Conversations with History - Joan Wallach Scott

welcome to a conversation with history I'm Harry Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies our guest today is Joan Walla Scott who is professor in the school of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study her most recent book is the politics of the veil professor Scott welcome to Berkeley thank you where were you born and raised I was born in Brooklyn raised in Brooklyn and how do you think your parents shaped your thinking about the world oh they shaped it in many many ways my parents were both high school teachers my both history high school history teachers although I like to think that's not the reason I became a historian but it was definitely a family in which ideas mattered and in which politics matters they were both on the left in fact my father was a was fired in 1953 from his New York City school teacher position for refusing to cooperate with well it wasn't a McCarthy Committee but it was a McCarthy like investigating committee in New York City and and what was the conversation like around the dinner table a lot of organizing talking about organizing politics issues and the policies of politics and issues and also discussions about history how my mother continued to teach all of all of those years so stories about students about how they taught the civil war or various things in American history my mother would puzzle over why kids could understand some things and not other things so it was a the idea of teaching and the importance of teaching was very much present at the dinner in the dinner table conversations so it sounds like there was a lot of talk about methodology or you went on to university and any high school teachers that particularly influenced you or any setting before you went to college yeah there was a particularly one high school teacher who was actually a high school teacher of English and it was an Advanced Placement English course and I always think that he's the one who taught me how to read he taught me we use those old Brooks and Warren understanding poetry and understand literature books and he taught us how to read palms and had a read beneath the lines and literature and I think now I had to write something about these early years of my formation and I think now that I didn't know it then but that was when I sort of fell in love with language and ideas of literary representation and and what was his name his name was Saul Schleck one and then where did you do your undergraduate at Brandeis University and what what did Brandeis contribute to the shaping of your intellectual mind well the first year I was at Brandeis there was a the first year as apprentice as a freshman herbert markussi gave a lecture to the incoming freshman class that was called the nuisance value of an education and the idea was that you were supposed to do something with what you learned be critical the sort of politically engaged and I remember well I've never forgotten that I forgotten a lot else of what happened in those first weeks and then the next influence was a course taught by Frank Manuel which was the Western Civ course the the second half of the introduction to Western civilization and that is I think why I became a historian and I know from my own friends that I'm not the only one that that that happened to that Frank Manuel's course was one of these places where converts to history were made he mostly was interested in history of ideas and intellectual history and we read original texts and talked about them so and and what else did you get from Brandeis I mean was there something about the the atmosphere I mean we're we're sort of seeing where you come from very clearly but in terms of your family background but but did you get us an even greater sense of activism there or yeah it was nine I went to Brandeis I started in the fall of 1958 graduated in 1962 1960 was it ins in Greensboro North Carolina and Michael Walzer who is now my colleague the Institute but who had graduated several years before was I think did a tour to the to Greensboro North Carolina and to the South generally and came back and reported to us about what he'd seen and urged us all to pick it Woolworths and get engaged in all kinds of activities and so that was another of those influences but those were the years of real engagement in any case it was hard not to be engaged in student politics at brandeis in those years and and so we're talking about the civil rights movement and then but you had already graduated before the Vietnam War actually he'd yeah yeah Vietnam or for me was my years at the University of Wisconsin as a graduate student and I'm obviously the women's movement was very important for you and affecting your your consciousness talk let's talk a little about that I mean it was this were the Inklings of this you know during your years at Brandeis or was it really the 60s when you're at the University of Wisconsin it wasn't even at the University of Wisconsin I mean I I always say that there was an influence in my family because my father who was very secular as well as politically engaged would always tell us when we were quite young that the Bible was a book not to be trusted because it was said that God had created woman out of man's rib and that there was a inherent inferiority assumed in that that you had to be suspicious of and we were certainly raised my mother worked the whole time that I was growing up we were certainly raised to believe that there was no difference in what men and women could do or should be expected to do and many of my parents friends were also teachers women and men and so there was not they were in full set for us as kids but no when I was at Brandeis it was other kinds of politics anti-nuclear politics civil rights stuff at Wisconsin it was civil rights first and 64 was the freedom summer and then Vietnam and it really wasn't until I was teaching at the first job I had teaching at the University of Illinois at Chicago so that was 1970 and there were friends who were organizing courses in women's history because that was the really the beginning and I was part of a group of women faculty we found it a daycare center we founded a women's studies course which then became a program and it was there and in those conversations and those discussions that I began to be interested in the feminist movement and in women's history and it was actually when I went to teach at Northwestern two years later that when the chairman of the department asked me if I would like to teach I was the only woman in the department asked me if I would like to teach the course in women's history I said yes because I was interested and the students were the ones the students in those years would come into the classes demanding inspiration demanding stories about women in the past and it was there and a number of us I think went through that because there were groups informal groups of women historians who would share course syllabi with each other recommended reading you know what are you using because none of us had any idea of what we none of us were trained in in women's history and so we invented these courses and sent us and sent each other wasn't even Xerox it was that purple stuff whatever was you know that carbon no it wasn't karma it was me it was a mimeograph yeah for a minute even there was some other cheaper version of me yeah we would send this stuff in the mail and it was like I always said it was like samizdat literature you know you'd send each other this stuff and that was how I really became a women's historian as I had to teach the course I had to teach myself something of a history in order to be able to teach the course and then I began to be really interested in some of the problems that were raised about women's history particularly because I was a labor historian to begin with yeah let's talk about that and then way back woman's yeah so in Wisconsin your focus was on labor history well I came into Wisconsin knowing well I came into Wisconsin and Wisconsin in those years was teeming with graduate students it was 1960 fall of 1962 and the chairman of the department who was named Merrill Denson was known for preferring not to have women in graduate seminars thinking that it would destroy the camaraderie of the men in this era and when you came to graduate school at Wisconsin you met with the chair and you were then assigned a seminar for life and I came in and he said to me what language do you have what do you what history do you want to do I mean these days I don't know if you know this but these days you get interviewed by students wanting to come to graduate school they want to know they call you up they come and interview you they want to know what you require what your qualifications are and so on and so forth then you went I think I was notified that I was accepted with a postcard with my acceptance number on it in the mail and you came in in the chair of the department assigned you at Wisconsin to a seminar and so he said what language do you have and I said French because I had that from Hisle junior high actually and he said okay French history seminar and that's how I became a French historian well I was in the seminar first of somebody who retired very quickly and then in the seminar of somebody named Harvey Goldberg who was a labor historian a social historian of socialism and I was in his seminar but in his seminar you had to write a biography of a famous socialist which I quickly was bored with and didn't want to do he was on leave and a couple of professors formed a social history seminar it was the beginning of the movement for social history in the field of history and we read EB Thompson's making the English working class and a number of other books which inspired not only me but a whole generation of people to become social historians and I was particularly interested in labor history and so I did my dissertation on glass workers in the South of France in a town in the South of France now talking about the development of the feminist movement it sounds like you're saying that that really this because I want to explode the way ideas change and in the face of both social and political movements so what what you're you really I think you just said was that as you saw the need for this new curriculum and you participated in the making of it that that the the pressures came from the bottom up yeah absolutely and so it was just part of the those times when authority across the board was was being questioned the war in Vietnam and that's right and those of us who were sort of I think some of us were predisposed by our own backgrounds and family experiences to be to be interested in politics and to participate in politics I think that provided the opportunity to in fact explore these questions further and to bring together when I was an undergraduate at Brandeis I did my politics and I did my history even though there were people who were interested in both but I never thought of them as being part of the same project doing women's history is when I began to realize that there could be a relationship between the academic work I did and what I thought of was not it's short term I mean I wasn't doing policy work but in terms of changing ideas in terms of challenging prevailing ways of thinking about things that I could do that as a scholar and think of it as having some inherent political effect as well now I want to ask you what it is you think it takes to be a historian what are the skills involved because you're really what you've just described as you're navigating two worlds and I have no doubt that in the beginning doing serious feminist studies was considered irresponsible that's in quotes yeah so so so let let's stop a minute so what what when one looks at your work you get the sense that a lot is going on I mean it's it's not just history it's social theory and so I'll talk a little about that what do students need to do the kind of work you were doing I think students need some kind of theoretical background I think I got a theoretical background at Brandeis not only mark ooza but there were a whole bunch of social theorists not all of the Marxists like mark ooza cousre Kozar there were more yeah everything how was still there yeah but in any case that there were there were social theorists who were also vibe Aryans who were darkanian's who were Marxist and I think an exposure to the kind of analytic thinking that theory allows you to do is really important otherwise what you do as a historian is just describe things that happened and you're not very self conscious about what it is that's going on below the surface or what it is that's forming the movements or political events that that you're wanting to study so one thing I think is is some kind of theoretical grounding and for me this is the jumps ahead in the story but for me it was particularly post structuralism and someone like reading Michel Foucault who changed the theoretical orientation I started with and allowed me to think differently about doing history and particularly about actually about doing women's history and gender history at a point where I just couldn't figure my way out of women as a kind of supplement to the main story and what was what go into the particulars there and what way did he affect you well it could be a long academic job one of the things that Foucault writes about or calls your attention to is the fact that the questions you have in the present are not innocent or objective questions they're questions that are related to the time you live in to the political justifications or challenges to the politics of the time you live in so for example two women's history would mean not just to say what did women do in the past but to say what is what what is it now that lets us think about gender the relations between men and women in the ways we do as a natural category did people always think that the differences were entirely natural what's the difference between thinking about gender as God's product or nature's product is there any difference what's the difference if you say they've always been changes in the categories even of men and women over time and we need to know what those are because not only will it help us understand the past but it'll make us realize that things can be changed in the in the present that things aren't always don't always have to be the way they always seem to have been it sounds like it takes courage to move in this realm on the one hand but then it can be a real source of creativity well it is I mean I think I think there was some dimension of me that was always a little bit rebellious some people would say more but so that I was looking to challenge things in some way or another I was never quite satisfied with the way I learned the things I learned and part of that was unlike these days it seems to me that the 1950s and 60s for all that we say the 50s was an era of conformity one of the things that Brandeis they you learned was that the best essay exams you could write were ones that challenged the premises of the question if you got an essay exam and said you know the civil war was caused by slavery if you just said yes and wrote the answer that was not good enough if you said the premise that the civil war was caused by slavery ignores questions of economics politics the interests of the economic interests of the states and so on and so forth you got you could get an A and so I think that the teaching that we got and I don't I'm not sure how conscious everybody was about this teaching but was to think critically and always to call into question the presuppositions of any thing that you were being offered so I learned that and I think I learned that well in in in college and again it was true in graduate school as well so when I read Foucault it was like another version of the critical challenge it was okay he's saying that you don't have to think of history as a continuous linear development you can ask where the brakes are and why they happen and even if the words used are the same women man reason passion they mean different things at different times what is it that brings those different meanings into effect and then you get a whole different take a much more excitement for me a much more exciting take on history and on what you can do then with knowledge of the past now you took this to another step and you wrote a classic article in in in called gender a useful category of historical analysis which appeared in American historical review tell us about that and how was that the next step and and how you think it affected other scholars who were interested in this subject well I wrote that in 1985 I was published in 86 but in 85 and I had just gone to teach at Brown University and Brown University then and now is a quirky the best parts of Brown University are its refusal to be like everybody else students faculty and in fact the more Brown becomes like everybody else the sadder I become about it's it's but it's a sort of place where this is just a little digression but a couple of weeks ago I read an article by somebody and I thought this is really interesting really critical really good and I look to my google him and sure enough he had been a brown undergraduate and I thought it's like the trademark or something then gets stamped on a certain kind of student in any case I had gone to brown I had been at the University of North Carolina to brown and went as a professor of history and women's studies and the people in women's studies were many of them in literature very much influenced by psychoanalysis and post structuralism things I had had no exposure to it all and I began to read with them and there was a small reading group we had and and so I read Foucault Derrida you know lots of things I had never read before and everyone was talking about or lots of people were talking about gender a wonderful phenomenon among historians the berkshire conference on women's history the berkshire Conference of women historians had organized starting in the 70s conferences where people came and presented papers and early versions of a book I did in women's history with Louisa Tilly of women work and family were presented at those berkshire conferences so there was tremendous amount of talk and excitement and discussion in the air i came to brown trying to figure out how to think about gender women and men in history in ways that I couldn't think my way through I mean I was I the the Marxist analyses didn't work for me other kinds of analyses didn't work for me or didn't completely work and then I came upon this post structuralist stuff particularly Foucault and I thought well this could do it and I had to I was invited to give a paper at the age American Historical Association meetings and a panel on gender and I thought okay and so in the kind of heat of discovery of excitement of wanting to touch every base I wrote this paper I think of as I think about or remember writing it it was a kind of intellectual frenzy of a sort of wonderful kind I wasn't angry at anybody because when you write things in anger it's it's not as pleasurable this was just like I could go anywhere with this I would see what I could do with it and so I did and it did become a kind of classic article in the most recent issue of the American historical review there was a forum 20-plus years later on the writing of that article which people talked about its impact and its influence and the most amazing thing to me was the discovery that of all the articles published in the ahr since it's been available online or since J's whatever it is since the 1990s it is the most frequently consulted and cited of any and I was really taken aback i mean i did not think of it as having that broad a a field of influence and and what what was the impact do you think in an open the eyes of a whole new generation no i think their eyes were already open i think it focused the questions in in my reply to that forum i say you know i didn't invent this I was there participating in it and what I did was articulate a set of questions that we were all grappling with and I just had the luck or you know I articulated it in a way that took and that people then used and could refer to but I think of it as a kind of culmination rather than a beginning of a particular set of movements in the field of women's history so it's addressing because I think that background really helps us understand this book your new book which is called the politics of the veil and so so what I think the premise you're starting with and where we've come to is is really that history has an important role to play in contemporary political discourse but but it's a particular kind of history that has evolved in in the last 20 years now you talked a little about that before we talked about categories in this case yeah I think I would call it critical history it's and Foucault actually calls it the history of the present which means that you take up contemporary issues but not political issues in this small and meat not not the stimulus package but the language used to think the problems of the moment you know the market might be one of them right now and whether or not there's such a thing as a free market but what's the sort of history of the idea of the market are we in a period in which Adam Smith's ideas are simply being reapplied or is something entirely different going on which is is using those ideas but for a very different set of issues so it's it's a history that's sensitive to the conceptual categories with which people think that then critically looks at them and tries to disturb the power that they have in in actually in this book if we want to take an example from the veil book it's the French idea of universalism that I was interested in and that first got me interested in the question of the veil in France the notion that everybody's individuals all individuals are equal that to recognize difference is to acknowledge cracks in the in the building of a unified nation and of a universal set of principles that are equally applied to everybody I thought there was something wrong with that notion when you looked at any number of issues in French society but the one of the moment was the treatment of Muslim immigrants some of whom are not immigrants at all who've been there for generations but the treatment of Muslims and particularly girls and headscarves in public schools so instead of writing a book in which I said okay here's the story I said what is it that allows the French to think about Muslims as and and the wearing of a headscarf as an unacceptable form of behavior and why headscarves why women why not go after Imams you know why not not that they don't discriminate against North Africans who are Muslims North Africans and Africans who are Muslims but it's what is it that allowed this to become the symbol of what was wrong with Muslims in French society so in picking up this problem and I guess very briefly I'm gonna walk you through this but the the the issue here was young women wearing scarfs veil not veiled just just job yeah just the scarf to school and creating such a stir in France then it led to a banning of that practice now interestingly enough you've actually started your analysis on the way you think and and what you're so as a historian doing critical history you you you say well and following Foucault what are let's go back and look at the founding principle there so so that that is one thing and you just helped us understand that so so what does it mean and what what is the French Revolution meant in the way France has has seen itself now the other the other thing that's going on here very clearly because you have a chapter on on women you have a chapter on individualism on secularism is is its you you delving into history but you're looking at another a number of issues that somehow have flowed through time been resolved in a certain way under this umbrella of theory and and you have to look at those other issues before you can confront is that a fair assessment of what you're doing yeah yeah I mean I wouldn't say that that they continue through time in the same way right yeah but that there are a set of concepts that certainly were I play in this controversy about heads cross I just have to say that it wasn't that these girls caused problems in school with their head scars they were probably at most a couple of thousand girls out of a population of Muslims of maybe six million so we're not talking about a huge threat suddenly inundating the class we're talking about a heightened consciousness of the presence of Muslims particularly after September 11th I mean there's no there in in 1989 at the bicentennial of the French Revolution was the first explosion of this and a principal in a junior high decided that he wasn't going to tolerate girls and head scarves anymore that they had been coming to school with head scarves boys were coming to school Jewish boys with yarmulkes Sikhs were coming with their turbans nobody was bothered if they were bothered about this it was not an issue in 1989 this guy says I'm not taking you're not going to be in school anymore you we're not having the muslim jihad is not going to be allowed into french classrooms it quiets down there are negotiations and all things happen 1994 it erupts again 2003 again and in the book each time I show what's happening politically particularly with the far-right in France who's raising the immigration issue and pushing a large population of large an increasingly large and different in a way that earlier populations have not been France has long been a country of immigration but the requirement was that you assimilated to the the country so if you came from Portugal or Italy or Spain or you learn the language you behave like everybody else you looked like everybody else there's two problems with them with Muslims one is they're darker or they're three maybe one is the third darker two is that they're coming from former colonies so that their relationships socially to the dominantly the the Metropole to the dominant population in France is as people who have been defined in a certain way as inferior for years and years at hundred 1830 is when the French conquer Algeria for the first time so you have a long history which associates these people with inferiority mm-hm and the third thing is that they are insisting on practicing their religion in a public way where as part of the assimilation process in France is that religion is a private matter and if you do it privately at home there's no problem it's fine but if you're if you demonstrate your religiosity by wearing a headscarf by praying five times a day by in school refusing to eat certain foods that are offered in the cafeteria then you're breaking the rules and trying to introduce what ought to be private into the sphere of the public so what you're saying is that there was something about this issue that attracted you because it seemed to be pushing so many buttons and if you didn't go back and unravel what you know the source of these buttons then it was kind of weird that suddenly they were focusing on young girls as opposed to the young Jewish lad in a yarmulke or the right it just seemed to me to be out of proportion that the and it was hysteria the hysteria about these headscarfs the speeches people who are making the articles you would read in the newspapers the ultimate destruction of everything that was predicted if girls were allowed to keep coming to school in headscarf was so out of proportion to the phenomenon itself which was a couple of thousand girls and most in a few suburban areas outside of the major cities and particularly outside of Paris yeah it raised its own question like why is this happening what is it about the society that is causing this to become the kind of focus of political debate and there are two intriguing elements to the story before we get back to the big picture one is I believe you said that the the school teacher or the principal who was evolved over time went into politics basically well there were two things he was black it was from the Antilles yeah but thought of himself as French the Antilles are one of the overseas departments of France and too he was preparing a career in politics and the on the sort of ending in the Gollust side which is this right center of political and and to do that you essentially had to be seemed to be responsive to the these right-wing concerns on the anti-immigrant now and then the the girls involved were were as I recall from the book that they were the children of Judah and had converted no knows one no not in that one know that the first in 1989 these were there were two girls from Morocco I think and one from Tunis okay but later what was it was a rebellious young woman in 2003 yeah at the time just before the law or I think it's 2003 just before the law passes or maybe when the law passed but right in that no it's before the law right in that moment there are these two girls who were but they weren't there were many many more girls who were Muslims and not converts at all these girls were daughters of a Berber mother and a Jewish father so they were legally at least according to one set of principles they were more they were more Muslim or the mother was a Christian though she was a Berber Christian so they were they were not technically Jewish although their last name levy was and so that immediately when I saw that I thought levy I knew but in any case the the these girls had converted much to the distress of their parents who were leftists both of them and they knew the five pillars of Islam and they prayed and they you know wanted to do everything and but it's clearly was rebellion that was that was going on and it was one of the moments I think that I thought and I wasn't the only one who said this there were a number of French sociologists who said this you know if this had been the 1970s these girls would have been Maoists and now we're in the in the in the 2000 the 21st century and what is available as a kind of radical departure from materialism Western imperialism global economic transformations it is for of them Islam and for good reason for serious reasons not frivolous ones but it is a language of protest as as much as it is or in in the same way that it is also a language of religion I mean I don't want to say that it's not about religion yeah but it is the available language of a kind of radical stand that you can take and and it's about as Olivier Weil and others have pointed out it's really about a youthful response to the issues raised by globalization and and kind of the the statement of an identity that's eclectic and makes the young person part of a larger community yeah absolutely and and of an international one not just a national one even if the kids themselves are not political in in the scary ways that those who want to outlaw the the headscarf or ban immigration and from these countries altogether say it is I mean I don't think it's about terrorism it's about a kind of identification mm-hmm that is a way of thinking yourself out of a situation of great discrimination in which a lot of these kids live in France or for that matter if they're Turks in Germany or in the Netherlands or anywhere else you're talking about minority often very poor populations unlike in the United States where so much of the Muslim immigration is middle-class and professional in these countries you're talking about a kind of lower class of people who are just on top of being economically disadvantaged discriminated against on the basis of what I would call race in the end but in a way you're bringing light to to a a public perception of what's going on and I want you to characterize that perception because you're saying that this notion that that that or this perspective that drives the the powers-that-be is a is a very ease is lack subtlety it's it's really a blind way of approaching Muslim communities both within and without and it seems to have similarities not to the way we treat Muslims in the United States but the way our foreign policy yes you know about that because there is a there is a sense that well we're modern their fundamentals this Islam comes in one package can't disaggregate it and so on well yeah I mean that was one of the things in fact that struck me in in this campaign but in all of these camp has the the other night I gave a lecture in in to a group of to a World Affairs Council actually in California and the message I was trying to deliver was in fact that well one of them was that you can't think of the west and Islam or in this case of the the book I was writing France and Islam those categories when you start thinking that way hide the enormous diversities of social religious practical name it on both sides I mean one of the ways in which I think that the issue of Islam and the West has been used politically recently is to cover over in the West all of the problems of gender equality or of gender inequality that are now being attributed to Islam so if we can say well one of our objections to them is that women are unequal and wearing a headscarf is a sign of their inequality even if the women will say to you know I'm wearing this headscarf because it's my way of deferring to God just like a Jewish man will wear a yarmulke and say he's deferring to God I'm wearing this to differ it has nothing to do with my father it has nothing to do with my brothers anybody I'm not saying that all of them are do it for these reasons but but instead of being able to sort of see that the headscarf is the sign of inequality we who don't wear a headscarf are living in an egalitarian society and that makes it possible then to overlook all of the inequalities that persist in Western societies if you look at the numbers of women in the elected parliament some of the West you know it's 15 16 maybe 18 percent that's it how do you explain if women are totally equal how do you explain unequal access or unequal wages or all the sorts of things that in fact feminists have typically been concerned about and and politically active about but once you introduce this it's la us versus them then all of those issues of inequality pale and as feminists we become interested in taken liberating them from their headscarves and we forget about the kinds of problems that that we face so this is about power and the way words and symbols become an instrument of powerful to to essentially deal with the situation by the way not dealing with yeah I mean yeah yeah I mean it is exactly what you said it's the way in which language structures relations of power so you don't even get to see them in the way in which they're actually operating you know at the moment of the the war in the beginning of the war in Afghanistan Laura Bush was talking everywhere about how we were freeing these women from the oppression that they had suffered even as her president's administration was trying to take away the right to abortion was being supported by Christian fundamentalists who believed that women's role was to stay at home and have children and take care of their children and there was no realization on the part of many people who bought that line that these were people who at home were interested in oppressing women in certain ways while liberating them in in Afghanistan and in the fridge case you you're you you're your background as a as a scholar and a theoretician of women's issues sort of enables you some important things about the French ambivalence about sexuality having nothing to do with these young girls who are Muslim but really that that there we go back to political theory and the French theory that says we're all equal by not being different then it doesn't address the problem of sexuality where there are differences yeah yeah of sexual difference we're yeah we're there well where the difference is thought to be natural and therefore inescapable but in some ways I think of that as as the hardest part of the book and and and also the one where I something up that hadn't been quite talked about in the same way before but you you have it exactly right that is that if in order to be equal you have to be the same mm-hmm and you get to be the same by being abstracted from your social characteristics religion ethnicity class occupation whatever it is then that's fine as a way of thinking about formal political rights we're all individuals were all equal but if at the same time there's one set of characteristics that cannot be abstracted which is sex and those are thought to be naturally different and therefore inescapable then French political theory always has a difficult time with equality on the one hand in sexual difference on the other hand and so you have a history in which liberty equality and fraternity are declared in the French Revolution in 1789 and it takes till 1944 for women to get the vote that was a shocker and then it takes till 2000 for a law to pass that says women have to have equal access to elective office in France for the years from 44 when women first get to vote until 2000 there's about five percent women are about five percent of the National Assembly and less than that of the Senate in so you know the question then is what what do you mean by equality yes we have the right to vote but what does it mean to and so what I argue is that where you have this tension between natural difference or naturalized so-called natural difference on the one hand and abstract individualism which is the basis for equality on the other you have a tremendous tension which the French address I think by talking about sexiness and sexual seduction and flirtatiousness between men and women as a national character trait and they were in fact a series of books written in the around the time of the of the Bicentennial which talked about this it was won by a historian called Mona Asif which was called la mode a femme words of women si sir that singularity law says an essay on French singularity and what was French singularity but this aristocratic remnant of flirtatiousness and sexual play and the public display of what women men women and so on and what I argue in there is that that Muslims are doing exactly the opposite that as Muslims are saying by the modest clothing that is worn there's no sexual play between men and women in public and in political realms causes trouble and to avoid that trouble we are going to separate the sexes we are going to wear clothing which underestimates and doesn't emphasize sexuality and sexual attractiveness and there's a clash there between two styles of thinking about how to represent the relations between the sexes that I think fed into the French anxiety about Islam but also the reason what it was one of the reasons that the headscarf and women and women's dress became a hot political issue and and you know when when you put all this together you're saying at the end of the book that what we get is a series of policy responses that don't really address the issue the issues they don't it doesn't tell us what's really at work here and it doesn't look at you know the broader problem now ironically you you identify that the one of the greatest challenges of a world of nationalization globalization is negotiating difference and and so in the end following this this logic that occurs within the French system and I'm sure their counterparts you know on other issues in the United States what you you wind up doing is coming up with a way of responding that doesn't address the central problem which is people have differences people belong to groups and we have to find a way in a democracy of they're working together both within a country and globally and working together without the difference being thought of as invidious you know without the difference being higher are being turned into a hierarchy without the difference being a difference of power but just acknowledging that difference is in fact the human condition I cite a French philosopher at the end of the book named jean-luc Dulcy who says instead of thinking about having a common being that is all of us being somehow the same we need to think of having being in common and being in common understands being as a state of difference individuals are different from one another groups are different from one another difference is the human condition and if you could think in those terms its utopian I know but if you could think in those terms then you would be in a situation in which DIF couldn't be used to structure relations of power other things probably would be but these kinds of differences wouldn't now-now you you you have taken us on a journey in this book where you you really unearth the where this issue came from and and you you put it in a context and so so the question becomes how does this analysis come to matter in other words does it does it feed back in the in the discourse I mean when we're talking about the woman's movement it's very clear how it it did some change but not as much change as was really necessary do you see this kind of historical work apply to policy debates affecting the discourse a you know in in real time well probably yes and no I mean I think it would be foolish to think that any single book or any intervention in a set of conversations could check could work change may be there are maybe we could think of books that blew up a way of thinking about things but I you know I think you only actually do that in retrospect I mean I think you could say Simone de Beauvoir as the second sex became a kind of crucial text looking back on it 20 or 30 years later when a women's movement came into existence and cited it so I think there there there's the the the theoretical thinking and critical thinking does not have an immediate policy impact but what you hope to do with or what I hope to do with this kind of work is to get enough people thinking differently about the questions to kind of shake the firmness of the ground on which some of these opinions stand so that for example the other day when I was talking to this group of at the world affairs council and people said to me yes but you know we know that in Muslims this in this in Muslim societies this is the view of women and I could say in that situation well that's not really true it's much more complicated than that and here are the reasons and here that it and make the take an example that from something that was familiar to them and say but you know here here are girls saying they made a choice to be modest before God let's say we're to respect God I think you you introduce doubt about the certainty of the the predominant ideas or the ones that are sort of held and if you can do that you begin to make a difference in the general way people think and then maybe ultimately in the policy things I mean something like gay marriage is an example a couple of you know twenty years ago or at the time of the making of the film milk to come up to you know recent Hollywood stuff that the idea that that married that that the star of the movie a straight actor would get up and accept the Academy Award by saying that Proposition eight shouldn't have been passed and that will come to a day when in fact Harvey Milk's dream would be realized even beyond his wildest doubts would have been unthinkable thirty years ago so what's happened over the course of those years that has in the American public at large created a much greater acceptance of the notion that there are people who are gay and that that's fine and that maybe even there are gay people who can marry I mean what is it that you could account for what does seem to me a fundamental change despite the persistence of right-wing opposition despite the Pope's resistance to or condemnation of all of these kinds of things the fact is if you look at these public opinion polls most people either don't care or are positively inclined to these kinds of transformations so how do you account for it well there have been social movements they've been individual experiences they've been books have been written every mood you know there's a whole set of voices that have come into a conversation of which historians philosophers theorists are one small part and I think that's the way social change happens and it's it's as a participant in an ongoing critical conversation that some people will latch on to and disseminate in some ways that I think that I imagine my own the work that my own writing does one final question and let me see if I can formulate a question because this it strikes me that what we're talking about is the relationship of power to ideas and ideas emerge from a changing consciousness and that we seem to go through a period when the politics seems to be one in which those with the fewest ideas seem to maximize power by sort of closing off our insight into the complexity of the issue but that over time you know ideas can make a difference as you just suggested yeah and it depends on the circumstances I mean you know I think if we were to do this history I was just talking about there would be moments at which for what we some people might say we're economic reasons or some for various kinds of social reasons the structure of families the prevalence of divorce the numbers of broken and recombine you know on it we could we could do reproductive technology I mean there would be lots of smaller histories that we would need to get at to untangle this these sets of historical developments so I think the ideas are tremendously important and the ideas give voice or conceptualization to the processes that are that are going on but it's the kind of contingent mixtures of these things that ultimately make the difference and create the change well professor Scott I want to thank you for taking the time to come to the campus and to be on our program let me show your book again the politics of the veil I always like to say that there's a limit to how much justice you can do to look like this in such a short time but but hopefully our audience will go out and buy it in I want to thank you very much for joining us - thank you very much and thank you very much for joining us for this conversation with history

Channel: UC Berkeley Events

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Length: 56min 47sec (3407 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 09 2009