Conversations With History: The Politics of the Veil

Harry Kreisler welcomes historian Joan Wallach Scott who traces her intellectual odyssey and recalls the impact of the women's movement on her research and teaching. She describes the intellectual influences that led her to write the now classic article, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis." She also discusses the utility of critical history for elucidating contemporary policy debates with a focus on her recent book "The Politics of the Veil," an analysis of the political, cultural, and social factors that led to the French ban on the wearing of the veil by Muslim young women in public schools.
Series: Conversations with History [6/2009] [Public Affairs] [Humanities] [Show ID: 16278]

Category:

Education

Tags:

• joan
• wallach
• scott
• women
• movement
• gender
• veil

[captainSTROO]

fctchk .... Epic fail. You totally missed the point of her use of race

[captainSTROO]

Race doesnt have a biological basis and Scott knows that. Race is still worth exploring for the ways that debunked categories still organize the present.

Scott writes that race is an imagined perception of unbridgable differences based on physical characteristics.

Race is a real category even if it is arbitrary, just like lots of arbirtrary categories are worth debate and dissection.

[PallaAurinkoon]

"ethically and intellectually bankrupt"? Please then elaborate on alternative models for civil rights in a society without "racial identity".

[PallaAurinkoon]

Then I would like to see your model for the "other"

[fctchk]

White supremacy during the colonial era used the concept of "race" and racial superiority as the foundation for slavery, imperialistic plunder and the general lording it over the "savages". Not to mention the heights of perversity that this very bad idea reached under the Nazis.

Perpetuating a debunked concept because it might give a group an identity, all be it false, is as ethically and intellectually bankrupt as tolerating barbaric medieval religious teachings in the name of diversity.

[PallaAurinkoon]

Just because the term "race" is meaningless doesn't mean the idea still doesn't hold power in political discourse. "Race" may be meaningless on a biological basis, but that doesn't mean it still doesn't hold power for the marginalized and the oppressed to give themselves an "identity" or a voice. Society should not be the society of "same", but of difference. This is where real community is born.

[fctchk]

37:00 to 37:52 The lady doth ride her womens studies hobby horse too much to notice what goes on in real science: DNA studies have rendered the concept of "race" meaningless. It's sufficiently deplorable that the term is still being used by the ill educated public and the lazy parroting sound bite media. It is inexcusable that a member of academia use it.

Muslims marginalize themselves in these societies by not assimilating and by persisting in their fundamentalist beliefs and practices.