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This chapter revisits a textual crux in the history of sexuality studies: Joan Scott’s influential reading of Samuel R. Delany’s memoir, The Motion of Light in Water in her 1991 essay “The Evidence of Experience.” Scott’s essay articulates a powerful critique of traditional empiricism, and is an important document in the movement called the linguistic turn, when scholars in the social sciences turned to interpretive paradigms drawn from the humanities to challenge the positivism of their disciplines. Through this exchange, Delany became a key figure in the anti-foundationalist field of queer theory. The chapter presents another version of Delany, framing him as a social historian and empirical researcher, invested in documenting marginal sexual worlds. It points to the figure of the periplum, or nautical map, drawn from his 1999 book Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, to suggest the urgency of this task of knowledge production for him. By situating Delany as an inheritor of the deviance studies tradition, the chapter attempts to historicize queer theory in relation to the linguistic turn, and suggests that a fuller appreciation of Delany’s documentary poetics will allow us to broaden the purview of the field.

This chapter discusses how the notions of the subject, individualism, freedom, agency, change, and history have come to cluster around the figure of the Muslim woman for whom the metonym is increasingly the veil. It considers how the Muslim woman is conceived in the fiction of John Le Carre, the theory of Alain Badiou, the scholarship on the veil in France by Joan Scott, and in the work of Saba Mahmood.

This chapter presents historian Joan Wallach Scott's memoirs, which trace how she became interested in critical history. Scott was not very much interested as a young student, but it was inevitable for her to become a historian because her parents were high school history teachers; their love and passion for history nurtured hers. Scott's latest project is a book on academic freedom; a history of the concept in the United States and an analysis of its applications.

Intellectual history is routinely described as “intrinsically” interdisciplinary, but what does this really mean? This chapter begins by considering moments in the history of intellectual history when interdisciplinarity became a particularly acute concern and then moves to a consideration of present taxonomies of interdisciplinarity. By these lights, intellectual history may be described as an instance when “weak” interdisciplinarity meets “weak” disciplinarity. Far from representing a negative judgment, this speaks to the particular richness of intellectual history. A concluding section addresses anxieties that interdisciplinarity produces a watered-down eclecticism by rooting intellectual history in a more robust tradition of eclecticism derived from ancient skepticism and its modern inheritors.

Intersectionality theory’s notion of concepts and theory blocks its important and necessary project, namely to understand and name complex forms of oppression, the identities formed under such conditions, and the power structures that produces them. Intersectionality shares the goal of avoiding “exclusionary” concepts with identity theory more generally. But this goal is based on a mistaken view of how concepts work. Wittgenstein’s analysis of concepts, and his critique of the “craving for generality” explains why the project of formulating an overarching theory of intersectionality as such cannot succeed. Returning to Crenshaw’s foundational work, the chapter shows that intersectionality was not originally a call for theory, but a call for attention to black women’s experience. Frye was right to argue that the task of feminist theory is to make women’s experiences intelligible. Scott’s critique of experience is compatible with this goal. Instead of searching for a grand theory of intersectionality, we can consider “intersectionality” the name of a language. While there can be no general theory of language as such, we can map out its grammar. Some regions of use will be relatively rule-bound, but others will not.

The introduction situates the book within three main historiographies: the cultural history of the First World War, photographic history and the history of experience. Building on studies on the materiality of photography, this book focuses on photographic practices. In particular, it examines how doing photography had an influence on shaping experiences that were not intrinsically photographic, for instance, losing a friend in the war. This is an important question because, although photographs are often considered as sources that tell people’s inner lives, there is a lack of explanation about how exactly photography can act as a means of expression. To bridge this gap, this book engages with debates with the history and theory of experience. Borrowing from recent works in the history of emotions, this book proposes an approach to experience based not on language and narratives but on practices. This approach explains how photography can articulate war experiences and situates it within the long tradition of cultural history of war experiences.

This chapter tackles rationales for History on their own merits. It assesses for coherence all of the rationales hitherto mentioned in the book, insofar as they still have any currency. Then it makes some suggestions of its own. This work is less sanguine than many about the prospects for History as Emancipation, and more optimistic than many about forms of History as Practical Lesson. History as Method has something going for it but even on its own best ethical terms it needs to be bolstered by concerns related to the content of the past rather than just to procedures for researching and writing History. History as Identity remains arguably the most important of all the substantivist rationales. It is so often at issue even when the identity question is addressed only indirectly via History as Travel, since it is difficult to get away from the matter of how one defines oneself in relation to other, different ways of being and doing. Furthermore, those historians who engage in Emancipatory History à la Foucault would be more effective if they engaged more directly in Identity History, which would mean engaging in straightforwardly normative arguments about right and wrong. Extending the discussion of normativity, the final pages of the book turn to the matter of moral evaluation by the historian, suggesting evaluation is not a category error or an anachronistic residue of the days when History was commonly seen as a fount of Moral Lessons.