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out the importance of Petra’s and Alexander’s love, writes, “Significantly, both Alexander and Petra come to care for children who are not their biological children, but children in exile” (“The Bogus Woman” 15). Even for Shivan who causes a little riot in the detention center, love is what he longs for. He quotes from Paradise Lost to rebel against the authority, but “[t]he central theme of Paradise Lost is Love” (Day 435). All in all, Wertenbaker shows that historical paralysis is inevitable, but love may help people to get through.
C. Gender as a Useful Category of Historical Analysis
Similar with Hayden White’s claim of history as narrative form, Wertenbaker in Credible Witness reveals that everyone, no matter foreign or native, is a rightful storyteller as well as a legitimate historian. Based on the characteristic of
changeability and rewritability of history, the dramatist further points out a fluid identity and the multiplicity of history while we “dance with history.” Credible Witness, Three Birds Alighting on a Field and The Break of Day all display the disavowal of a fixed and stable concept of history, which conveys only one
interpretation or one truth, in the globalized age. Interestingly enough, Wertenbaker enlightens the reader on the issue of history through the awakening of female protagonists. The transformation of Petra in Credible Witness, Biddy in Three Birds, and Tess and Nina in The Break of Day represent the reader’s perceptive process from ignorance to awakening. Interpreting history from female perspectives complicates the discussion of history, complementing the lack of gender in White’s theory of history, and becoming one of the major traits in Wertenbaker’s plays.
White’s metahistory refers to history as a literary artifact so he offers feminists chances to write women into history. However, since Gayle Rubin theorizes “the sex/gender system,” which means “the set of arrangements by which a society
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transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity, and in which these transformed sexual needs are satisfied” (159), instead of “women,” “gender” becomes a term that designates the production of the social and cultural relationships between two biological sexes. Hence, nowadays feminists prefer to deal with gender issues instead of women’s problems for the following reasons: men and women are both socially and culturally constructed; men as well as women in a way are victims of the arbitrary sex/gender system; their relationship, which involves power and the
interconnection with other social institutions, influences our acknowledgement of history. In Rubin’s viewpoint, patriarchy is not a proper term to describe the origin of the oppression of women due to the reason that patriarchy, which means a society dominated by men only, is too large and vague to designate different oppressions in society (167). She, proposing “sex/gender system” instead of patriarchy to mean a system which oppresses women, writes, “Sex/gender system […] is a neutral term which refers to the domain and indicates that oppression is not inevitable in that domain, but is the product of the specific social relations which organize it” (168).
Rubin regards sex as biological differences while gender is the social conventions that command sexes. To be a woman or a man in society means to place her or him in the sex/gender system; as Toril Moi explains, “The individual men and women we meet in everyday life are products of the sex/gender system; no human being exemplifies
‘raw’ or ‘natural’ sex” (25 emphasis added). Although the system, forcing individuals to fit in it, is arbitrary, Rubin is optimistic, believing that since the system is
man-made, the oppression is evitable (Rubin 203). All we need is to see through the illusion that covers the system as nature and to reconstruct it politically (Rubin 204).16
16 Rubin prefers to use “the sex/gender system.” She intends to expose why and how a woman is transformed from a female to a woman and this transformation is important because it means a woman finds a position and an identity in society. Rubin’s idea of the sex/gender system forms a basic
theoretical ground in this book. Her idea explains why women are expected to be feminine and men masculine based on biological determinism, and femininity and masculinity are the two main focuses
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After Rubin, gender becomes a target that feminists endeavor to deconstruct.
Hence, due to the limited analysis of gender in history, feminists call for a feminist history after the so-called second wave feminist movement during the 1970s (Scott, Gender xi). Tosh and Lang examine the contribution of women’s history under the influence of the second feminist movement, commenting that women’s history is one of feminist manifestations, which intends to find women in history and to challenge the male-centered history. However, women’s history requires an “effective strategy”
(244) to modify mainstream history; otherwise, women’s history simply turns into a slogan or an ideal of feminist movements, instead of a power or a method to change history politically. Tosh and Lang express, “[I]t was unclear whether women’s history would become one among several intellectual strands in the women’s liberation movement, or a potentially transforming dimension of academic history” (244). It is not until “gender” becomes popular as, gender history, rather than women’s history, that it has the power to challenge mainstream history, as Tosh and Lang explains,
The history of gender represents a theoretically informed attempt to bring the two sexes and their complex relations into our picture of the past and in so doing to modify the writing of all history. It is by no means the only current within women’s history, but it holds out the greatest promise for the discipline as a whole. (246 emphasis in original)
Consequently, when Joan Scott in 1986 declares the importance of gender history in her well-known article, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” the phallocentric history is indeed challenged.17
of discussion in my book.
Joan Scott, on the one hand, follows Rubin’s sex/gender system to emphasize gender as “a socially imposed
17 “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis” was first published in 1986 in American Historical Review 91.5 (1986): 1053-75. Then it is included in Scott’s book Gender and the Politics of History (1988).
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division of the sexes” (Rubin 179); on the other hand, she follows Foucault’s analysis of power to stress gender as “a primary way of signifying relationships of power”
(Scott, Gender 42). Scott advocates gender not only as a useful tool to analyze history but also as a crucial category of historical analysis.18
Starting her theory from evaluating “her-story” or “women’s history,” Scott well explains the approach of her-story to highlight women as historical subjects.
Writing her-story gives value to the women who were silenced in history or hidden from history. Scott mentions that her-story has several usages. It gathers information about women (Gender 18), and interprets the structure of common women’s lives, not just great, noble and famous women’s (19). Besides, her-story also attempts to reveal and awaken women’s feminist consciousness (19). For Scott, the most important function of her-story approach is to change the standards of historical significance, asserting “‘personal, subjective experience’ matters as much as ‘public and political activities,’” especially because “the former influences the latter” (20).
Unlike her-story which emphasizes only women as historical subjects, Scott proposes gender as an important tool to comprehend history. She develops her theory from her astonishing observation of a lack of a theory to describe gender differences and how gender exercises socially even though the her-story approach has gathered so many documents. Feminist historians are better at description than theorization;
therefore, they are anxious about a system of theoretical formations to explain different social experiences of gender (Gender 30). They have proven that women have history and women are involved in important social movements in the western
18 There are three main categories of history: political history, economic history, and social history (Tosh and Lang 115). Women as well as “poverty, ignorance, insanity and disease” (131) are the subcategory of social history. However, because of the dominance of political history in historical analysis, social history has been overlooked, not to mention the fact that the role of women in history is extremely marginalized. In order to analyze history from a new perspective, Scott suggests that
“gender” should become the fourth main category of history alongside political, economic, and social histories.
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civilization (30), but their documents cannot answer how gender works in society or how gender gives meanings to the perception of history. Thus, it is not enough for Scott to emphasize that women indeed exist in history or to simply collect a lot of documents. What interests Scott is how the inclusion of gender in history changes our perception of history and how gender is constructed socially. Scott explains, “The emphasis on ‘how’ suggests a study of processes, not of origins, of multiple rather than single causes, of rhetoric or discourse rather than ideology or consciousness” (4).
In other words, Scott is not eager to find out the origins of gender differences, such as
“patriarchy” for many feminists or the “sex/gender system” for Rubin, but she pays more attention to the interaction between gender and other institutions, such as gender versus politics, war, and economics. To emphasize “how” means to emphasize the exercise of discourses. Hence, Scott’s purpose of comprehending history genderedly is very political: “to point out and change inequalities between women and men” (3).
As a feminist historian, Scott seeks a proper approach to use “gender as an analytic category” (31), analyzing the relations between gender and history, and equally valuing the two without prejudice. In order to justify her own theory, Scott explains and criticizes three main approaches of the analysis of gender first,19
19 The first approach is applied by theorists of patriarchy, who try to explain the origins of patriarchy (33). Their analysis is based on physical and biological differences between two sexes, but in this way, Scott observes that gender becomes “ahistoricity,” (34) meaning there is no connection between gender and history. History turns out to be “epiphenomenal” (34) and gender becomes a fixed and
unchangeable entity which conveys the eternal physical differences and inequality (34). Second, the Marxist feminist approach emphasizes the important role of economic factors in the determination of the gender system (35), so gender is the production of economic structures. In other words, gender under Marxist explanation “has had no independent analytic status of its own” (37). Third, the psychoanalytic approach tends to deal with how the individual subject is constructed; therefore, the specificity and variability of history is ignored (39).
and then proposes her definition of gender, which contains two propositions. The first proposition is that “gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes” (42), and Scott further provides four aspects to see how gender interacts with history. First, one must re-examine the meaning of
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“culturally available symbols” (43) in society and how this symbol becomes the meaning we think they are. Second, we should reconsider “normative concepts,” (43) which are mostly inscribed in religion, education, science and politics, and have appeared as binary gender representations, such as femininity versus masculinity. The purpose of reconsideration of normative concepts is to disrupt any fixed notion and binary in order to uncover the nature of gender (43). Third, followed by the second aspect, “a notion of politics and reference to social institutions and organizations” (43) cannot be overlooked when history is reinvestigated by gender. The fourth aspect is to link history with “subjective identity” (44), examining the way in which gender identities are constructed and relative to social and cultural organizations. Scott’s first proposition of gender contains the above four aspects, revealing gender is not just about the issue of women, but it has to be concerned with a wide range from personal identity to culture, society, religion, science, politics and wars. In other words, Scott’s contribution lies in expanding the narrow definition of gender to include politics, diplomacy, wars or others that usually are seen independent from gender.
Scott’s second proposition of gender is that it is “a primary way of signifying relationships of power” (Gender 42). That is to say, gender is where power is articulated (45). While the her-story approach seeks for documents about female ancestors, Scott questions why some facts are ignored but others are not. History is not merely a search for facts; thus, Scott’s question reveals that history as well as gender is manipulated by power, and gender, through power, rationalizes and justifies itself. Moreover, Scott is not satisfied with the insistence on the co-existing
connection between gender and power, but she further points out that it is more important to understand “the organization of equality or inequality” (48). Her emphasis on the structure of how equality or inequality is organized and exercised obviously follows Foucault’s idea of power, which is that power is inside, instead of
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outside, relationships. Scott, consequently, asserts that gender and power construct each other (49). Without the consideration of power, gender cannot be fully
comprehended.
To see gender as a useful category of historical analysis is Scott’s contribution to feminism as well as history. She affirms, “My point was to clarify and specify how one needs to think about the effect of gender in social and institutional relationships, because this thinking is often not done precisely or systematically” (Gender 44). Scott is the first person who provides a useful approach to reexamine gender in history, and her strategy is based on Foucault’s post-structuralist approach, especially her
insistence on inclusion of power into gender.20
Gender [. . .] means knowledge about sexual difference. I use knowledge, following Michel Foucault, to mean the understanding produced by cultures and societies of human relationships, in this case of those between men and women. Such knowledge is not absolute or true, but always relative. (2)
Scott expresses Foucault’s influence on her idea of gender, stating,
Based on Foucault’s ideas, seeing gender as knowledge also indicates that gender is produced and constructed socially. Scott, from this perspective, believes that we have to recognize men and women are both “empty” and “overflowing” categories, and she explains, “Empty because they have no ultimate, transcendent meaning. Overflowing because even when they appear to be fixed, they still contain within them alternative, denied, or suppressed definitions” (49). Since gender is constructed, not natural, men and women are empty without an absolute essence. Since gender is produced socially,
20 Not only Scott, but Denise Riley also follows the post-structuralist strategy to define women. By asserting “‘women’ is historically, discursively constructed, and always relatively to other categories which themselves change” (1-2), Riley criticizes the essentialist definition of women. Also, Catherine Hall observes that post-structuralism provides a way of analyzing history and a possibility of feminist history (23).
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men and women cannot be understood exclusively without the interaction with history.