Strange Bedfellows: feminist theory and historical research
Location: AgC134.1 (lower floor).
Programme:
Friday (9 October):
15.00 Welcome to the session
15.05–15.30 Maija Ojala (University of Tampere, Finland): “Gendering Women’s Work”
15.30–15.55 Aylin Atilla (Ege University, Turkey): “Romance as Gendered History: George Eliot’s Feminist Discourse in Romola”
15.55–16.20 Veera Rautavuoma (University of Jyväskylä, Finland): “The Transparent Gender of State-Socialism: Reading for Otherness”
16.20–16.45 Discussion
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Approved participants in alphaphetical order
Atilla, Aylin: Romance as Gendered History: George Eliot’s Feminist Discourse in Romola
Gender is a problem that has to be negotiated for the British author Mary Anne Evans who insisted that her readers call her “George”. It may seem strange to discuss Eliot’s work in terms of romance instead of realism, because she defines romance as a silly female desire for uncultured knowledge, as she tells us in her essay, “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists”. However, this paper will argue that romance involves not simply a reflection but a rethinking of gender for Eliot. Although, Diana Elam, in Romancing the Postmodern, writes that romance has become “the woman of the world of genres . . . helpmate of serious historical inquiry”, I want to argue that romance should not be understood as built upon the foundations of an assumed gendering. Joan Wallach Scott, in Gender and the Politics of History, has already stated that women’s history does not have a definable historiographic tradition within which “interpretations can be debated and revised . . . instead, the subject of woman has been either grafted on to other traditions or studied in isolation from them”. Apparently, feminist theory has to formulate new strategies for the gendered nature of history. In this paper, while rereading Romola (1863)--set in late-15th-century Florence-- which is Eliot’s thoroughly researched reconstruction of a past period, I will try to bring together feminist analysis of genre, culture and history. My central argument is that Eliot displaces received meanings by rereading history through the agency of gender through romance which offers a way of revaluing the complex and contradictory aspects of female discourse.
Ojala, Maija: Gendering women’s work
In the past decades the term gender and its connotations have changed. In this paper I will discuss if the interpretations of (gender) history have changed in the same relation. My focus will be in studies dealing with women and work in medieval and early modern times. Has the paradigm change from the history of women to the history of gender affected the interpretations of the history? Secondly I will ask do modern gender theories fit to the medieval and early modern times, since the term itself is a present-day innovation. How was gender perceived five hundred years ago? We must also notice that most of the medieval written historical evidences, which are used as sources, are written by men. Yet the majority of gender history studies are written by women. This may be one sore point in the relationship between feminist theory and historical research but it could also be prevailed by acknowledging your own starting point of view and presuppositions. In this paper I will illustrate how gender was constructed in the craftsmen’s organizations in late medieval Tallinn. It seems that specific rhetoric and lingual expressions were used in the craft ordinances to indicate gender relationships. These ordinances regulated both work and social life of the craftspeople.
Rautavuoma, Veera: The Transparent Gender of State Socialism: Reading for Otherness
Ideally, in socialism, gender is a non-existing issue and irrelevant category. As agents among the collective, the proletariat, all workers are created equal, regardless of their sex or ethnicity and, consequently, gender does not need to be problematized. Against this backdrop, it is interesting to look at the construction of gender in museum exhibitions: are men and women represented as equal agents in the construction of socialism? If women and the feminine become, literally, the frontiers by which space and knowledge are defined, as Gaby Porter argues, how is this tendency reflected in this (seemingly) egalitarian frame? The objective of my paper is two-fold: firstly, to examine gender relations in the so-called ‘liberation exhibitions’ in socialist Hungary, and secondly, ponder over the gendered positions in historical Museum Studies. Studying commemorative political exhibitions of a past regime entails re-creating a dynamic complex of material, textual, symbolic and imaginary dimensions. How can I read ‘as a woman’ to tackle the authority of physically evident objects and map out the knowledge embodied in temporary exhibitions long gone?
Last update 5.10.2009.
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