Winter 2001
Volume 27, Number 2

For a while I have been writing critically about identity, insisting that identities don't preexist their strategic political invocations, that categories of identity we take for granted as rooted in our physical bodies (gender and race) or our cultural (ethnic, religious) heritages are, in fact, retrospectively linked to those roots; they don't follow predictably or naturally from them.2 There's an illusory sameness established by referring to a category of person (women, workers, African Americans, homosexuals) as if it never changed, as if not the category, but only its historical circumstances varied over time. Thus women's historians (to take the example I know best) have asked how changes in the legal, social, economic, and medical status of women affected their possibilities for emancipation or equality; but they have asked less often how these changes altered the meaning (socially articulated, subjectively understood) of the term women itself. Few feminist historians (Denise Riley is the exception here) have heeded the advice of Michel Foucault to historicize the categories that the present takes to be self-evident realities.3 Even though, for Foucault, the "history of the present" served a clear political end (denaturalizing the categories upon which contemporary structures of power rested and so destabilizing those structures of power), those who resist his teaching have taken historicization to be synonymous with depoliticization. This synonymity is only true, however, if historical rootedness is seen as a prerequisite for the stability of the subject of feminism, if the existence of feminism is made to depend on some inherent, timeless agency of women.

[...]

What might it mean to characterize the operations of retrospective identification as a fantasized echo or an echoed fantasy? It might mean simply that such identification is established by the finding of resemblances between actors present and past. There is no shortage of writing about history in these terms: history as the result of empathetic identification made possible either by the existence of universal human characteristics or, in some instances, by a transcendent set of traits and experiences belonging to women or workers or members of religious or ethnic communities. In this view of things, fantasy is the means by which real relations of identity between past and present are discovered and/or forged. Fantasy is more or less synonymous with imagination, and it is taken to be subject to rational, intentional control; one directs one's imagination purposively to achieve a coherent aim, that of writing oneself or one's group into history, writing the history of individuals or groups.6 The limits of this approach for my purposes are that it assumes exactly the continuity--the essentialist nature--of identity that I want to question.

For that reason I have turned to writings, informed by psychoanalysis, that treat fantasy in its unconscious dimensions. Substantively, it may be that certain shared fantasies--the ones Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis deem "primal fantasies"--provide fundamental terms for sexed identities. These fantasies are the myths cultures develop to answer questions about the origins of subjects, sexual difference, and sexuality.7 Primal fantasies of sexual difference (which assume the female body has been castrated) may provide a ground of unconscious commonality among women who are otherwise historically and socially different. But this can't account either for the subjectively different perceptions women have of themselves as women or for the ways in which at certain moments "women" become consolidated as an identity group. I want to argue that the commonality among women does not preexist its invocation but rather that it is secured by fantasies that enable them to transcend history and difference.

2. See Joan W. Scott, "Multiculturalism and the Politics of Identity," in The Identity in Question, ed. John Rajchman (New York, 1995), pp. 3Ð12.

3. See Denise Riley, 'Am I That Name?' Feminism and the Category of 'Women' in History (Minneapolis, 1988).

6. For an example, see R. G. Collingwood, Idea of History (New York, 1956).

7. See Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, "Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality," in Formations of Fantasy, ed. Victor Burgin, James Donald, and Cora Kaplan (London, 1986).

Joan W. Scott is Harold F. Linder Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study. She is the author, most recently, of Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (1996).