Leora Auslander, Professor of History at the University of Chicago
Leora Auslander's publications in the field of material culture
Any European or American newspaper of the last few decades includes at least one story in which a seemingly trivial object lies at the heart of a social drama: the expulsion of Muslim girls from French schools for refusing to remove their head-scarves; kids killing each other over brand-name sneakers in Chicago; a boycott of the clothing chain Benetton because of its use of race in its advertisements; the revelation that Michael Jordan earns more for his endorsement of Nikes than Nike's entire labor force earns in a year; French farmers vandalizing a McDonalds to express their outrage at Americanization. In all of these incidents, everyday goods—their production, marketing, or use—have become fraught. My work seeks to explain how and why everyday things have become catalysts for conflict, means of expressing identities and constructing selves, vehicles for dissenting opinions, and sites of unexpected state intervention. My research agenda is based on the hypothesis that key to these questions is the close and careful study of material culture, one that always links the concreteness of everyday goods to the abstractions of polity, society, and economy.
My publications in the domain of material culture and the histories of production and consumption include: Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1996); "Perceptions of Beauty and the Problem of Consciousness," in Lenard Berlanstein, ed. Rethinking Labor History (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1993); "After the Revolution: Recycling Ancien Régime Style in the Nineteenth Century," in Bryant T. Ragan and Elizabeth Williams, eds. Re-creating Authority in Revolutionary France, (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), pp. 144-174; "The Gendering of Consumer Practices in Nineteenth-Century France," in Victoria de Grazia and Ellen Furlough, eds. Sex of Things: Essays on Gender and Consumption (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 79-112; "Regeneration through the Everyday? Furniture in Revolutionary Paris," in a special issue of Art History (vol. 28:1, Spring 2005), ed. Katie Scott, and; "Beyond Words," American Historical Review October, 2005; "Sambo in Paris: Race and Racism in the Iconography of Everyday Life", co-authored with Tom Holt, in Susan Peabody and Tyler Stovall, eds. The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France, (Raleigh, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003); "Historians and Architectural History," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians March, 2006 and "Colonial and Post-Colonial Eigensinn: the Évolués and the Sapeurs between Europe, the Congo and Zaire," for a Festschrift for Alf Lüdtke, as well as one book in press, Cultural Revolutions: Everyday Life and Politics in England, North America and France forthcoming, Berg Press, 2008 and another book in progress, Strangers at Home: Jews Parisians and Berliners in the Twentieth Century.
Auslander's work in the field of feminist history and gender studies
I have had a very long-standing interest in the analysis of the construction of gender difference. My writings in the field range quite widely including a critical analysis of the work of three key feminist philosophers (Judith Butler, Nancy Fraser, and Denise Riley), another essay in which I argued that nineteenth-century French conceptions of masculinity were fundamentally important in shaping the nature of demands made by organized labor; an article that traces the ways in which different consumption activities were gendered (and the implications of that gendering); and a co-edited volume on "protective" labor legislation in France and the United States in which we attempted to demonstrate that both conceptions of the meanings of both gender and sexuality have influenced that legislation. All of these projects were driven by a conviction that adequate analysis of how differences between women and men are constructed required the concept of gender. That is, only through analysis of the simultaneous construction of masculinity and femininity, and of male roles and female roles can one grasp either. I was equally persuaded that analysis of gender and of sexuality needed to be done hand-in-hand. Trying to understand the conditions of women's labor, for example, without knowing a given society's conception of women's sexuality will necessarily be only partially successful. These convictions formed the core of my intellectual agenda as the Director of the Center for Gender Studies at the University of Chicago (1996-1999).
My work in the field of feminist history and gender studies includes: Différence des sexes et protection sociale (XIXe-XXe siècles), a co-edited volume with Michelle Zancarini-Fournel (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1995); "Feminist Theory and Social History: Explorations in the Politics of Identity," Radical History Review 53 (Fall 1992): 158-176; "Do Women's + Feminist + Men's + Lesbian and Gay + Queer Studies = Gender Studies?" Differences 9/3 (Fall 1997):1-30; "Le genre de la nation" Fall, 2000 issue of Clio: Histoire, femmes et sociétés on gender, citizenship and the nation, co-edited (with Michelle Zancarini-Fournel); "Women's Suffrage, Citizenship Law and National Identity: Gendering the Nation-State in France and Germany, 1871-1918," in Patricia Grimshaw, Katie Holmes and Marilyn Lake, eds. Women's Rights and Human Rights: International Historical Perspectives (London: Macmillan, 2001), pp. 138-152; "Gender at the Intersection of the Disciplines," Cahiers Parisiens/Parisian Notebooks, vol. 2 (2006) pp. 434-446.
Leora Auslander's recent research
In my research in Jewish history I walk a fine line between an approach that privileges the particularities and distinctiveness of the Jewish tradition and one which emphasizes commonalities among minority, diasporic cultures. Thus an analysis of the Jewish engagement with modernist aesthetics in the 1920s requires investigation not only of the Jewish traditions that survived both exclusion and emancipation but also of the other encounters between minority diasporic communities and modernist aesthetics in the Harlem Renaissance or the Négritude movement of the same period. That kind of comparative approach not only enables more powerful analyses of the minority cultures, but also of the dominant culture in which they were embedded and the nature of the interaction between them.
My most recent area of research is at the intersection of Jewish history and material culture. Some early thoughts on those questions may be found in: "'Jewish Taste'? Jews, and the aesthetics of everyday life in Paris and Berlin, 1933-1942," in Rudy Koshar, ed. Histories of Leisure (Oxford: Berg Press, 2002), pp. 299-318. That reflection has taken a somewhat different turn in: "Resisting Context: The Spiritual Objects of Tobi Kahn," in Objects of the Spirit: Ritual and the Art of Tobi Kahn, ed. Emily Bilski (New York: Avoda/Hudson Hills, 2004) pp. 71-78 and "Coming Home? Jews in Postwar Paris," Journal of Contemporary History 40/2 (2005): 237-259; "Archiving a Life: Post-Shoah Dilemmas of Memory Legacies," accepted for a volume edited by Alf Lüdtke and "The Boundaries of Jewishness or when is a Cultural Practice Jewish?" solicited for an issue of Jewish Social Studies.