RE-MEMBERING IDENTITY
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"[M]ediation is not necessarily singular, a
choice of 'this
(from "What
Women Can Learn from Men,"
"Where are we now? Further from the classical canons. Let us offer this as a potential revision." |
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Materiality and Re-membering With the title of this piece, I have tried to signal the remembering involved in retracing this textual history—a history that helps us better understand how a particular kind of female secretary (and other classes of feminized office workers) came to exist. The "good secretary" as represented in these texts was an ideal that was contradicatory, yet powerful in the way it shaped expectations and behaviors. In revisiting this multi-genre, multi-media "paper-trail" we can begin to get a sense of the material and semiotic means by which this new identity was constructed—and see the non-inevitability of what woman’s place in the office would be. In other words, we see in these texts the early, ongoing production of the woman office worker as a cultural icon and an identity available to women and girls. I hyphenate “re-membering” to signal the re-construction of this network of texts, and also to mark the materiality—the embodiedness—entailed by their socializing practices and the ways those practices have been enacted by (and upon) particular bodies. Historian Joan Wallach Scott warns against simply applying gender labels to histories and historical artifacts. Instead, she urges us to attend to the systematic, discursive processes through which gender is made and remade and unmade (p. xii). I have tried to gesture here toward the ways that networks of texts have functioned to produce gendered readings—and corresponding devaluations—of office work. I have also tried to gesture toward the value I see in CHAT for undertaking this kind of historical work: work that studies texts that are interconnected in purpose and effect, but that do not cohere neatly into a single genre category or around a single author.
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