Boydston

Question 1

What does not concern her and why?

Answer 1

• Using the term gender instead of women
• Words of females at their most fragile have included males
• Gender is the concept in current practice that includes relational dynamic
• seems useful to make the shift

Question 2

What worries her when it comes to gender?

Answer 2

• Is as a category of analysis gender may be functioning in historians work
• There’s a difference between concept (theorised but institutionalised) vs a more fixed and furnished category of analysis
• Gender has always been up for debate
• Scholars have struggled with little success to problematise relation of gender as a social construction to designated male and female bodies
• Too often assumed that females do things from femininity
• Gender has been looked at with little effort to resolve theorising gender in other ways apart from binary and oppositional forms
• Greatest concern is although debates on gender in history the process is treated as non-historical contingent
• Viewed as unfolding in the same ways and same terms in all societies

Question 3

What does she say historians are doing by avoiding trying to resolve the issues found in gender?

Answer 3

• They’re further securing a silent bias in historical work
• Gender seems almost nowhere critically reassessed with respect to time, place and culture
• Relying on gender as a category of historical analysis has stopped efforts to write history of gender as a historical process

Question 4

What does Boydston say categories of analysis are?

• Relate to the present

Answer 4

• Subjective
• Created in the critical minds of historians to help identify, organise and assess certain kinds of evidence of particular interest to that historian
• Thus: They may carry an urgency that makes them appear both natural and inevitable but categories of analysis are always contemporary,constituted in and marked by the present

Question 5

How does Boydston say categories of analysis exist in relation to sources?

Answer 5

• instead categories exist a prior in the sources and for them to merely be revealed is for them to be misunderstood in history as a discipline and misrepresented the role of the historian as the maker of meaning

Question 6

Why does Boydston say categories of analysis are not analytically neutral?

Answer 6

• They are frameworks that reflect and replicated our own understandings of the world

Question 7

What is benefits of categories?

Answer 7

• Their purpose is to bring order and meaning to an unruly set of data.
• universalises data

Question 8

What are the limitations of categorisation?

Answer 8

• Reduces the variability of lived experience to a few elements that are allowed to stand as a substitute for that experience
• Using category we accept these reductions even if it can be viewed as misconceptions/misrepresentation

Question 9

What did Boydston say the aim of feminism was in history?

Answer 9

• To expose gender systems and redress the injustices
• Was to discover and reveal such patterns in the past, return women’s activities and women to the historical record and illuminate ways in which women in the past had attempted to resist sexual oppression

Question 10

According the Boydston what happened a lot in women’s history during 1960-80s?

Answer 10

• Lots of theorising about gender but emphasis was not on problematising the term gender more problematising the relation of gender to other categories e.g. class and patriarchy

Question 11

What does she say happened in the 1980s?

Answer 11

• Women’s history became almost impossible not to use the concept of gender
• Fuller investigation into intersectionality
• Women’s history became more popular in journals
• Women’s history also criticised for being too narrow

Question 12

In the 1990s what did scholars of race and slavery in Europe and America point out?

Answer 12

• That the bodies of women of colour had been socially constructed to meet the interests of Europeans since the first colonial impact

Question 13

What does Bodyston think would be the best approach for gender?

Answer 13

• the concept of ‘genderqueerness’ to convey a rejection of gender categorisation altogether

Question 14

What is genderqueerness?

Answer 14

• It suggests a framework for historians not to anticipate association (previously like strength to masculinity), not until there is evidence that these associations were the ways the specific culture under investigation understood those traits

Question 15

What does Boydston think the benefit of a genderqueer-ness concept is?

Answer 15

• Don’t have to shoehorn female-masculinity
• A fluidity that would help identify and discuss earlier and non-western gender formations
• Wouldn’t stop historians seeing binary gender formations where they historically occur but would give them tools for seeing other gender formations where they have historically occurred
• Would encourage historians to first decide whether male/female distinctions are important in the social relationships in the place and time
• Would force historians to explain what they mean by the term gender
• Look at sources more critically because previously when when gender is forgone conclusion sources seem more minor

Question 16

What does Boydston say historians anxiety is about variation im historical relations of maleness and femaleness?

What are historians putting this anxiety in higher importance than?

Answer 16

• That we will lose legitimacy to judge or intervene where those relations are vehicles of domination or subordination in the present
• Putting this fear over the fear that for many societies and many women historians might be getting it wrong historically, which means we may also be getting it wrong in the present