If “Woman” is Just an Empty Category, Then Why Am I Afraid to Walk Alone at Night? Identity Politics Meets the Postmodern Subject

Abstract

This essay is a set of extended reflections on a book that has both attracted much commentary and exercised a considerable influence in current thinking about gender. This book, Joan Scott's Gender and the Politics of History, ' has had an especially powerful impact upon historians, for it is through her eyes that many of us have become acquainted with post-structuralist thought, particularly the ideas of Jacques Derrida. At the same time, Scott has become the spokesperson for gender history, the individual whose thoughts on women and gender are perhaps most widely known among those who otherwise know very little of feminist theory and the decades of scholarship and struggle on which it rests. There is much to admire in Scott's book, for as anyone who looks at the history of women must agree, discursively constructed conceptions of masculine and feminine have exerted enormous force in shaping both lives and opportunities. But lurking at the heart of Scott's call to recognize gender as a useful category of analysis lies a radical attack on the naive suppositions of all previous feminist scholarship: a rejection of that ingenuous chain of reasoning which links subjectivity and experience to the hope that oppressed persons, too, might find some agency in history. This rejection seems to rest upon the proposition that social identities are established solely through a process of differentiation analogous to that which Saussure identified as the structural ground of linguistic systems of meaning. The positive identity of one term (in this case, the socially powerful) emerges