Feminist History After the Linguistic Turn: Historicizing Discourse and Experience
Author(s)
Canning, Kathleen
Abstract
The starting point of this article is the ongoing and uneasy encounter between feminism and poststructuralist theory. The author explores the implications of the “linguistic turn” for the history of women and gender and analyzes the controversies among feminists about its far-reaching consequences for historical research. The interdisciplinarity implied by the term linguistic turn is one of the uneasy moments in this encounter: the boundary crossing between disciplines have challenged the foundations of individual fields while at the same time creating new domains of interdisciplinary inquiry that seem to render obsolete the familiar tools, concepts, and epistemologies of the traditional disciplines. However fruitful the fracturing of disciplinary boundaries has been, it has also opened up difficult questions regarding the meanings and methods and historical practice in the wake of the linguistic turn. In this article the author rethinks the contested terms discourse, experience, and agency through a study of gender and the politics of work in the German textile industry during late Imperial and Weimar Germany. She focus in particular two moments of crisis and transformation: the emergence of female factory labor as a new social question in the 1890s, and the feminization of union politics during the 1920s, when a politics of the body transformed the politics of class.
