Quote:
Originally Posted by henry quirk
V,
(1) As you are an academic, I thought you'd appreciate 'fact' over 'feeling'.
I offer 'fact' and you weigh in with 'feeling'.
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Well, as a historian, 'facts' are very much a starting point. The real work lies in interpretation. And 'facts' as they are presented can be tricky beasts indeed, particularly when we are dealing with individual experience and identity.
I can see how my responding with 'feelings' might confuse you. But, my particular fields of interest/expertise, are very much concerned with experience and identity.
I have two main areas of interest which crossover with each other at various points. The first, and central to my research is the soldier experience during the long eighteenth century, and particularly during the Napoleonic era. How they identified themselves and were identified by others is a fairly fundamental part of that.
The second area of interest and the area I usually teach, is gender in the same period. How was it constructed, applied, accepted, performed, or rejected? How and why did gender constructions change? How was gender used culturally? for example the masculinity of British national identity, versus the femininity which the British ascribed to their 'natural and necessary enemy' the French; the gendering of the 'other' in the context of imperialism and exploration, the use of gender to codify and understand alternate cultures (the taxonomic studies of the female form in different races - with each racial type ranked according to the size, shape, pertness of the breasts, and the degree to which each culture conformed to 'proper' gender roles (e.g the separate spheres of male and female lives); scientific understandings of gender and the medicalisation of the female within that
The ways in which masculinity was constructed and applied, and how that changed. The ways in which femininity was constructed and applied and how that changed. The way individuals experienced and performed gender, and how they self-identified (did the middling orders of 18th century Britain conform, for example, to the 'separate spheres' model which permeates popular culture, advice books, scientific and philosophical tracts? ). The ways in which gender constructions loosened and tightened according to the needs and insecurities of the time. How new ways of approaching the natural world (including humans) altered the ways in which men and women thought of themselves and each other.
I really, really don't see gender in the same way you do, henry.