Passion for History: Conversations With Denis Crouzet by Natalie Zemon Davis & Denis Crouzet

Author:Natalie Zemon Davis & Denis Crouzet [Davis, Natalie Zemon & Crouzet, Denis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historiography, Judaism, General, History/Non-Fiction, History, World, Religion
ISBN: 9781935503576
Google: MwtDEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: PennStateUP
Published: 2010-01-25T21:01:36.961641+00:00

DC: Yes, but they haven’t met with the same startling enthusiasm that greeted them in the United States, or at least not yet. Whether that’s a good or a bad thing, I won’t say.

NZD: Queer theory takes French post-structuralism and deconstruction as important ancestors, so it should have French echoes! Queer theory goes well beyond earlier approaches to the history of sexuality, in which sexual practices and identities were thought of as partly constructed over time and related to different historical milieux. The main debates in the 1970s and 1980s concerned the amount of construction: how much input was there from biology? Was there an identifiable current of, say, homoerotic culture in the West from antiquity on? But whatever the fluidity in sexual practices and identities, the binary of heterosexuality/homosexuality was the main frame.

Queer theory effaces that binary. It argues for no “natural” or biologically determined sexuality. One’s DNA has no necessary consequences for one’s identity or one’s sexual preference or practices. I’m not sure how psychoanalytic theory plays into queer theory, but you can see that it argues for particularity and particular choices. To me, it seems a reaction in gay studies to the kind of routine repeating of questions and approaches that I mentioned as a danger in the history of women and gender. In that sense, queer theory has cleared the air and challenged historiographical categories, and it has prompted some interesting writing in philosophical and literary criticism. But it’s hard to see how its radical and individualist particularity can be a practical guide to historians, who really do need to look at the play of culture and social experience in defining possibilities in a particular period. And some recent work by geneticists and specialists on infant physiology is showing a whole new way to think of the nature/nurture binary—much more porousness and interchange between genetic codes and life experience than believed before.

DC: I would like to ask you the following question: In France, despite the big projects to which you’ve contributed, such as the Histoire des femmes, directed by Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot, there doesn’t exist as strong a commitment to the history of women, perhaps because of certain methodological shortcomings.28 Take, for example, the awkward translation of “gender” as genre. There have been noteworthy works for sure, but—perhaps because French university life has been and remains more or less secretly misogynistic—there still hasn’t been a truly original work, properly speaking, for the early modern period. We could cite Éliane Viennot’s book, but it remains very much a classic in the sense you spoke of earlier, because it treated Queen Margot…

NZD: A very good book!

DC: Certainly, but it’s worth pointing out that it’s a work of a historian of literature. Tell me precisely what you see it contributes, if anything, in terms of methodology.

NZD: Methodological shortcomings of the history of women? I don’t think that’s the issue in France, for there are, as I’ve just tried to suggest, several ways in which the history of women and gender can be practiced.

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