“Experience” and “Discourse”—Productive Dichotomy or Much Ado About Unsatisfactorily Questioned Terms?

Abstract

Experience: All just discourse? The participants of the eleventh conference of Swiss historians for women’s, men’s, and gender history in 2002 asked themselves this question, which specifically promises to scrutinize the material quality and discursive quality of the term of experience. The carefully edited conference volume presents a felicitous survey of the disparate ways of dealing with the term of experience as a category for analysis in gender research. Rich in insight into the multifaceted nature of contemporary research praxis, the publication holds ready a number of case scenarios that invite another look. It is, however, missing one thing: the redemption of a long postulated research desideratum in gender history, that is a theoretically and methodologically profound disputation with the categories “experience” and “discourse,” categories that were the leading terms of the conference.