The fantasy of feminist history

Joan Wallach Scott, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2011, vii plus 187 pp., $22.95, ISBN-13: 978-0822351252

“I’d rather be dead than misread,” confesses Joan Wallach Scott in the epilogue to the important essays gathered together in The Fantasy of Feminist History. Of course, as the essays themselves testify and as Scott well knows, the two rhyming signifiers of this culminating avowal are not exactly alternatives to one another. And if none of us can escape the first fate, feminist theorists and historians may be particularly bound to suffer the second. The epilogue – her final meditation on “A Feminist Theory Archive” – pertains at least in part to the archive of Scott’s own work, attesting to the personal and political stakes in the problem posed by the title of her collection. Fantasy serves as a powerful analytic category for feminist history; psychoanalytic methods of reading illuminate history and culture, helping to unhook the categories of sexual difference from certain recursive prevailing assumptions. But these fantasies also impinge on feminism’s own, and Scott also troubles any strictly evolutionary account of the enlightenment project of feminism as linked to full liberation or progress. Oriented around the category of fantasy, this collection of essays, thus, has a doubled force: it attends, on the one hand, to the transformative legacy of feminist academic labor in the waning decades of the twentieth century; on the other, The Fantasy of Feminist History confronts throughout the persistence of a darker aspect to fantasies of sexual difference circulating through and around feminism, including the reappearance of troubling versions of gender asymmetry that Scott has spent her entire career working to dismantle.

Scott’s groundbreaking blend of psychoanalytic theory and feminist historiography guided generations of scholars (myself included) in the ways and means of thinking historicism differently. She taught us to consider the interpenetration