The Evidence of Experience

Feminist historian Joan W. Scott asks us to trouble commonsensical assumptions that experience alone generates knowledge. Directed at those Scott describes as historians of difference—that is, scholars focused on marginalized people, including those who lived in a prior historical moment—Scott argues that experience cannot be taken as self-evident. Such a valorizing of personal experience has been central to the work of feminist scholars, who both seek to push back against empiricist historical approaches and to highlight the voices of those who are less likely to appear in traditional archives and historical records. Instead, Scott says, we need to examine the social structures and power relations that produce experience. Doing so will allow us to see that neither experiences nor the identities that may or may not emerge out of them are stable, natural, or self-evident. As Scott concludes, “What counts as experience is neither self-evident nor straightforward; it is always contested, and always therefore political” (1991, 797).