Blogging Kalamazoo: Thursday Evening
May. 8th, 2008 08:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrjI succeeded in putting together a very pleasant dinner expedition that included ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nicolaa5, a woman I knew very slightly when she lived in the Bay Area (in the SCA) who is now doing graduate work in Santa Barbara, and a couple of Nicolaa's friend. Putting together successful dinner expeditions is so much more fun than moping about nobody asking me to join their expeditions.
Thursday's the only day they have an evening session of papers -- most of the evenings are taken up with social events, receptions, performances, etc. So ...
Session 164 - History, Patriarchy, Feminism: Responses to Judith Bennett's History Matters (A Roundtable) -- Various discussants
Thesis: women's status and experience experienced no drastic change (for good or ill) from the middle ages to today, rather there was continuity with minor change. This position primarily focuses on evidence of work but is less applicable, for example, when looking at property rights in marriage. (Why) does history (still) matter?
Why are women poor? Is it outside forces or internal understandings of what is possible?
Are the feminists in the academy softening their approach to avoid offending colleagues and students? Does women's history still matter for current historians?
How far back is it necessary/appropriate to look for the roots of gender issues in history? Can we look at medieval issues as they inform later history without looking at their pre-medieval roots?
Does it matter that general historical textbooks written by women on topics related to women get library-catalogued in an entirely different section than "regular history"?
Why are "lesbian-like" woman-woman interactions still studied and analyzed through a heteronormative lens and in the context of male models. Is "lesbian-like" a shock-value term to push people into thinking about women's live in ways that don't refer back to men? Or is it a valid conceptual framework for studying a set of roles and practices with useful similarities? Or is it simply a way of adding nuance between the categories "provable female same-sex sexual/affective relationships" and "assumed to be heterosexual (although perhaps celebate)"? Are there other ways of studying the spaces women create that have little or no relationship to male culture without bringing the suggestion of (sexual) lesbianism into it?
Why is any study of gender issues in history knee-jerk labeled "feminist history". But conversely, is a feminist and gender-aware approach to history a distinguishing feature for an academic that can be a career plus? Are students more resistant to feminist approaches t o history than the academy is? What does the average person-in-the-street think or know about women's history?
Has feminist history swung too far towards studying only "the ordinary woman" and glossing over women of the privileged elite as atypical and unrepresentative? What can a study of elite women say to the understanding of ordinary women's lives? Where do queens fit into the metaphor of the family as kingdom or the metaphor of the body politic? Where were the holes in the glass ceiling and how permeable were they for elite women? Were the elite women who acted with agency representative of the extremes of women's potential? Or were they examples of "honorary men"?
Will feminist historians lose their feminist edge if they study historic masculinity? Is the expansion of feminist history to the more general fields of gender studies a way of co-opting female energy back to the study of men? And how does this change when men focus on gender studies or masculinity studies?
nicolaa5, a woman I knew very slightly when she lived in the Bay Area (in the SCA) who is now doing graduate work in Santa Barbara, and a couple of Nicolaa's friend. Putting together successful dinner expeditions is so much more fun than moping about nobody asking me to join their expeditions.Thursday's the only day they have an evening session of papers -- most of the evenings are taken up with social events, receptions, performances, etc. So ...
Session 164 - History, Patriarchy, Feminism: Responses to Judith Bennett's History Matters (A Roundtable) -- Various discussants
Thesis: women's status and experience experienced no drastic change (for good or ill) from the middle ages to today, rather there was continuity with minor change. This position primarily focuses on evidence of work but is less applicable, for example, when looking at property rights in marriage. (Why) does history (still) matter?
Why are women poor? Is it outside forces or internal understandings of what is possible?
Are the feminists in the academy softening their approach to avoid offending colleagues and students? Does women's history still matter for current historians?
How far back is it necessary/appropriate to look for the roots of gender issues in history? Can we look at medieval issues as they inform later history without looking at their pre-medieval roots?
Does it matter that general historical textbooks written by women on topics related to women get library-catalogued in an entirely different section than "regular history"?
Why are "lesbian-like" woman-woman interactions still studied and analyzed through a heteronormative lens and in the context of male models. Is "lesbian-like" a shock-value term to push people into thinking about women's live in ways that don't refer back to men? Or is it a valid conceptual framework for studying a set of roles and practices with useful similarities? Or is it simply a way of adding nuance between the categories "provable female same-sex sexual/affective relationships" and "assumed to be heterosexual (although perhaps celebate)"? Are there other ways of studying the spaces women create that have little or no relationship to male culture without bringing the suggestion of (sexual) lesbianism into it?
Why is any study of gender issues in history knee-jerk labeled "feminist history". But conversely, is a feminist and gender-aware approach to history a distinguishing feature for an academic that can be a career plus? Are students more resistant to feminist approaches t o history than the academy is? What does the average person-in-the-street think or know about women's history?
Has feminist history swung too far towards studying only "the ordinary woman" and glossing over women of the privileged elite as atypical and unrepresentative? What can a study of elite women say to the understanding of ordinary women's lives? Where do queens fit into the metaphor of the family as kingdom or the metaphor of the body politic? Where were the holes in the glass ceiling and how permeable were they for elite women? Were the elite women who acted with agency representative of the extremes of women's potential? Or were they examples of "honorary men"?
Will feminist historians lose their feminist edge if they study historic masculinity? Is the expansion of feminist history to the more general fields of gender studies a way of co-opting female energy back to the study of men? And how does this change when men focus on gender studies or masculinity studies?
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no subject
Date: 2008-05-09 03:12 pm (UTC)agreed....
Date: 2008-05-10 12:26 am (UTC)This book is definitely going onto my "to get" list.....
Hope you're feeling better!