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In a Seminal Paper, the historian Joan Scott (1992) distinguished between two theoretical strategies that historians have utilized to bring marginalized voices into mainstream theory. The first, what I call the “conventional strategy,” assimilates previously silenced voices without questioning the basic foundations of historical theory. The inclusion of narrative accounts of women, gay men and lesbians, transsexual individuals, and people from “minority” groups into the record challenges historians’ability to maintain that there is one superior way of being human and that everything else is an aberration. A space for an intersubjectivity truly respectful of differences is opened.
Despite the fact that the conventional method leaves essentialist categories intact, its importance cannot be overemphasized. It has exposed the lies underlying hegemonic constructions, such as those that hold that white men are superior, that selves are coherent and unitary, that heterosexuality is the benchmark of “healthy” development, or that “femininity” and “masculinity” exist in nature.
In psychoanalysis, the pathbreaking work of Richard Isay (1989) serves as an illustration of the conventional strategy in the way that it broadens our view of what constitutes a healthy developmental trajectory, thereby granting gay men a legitimacy previously denied them by the psychoanalytic establishment. Yet, because Isay stays within the categories underlying psychoanalytic theory (e.g., man-woman, gay-straight), he unwittingly reproduces them. Questions about the historicity of naturalized categories such as heterosexual and homosexual, and about the ways