Joan Scott ist international für ihre Schriften bekannt, die Gender als analytische Kategorie theoretisieren, und gilt als führende Figur in der kritischen Geschichtsschreibung. Ihre bahnbrechende Arbeit hat die Grundlagen der konventionellen historischen Praxis in Frage gestellt und wesentlich zur Transformation der intellektuellen Geschichtsschreibung beigetragen. Scotts neuere Werke konzentrieren sich auf Gender und demokratische Politik und bieten Lesern tiefgreifende Einblicke in zeitgenössische gesellschaftliche und politische Fragen.
Joan Wallach Scott critically examines the belief that history will redeem us, revealing the implicit politics of appeals to the judgment of history. She argues that the notion of a linear, ever-improving direction of history hides the persistence of power structures and hinders the pursuit of alternative futures.
A self-critical intellectual autobiography, the nine essays in Gender in the Politics of History are a tour de force-they reveal historical imagination relentlessly moving forward...
Joan Wallach Scott, a historian who helped to shape the fields of gender and womens history, argues for the usefulness of psychoanalytic concepts, particularly fantasy, for feminist historical analysis.
In this book Joan Wallach Scott discusses the role history has played as an arbiter of right and wrong and of those who claim to act in its name―"in the name of history." Scott investigates three different instances in which repudiation of the past was conceived as a way to a better the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1946, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1996, and the ongoing movement for reparations for slavery in the United States. Scott shows how in these cases history was not only used to explain the past but to produce a particular future. Yet both past and future were subject to the political realities of their time and defined in terms of moral absolutes, often leading to deep contradictions. These three instances demonstrate that history is not an impartial truth, rather its very meaning is constructed by those who act in its name.