Gender History in Practice: Historical Perspectives on Bodies, Class, and Citizenship Book

First of all: a confession. When I pulled this book from my shelf to prepare the review, there were no signs of its ever having been opened or read before. I bought it at the beginning of my first year as a PhD candidate, and I know what class it was for, but I can't recall that I actually did read it. Possibly it was on the original reading list, but cut because we ran out of time, or maybe we just discussed a single essay, which I wound up finding online and printing out separately, but it's more likely that as I got more and more panicked about all the work I had, I just skipped it and went to the seminar and kept quiet, so that no one would know I hadn't read it. So how can I write a review? Well, fortunately, the past few weeks included a trans-continental flight (and return trip), so I brought it along and read a goodly chunk of it on the plane. Turns out that it's too bad I missed it in grad school; it would have done me a lot of good.

Canning discusses gender history in a context I can understand (European history) and shares a lot of my critiques/concerns about other leading voices in the gender field, notably Joan Scott. In fact, reading Canning, I came to feel that I understood Scott better than I did any of the three or more times I read her. The essay that grappled with her concepts the most directly was "Feminist History after the Linguistic Turn," which confirmed my sense that Scott's "Evidence of Experience" "offers a masterful deconstruction of the concept of experience but stops short of actually redefining or rewriting it. So even if we might agree with her about what experience is not (transcendent, visceral), we are left unsure as to what it might be." That was the problem I had experienced (no pun intended) with that essay, but when I tried to articulate it (nowhere near as well as Canning), I was told that I "just didn't understand" Scott. Canning takes that deconstruction and runs with it, trying to find places where experience, which seems to be central to any understanding of history (for what is the past besides a collectivity of experienced moments) can actually be approached.

Canning tends to favor "the body," which is discussed in almost every essay to some degree, but most especially in "The Body as Method?" I have some problems with the post-modern emphasis on the body, which after all can be hard to find in documentary sources, but Canning definitely makes a strong case for its inclusion, and for the ways in which approaching history from this most directly material of subjects can change our understanding of the past, and help us to escape from hegemonic readings of discourse. Far from reifying biological dichotomies such as the gender binary, engagement with the body allows the historian to look at the actual practices which discourses claimed to explain and delimit. Again, it seems to me the challenge is actually finding this "body" in the world of the written text, but Canning gives some interesting examples of it from her own work in German labor history.

The other major essay of value to me in this volume is the opening 60-page discussion of gender history, a masterful historiographical essay that gives the lay of the land in women's and gender history throughout the late-twentieth century and establishes the problems it faced at the beginning of the twenty-first. This would have been a great introductory essay for me in feminist history, and I hope it will be for others who come after me. In all, the book is a very useful discussion of theory and its application to history, and can be of use to students and teachers alike.