From Feminism To Gender Theory

It has been several hundreds years since the gender theory came into being from the original feminist theory. Gender theory is the fruit of the development of feminist theory. Understanding the process of development of this theory is very significant for us to absorb these feminist theories critically and foster our research on gender history.Scott is one of the famous American historians and theorists. She introduced Foucault's theories about discourse, knowledge and power and Derrida's deconstruction method to feminist theories and formed her own unique gender theory.Scott thought the discrepancy between the high quality of recent work in women's and its continuing marginal status in the field as a whole pointed up the limits of descriptive approaches that did not address dominant disciplinary concepts, or at least that did not address these concepts in terms that could shake their power and transform them. The reasons hat led to this situation were that they lacked theories. So she wanted to develop gender theory to be a category to challenge the traditional history.Scott's definition of gender has two basic propositions: gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes; gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power. On these basis, gender involves four interrelated elements: first, culturally available symbols that invoke multiple and often contradictory representation, such as Eve and Mary were symbols of woman and they were also the symbols of dark and light, pollution and purification, corruption and innocence. Second, normative concepts that set forth interpretations of the meanings of the symbols, that attempt to limit and contain their metaphoric possibilities. Third, the gender relationship in social institutions and organizations must be analyzed. Fourth, the subjective identity of gender. Historians need instead to examine the ways in which gendered identities are substantively constructed and relate their findings to a range of activities, social organizations, and historically specific cultural representations.The relationship of sex and gender is one important aspect of gender theory. Different perspectives to the relationship produced different gender theories. Scott used poststructural method to deconstruct the essentialism perspectives about " sex" that people had. She thought "sex" and "gender" both were forms of knowledge. She thought we couldn't take the two concepts as opposition. If we did that, we would secure thenatural status of sex——prelinguistic and ahistorical status. In fact, sexand gender are the different perspectives about the sexual differences and they were constructed from a particular standpoint and they were not the transparent description or reflections of nature. In fact, sex became an effect of gender. Gender, the social rules that attempted to organize the relationships of men and women in societies, produced the knowledge we have of sex and gender. On the basis of her gender theory, Scott researched the relationships among discourse, experience and identity more deeply. She thought that although the dominant discourses in the society had a great influence on the formation of people's identity, they were not the passive receivers of these discourses. They could create their own unique experience about societies according their interest and desire so as to form their own identities.Scott is the key person who developed gender theory to be a useful category of historical analysis. The formation of her gender theory was to a sign of transition from women history to gender history in American. At the same time Scott was the pioneer who used the poststructuralism for feminist theories and this caused heat dispute. The result of this debate boosted the development of feminist. So if we take feminist history practice and the transition of feminist theories as the background of her thought, we can not only understand the process of her thought development, but, more important, we can understand the process of development of American women's history and the transition of feminist theories. This maybe can provide us with some useful thoughts for the direction of future feminist's history and feminist theory practice.