This emphasis on the relationship of knowledge to power, and on the power of language, made poststructuralism attractive to feminist scholars in many disciplines, who themselves already emphasized the ways language and other structures of knowledge excluded women. The French philosopher Michel Foucault’s insight that power comes from everywhere fit with feminist recognition that misogyny and other forces that limited women’s lives could be found in many places: in fashion magazines, fairy tales, and jokes told at work, as well as overt job discrimination and domestic violence. Historians of gender were thus prominent exponents of the linguistic turn, and many analyzed representations of women, men, the body, sexual actions, and related topics within different types of discourses.
The linguistic/cultural turn – which happened in other fields along with history – elicited harsh responses from other historians, however, including many who focused on women and gender. They asserted that it denied women the ability to shape their world – what is usually termed “agency” – in both past and present by positing unchangeable linguistic structures. Wasn’t it ironic, they noted, that just as women were learning they had a history and asserting they were part of history, “history” became just a text? They wondered whether the ideas that gender – and perhaps even “women” – were simply historical constructs denied the very real oppression that many women in the past (and present) experienced. Such doubts were extended to other groups as well. If gender, sexuality, race, and other categories are all simply unstable and changing historical or social constructs, how do we understand intersectional oppression, and use this knowledge as a basis for engaged scholarship or activism? Advocates of the linguistic turn argued that their work was politically engaged because it critically examined the dynamics and cultural practices of power. Disagreements were sharp and sometimes personal, but by the 2010s, that debate seemed to have run its course. As Lynn Hunt – a powerful force in the cultural turn – commented, “most historians have simply moved on, incorporating insights from postmodern positions but not feeling obliged to take a stand on its epistemological claims.”[3]
The linguistic/cultural turn was only one of many “turns” that have shaped historical scholarship on gender and influenced history as a whole over the past several decades. For example, the “spatial turn” has led scholars to more closely examine borders and their permeability, connections and interactions, frontiers, actual and imagined spatial crossings, migration and displacement, and the natural and built environment. They have argued that space is both a geopolitical formation and a way of perceiving, producing, and organizing knowledge, and as such is deeply gendered. The “emotional turn” has led historians to seek to understand the changing meanings and consequences of emotional concepts, expression, and regulation. They have studied norms and standards that societies and groups maintained toward emotions, investigated anger, sadness, jealousy, desire, and other specific emotions, and looked at the interplay between emotions and other aspects of society. The “material turn” has brought a greater emphasis on material culture along with written texts as sources of historical knowledge. Material culture studies, an interdisciplinary field with roots in art history, archaeology, anthropology, and history, is both a method by which one can evaluate and analyze objects and a theory able to assess the role of objects and the relationships between things and people in the creation and transformation of society and culture. It was originally mainly androcentric, and either oblivious or hostile to using gender as a category of analysis, but the critiques and research of feminist art historians, archaeologists, and historians have begun to change this.
New theoretical perspectives are adding additional complexity and bringing in still more questions. One of these is queer theory, which was developed in the early 1990s – a period of intense HIV-AIDS activism – by scholars in several different fields who combined elements of gay and lesbian studies with other concepts originating in literary and feminist analysis. Queer theorists argued that sexual notions were central to all aspects of culture, and called for greater attention to sexuality that was at odds with whatever was defined as “normal.” They asserted that the line between “normal” and “abnormal” was always socially constructed, however, and that, in fact, all gender and sexual categories were artificial and changing. Some theorists celebrated all efforts at blurring or bending categories, viewing any sort of identity as both false and oppressive and celebrating hybridity and performance. Others had doubts about this, wondering whether one can work to end discrimination against women, African Americans, gay people, or any other group, if one denies that the group has an essential identity, something that makes its members clearly women or African American or gay. In the past several decades, queer theory has been widely applied, as scholars have “queered” – that is, called into question the categories used to describe and analyze – the nation, race, religion, and other topics along with gender and sexuality. This broadening has led some – including a few of the founders of the field – to wonder whether queer theory loses its punch when everything is queer, but it continues to be an influential theoretical perspective.
Related questions about identity, subjectivity, and the cultural construction of difference have also emerged from postcolonial theory and critical race theory. Postcolonial history and theory were initially associated with South Asian scholars and the book series Subaltern Studies, and focused on people who have been subordinated (the meaning of subaltern) by virtue of their race, class, culture, or language as part of the process of colonization and imperialism in the modern world. Critical race theory developed in the 1980s as an outgrowth (and critique) of the civil rights movement combined with ideas derived from critical legal studies, a radical group of legal scholars who argued that supposedly neutral legal concepts such as the individual or meritocracy actually masked power relationships. Historians of Europe and the United States are increasingly applying insights from both of these theoretical schools to their own work, particularly as they investigate subordinate groups such as racial and ethnic minorities. World historians also now often use ideas developed by postcolonial theorists to analyze relationships of power in all chronological periods, not simply eras of imperialism.
An important concept in much postcolonial and critical race theory has been the notion of hegemony, initially developed by the Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci. Today hegemony and domination are often used interchangeably, but in Gramsci’s view, they are not the same. Hegemony involves convincing dominated groups to acquiesce to the desires and systems of the dominators through cultural as well as military and political means. Generally this was accomplished by granting special powers and privileges to some individuals and groups from among the subordinated population, or by convincing them through education or other forms of socialization that the new system was beneficial or preferable. The notion of hegemony explains why small groups of people have been able to maintain control over much larger populations without constant rebellion and protest, though some scholars have argued that the emphasis on hegemony downplays the ability of subjugated peoples to recognize the power realities in which they are enmeshed and to shape their own history. Many historians have used the concept of hegemony to examine the role of high-status women, who gained power over subordinate men and women through their relationships with high-status men, and thus paid little attention to or chose not to protest their own subordination to men. The Australian sociologist R. W. Connell has also applied the idea of hegemony to studies of masculinity, noting that in every culture one form of masculinity is hegemonic, but men who are excluded from that particular form still benefit from male privilege, which they exploit rather than opposing the men who have power over them.
Both postcolonial and critical race theory point out that racial, ethnic, and other hierarchies are deeply rooted social and cultural principles, not simply aberrations that can be remedied by laws protecting individuals from discriminaton. They note that along with disenfranchising certain groups, such hierarchies privilege certain groups, a phenomenon that is analyzed under the rubric of critical white studies. (This is a pattern similar to the growth of men’s studies out of women’s studies, and there is a parallel development in the historical study of heterosexuality, which has grown out of LGBT history.) Unsurprisingly, such explorations of white privilege and structural racism have proven threatening to some, with conservative political and media figures, especially in the United States,