Joan W. Scott: Sexual difference as a signifier of difference itself


Scott, Joan W. “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis”. The American Historical Review, Vol. 91, No. 5. (Dec., 1986), pp. 1053-1075.

Scott's is a crucial reading to understand gender not only as the social organization of sexual difference, but as a primary way to articulate power relationships. Meanings around sexual difference, are always in flux and contested. Scott reviews the main ways that gender has been employed, and introduces a more complex reading of the category, beyond equating gender to women, and beyond both mere description or applying universal abstractions that leave no room for historical specificity and change. We must constantly ask how is sexual difference being invoked in every context, and what meanings and power relationships are at stake:

"Established as an objective set of references, concepts of gender structure perception and the concrete and symbolic organization of all social life. To the extent that these references establish distributions of power (differential control over or access to material and symbolic resources), gender becomes implicated in the conception and construction of power itself." p. 1069

Sexual difference becomes a ground of legitimation of power relations through the use of sets of binary oppositions. But moreover, sexual difference becomes the primary signifier of difference itself. Gendered and sexualized metaphors are used constantly to construct and critizice power relationships, being the ones of the nation as a heterosexual family just one —however, important— of them.

Scott laments that "[t]he connection between authoritarian regimes and the control of women has been noted but not thoroughly studied". p.1072

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