Approach relied on post-strucuturalism and
  discourse analysis.
• Language plays primary role in construction of
  gendered identity.
• 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. (Bock)
• Such theoretical methods would initiate new areas
  of historical inquiry

18
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.
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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

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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

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Critics of gender history

• Runs the risk of abandoning attempts to get at
  womens real experiences in the past
• Portrays women as lacking agency trapped
  inexorably in a web of discourse

22
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.
23
Masculinity

• History of masculinity evolved from work on
  womens history
• Mens movement questioned modern patriarchal
  gender roles
• if we live in a mans 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.

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Victorian Masculinity which picture is more
apposite?
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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.
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Class Gender

• An understanding of modernity needs to include
  issues of class and gender (as well as race).
• See Catherine Halls analysis of Peterloo which
  considers the gendered experiences of Samuel
  Bamford and his wife Jemima

Samuel Bamford, 1788-1872
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What does this image tell us about class, gender
and modernity?