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What Is Joan Scott Gender A Useful Category Of Historical Analysis

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Joan Scott’s central argument in her seminal work Gender: A useful Category of Historical Analysis is that gender as a framework of inquiry is relevant to many historical fields beyond simply women’s history. Scott argues that ‘descriptive usage of gender’ relegates gender to being analytically irrelevant towards addressing and changing historical paradigms. She reprimands the three distinct methods through which feminist historians have traditionally approached gender. The first process is the attempt to ‘explain the origins of the patriarchy’, which she criticises for not demonstrating how gender inequality influences society at large. Secondly, she critiques the Marxist orientation for being too rigid in the ‘self-imposed requirement’
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Gail Bederman draws a connection between race and gender especially in terms of ‘civilization’ in her book, Manliness & Civilization where she discusses how as men worked to enforce their power, race began to play a bigger role than imagined in gender. Bederman also examines the theory of ‘Neurasthenia’. In her analysis, Bedderman studies many different historical figures such as, Ida B. Wells, G. Stanley Hall, Theodore Roosevelt and Charlotte Perkins Gilman to gain historical insight on the ideologies of civilization, race and gender. Bederman states that her study is positioned on the assumption that gender is a ‘historical, ideological process’ (Bederman, 7). These historians give light and depth into the reading and allow the readers insight

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The reader has to understand that when Marxist ideas are discussed in literature, it has a different meaning to what ideas are represented when Marxism is discussed with politics or economics. Marxist

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This patriarchal system reveals the double standard in society, but also reveals the social statuses in this time period that oppressed women and bounded them from being able to change the

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The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History consists of 12 chapters, followed by Autobiographical Notes which explain what inspired Gerda Lerner to write her research. It further explores various themes such as assumptions made in women’s history, problems concerning class and race, and how feminism is considered as a “social and political battle for rights” (Stunkel, 2011, p. 226). One of the themes that comes up frequently is the patriarchy system, which Lerner viewed as a guideline that controlled and restricted women’s role and behavior. Lerner argues that women’s history went through multiple stages, the first being searching outstanding women that were missing from history, as women who made great achievement do not include majority of women and their different experiences (Stunkel, 2011, p. 226). The second stage focused on contributions made by women in a male-dominant society, and the third and final stage is the

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Words such as ‘unspoken assumption’, ‘insidiously’,‘exaggerating’, and “preoccupation” show suspicion towards the topic of women's rights and movements . In addition, the author also gives emphasis towards the downfall of men’s rights by including details such as “special privileges and protection to women” and “men’s supposed mistreatment of women”, thus showing how the author is directly opressed by the fight for equal rights. The author sees men's rights and their struggle with oppression as them being expected to have traditional cordial manners and fall into the traditional role of the patriarchy of the family, and decides to ‘debunk’ feminism by using these few points against a legacy of hatred, oppression, and misogyny that created

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Throughout history, human beings have struggled with the idea of equality. Whether in times of peace or times of war, the genders have almost never been equal in terms of political, economic or social pressures and activities. These injustices can be found everywhere— in conversations, classes, media, films, literature, and so forth. One example of this “hidden sexism” in literature can be found in the novel Lost Names by Richard E. Kim. Kim’s book, when first glanced at, seems normal.

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She explains how the feminist historians effected by different approaches to history writing; and one of the most influential impacts was Lacan’s language-centered theory. This interpretation of gender makes the categories of man and women problematic by suggesting that masculinity and femininity are subjective and fictional constructs instead of inherent characteristics. Still, Scott is uneasy with the tendency of reifying ‘subjectively originating antagonism between males and females as the central fact of gender’ (Scott, 1988, 39) because the terms suggested by Lacan do not provide the possibility to think of the construction of subjectivity within social and historical

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Thus, it is necessary to conclude that women have always played an important role in the development of history. History that involves women has been developed throughout the centuries, constantly changing its goals and forms, increasing the popularity movement of the American women in the late 1800’s. Women were discriminated for many things for a very long time, it wasn’t until the late 1800’s that women actually started to gain very few rights. The late 1800’s is very important time for women as it gets the movement started for Women’s Suffrage, and ultimately the late 1800’s starts to open the way for equality for women and

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A central concept within Marxism, classism, illustrates the

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Dorothy Smith conceives of ideology as a mode of reasoning, or creating knowledge which abstracts away from lives individuals engaged in everyday social interaction. It Is through ideology, hegemony and discourse that people become convinced to accept systems of social inequality as acceptable and immune from social transformation. It remains obvious that to state that the working class by virtue of its place in the social relations of capitalist production, has a fundamental interest in socialism, and is to attribute to a determined place at the economic level. But through the indoctrination by the capitalist classes, the working class comes to conclude that the dominate form of social structure is not subject to change. “Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious.

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When using a Marxist lens the viewer must focus on social classes and how power is distributed throughout these classes, including who holds the power and who is inferior to that power in the society. One question that might come about when viewing the

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An example would be from where the circus went through a series of destruction every time Celia and Bowen united. Through the Marxist analysis, the destructive forces occur in the moments because of the conflicts between the characters. • Both the history and the reality are affected • Another aspect that a Marxist would look at is how the pressure from the magicians’ society affects not only their personal powers but also Celia’s powers • If the magician’s powers are weakened, their society would collapse Novel 2: • A Hundred Years of Solitude through the Marxist view shows how the Buendia family’s authority would lead to destruction and could essentially alter the outcome of their town,

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In nearly all historical societies, sexism was prevalent. Power struggles between genders mostly ended in men being the dominant force in society, leaving women on a lower rung of the social ladder. However, this does not always mean that women have a harder existence in society. Scott Russell Sanders faces a moral dilemma in “The Men We Carry in Our Minds.” In the beginning, Sanders feels that women have a harder time in society today than men do.

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Commonly, it has been assumed that women’s right to work in old times was being abused for a long time. As a core role of householder, women had less as well as lack opportunity to engage in paid work (Speak, 2012). Things had changed when more women participated in social movements and had work experiences. In short, the historical development of feminism planning can be divided into different stages by the changes of gender division of

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There is no way to get to the bottom of things in such an approach and this confuses a lot of people. In a way it encourages the relativistic perspective, which then makes feminist research seem pointless. But rather than succumbing to a depoliticized relativism, postmodern framework focuses on the sociopolitical grounding of experience. The validity of the categories of masculinity and femininity are questioned. Postmodernists argue that in challenging gender as a foundational category of analysis they show greater reflexivity.

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