Persona and the Performance of Identity
Mineke Bosch · GenderOpen - Repositorium für die Geschlechterforschung · 2013
When in 2005 Harvard president and White House economic advisor Larry Summers gave a speech at a conference on Harvard's diversity policy for its academic staff, it was so badly received by the esteemed members of the audience that it was partly the reason why he was forced to resign.In this keynote lecture he claimed that women's under-representation in his university's top jobs was a matter of "genes".In one of his answers during the discussion after the speech, he cited developmental psychologist Judith Harris as an authority for his assertion that socialisation was an overrated factor. 1 With her huge 1998 bestseller, "The Nurture Assumption", she managed to convince not only academia but also the general public that it is not so much the parents (mothers) that exert the greatest influence on their children, but first and foremost the peers, i.e. the children's friends both male and female. 2 But that was not of much help for Summers.Shortly afterwards his speech was discussed in "The Boston Globe", where it was characterised as being both sexist and discriminatory.A day later, the presidents of the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, and the Universities of Stanford and Princeton distanced themselves from Summers's claims.Under pressure, he handed over his speech and repeatedly offered his apologies.But to no avail.His resignation, and Obama's decision less than a year later not to appoint him as Secretary of the Treasury, were perhaps not entirely due to this single faux pas.Yet according to general assumption it was largely to blame.Ironically, a year * This article is a translated and adapted version of the Dutch publication: Persona en de performance van identiteit.Parallelle ontwikkelingen in de nieuwe biografische geschiedschrijving van gender en van wetenschap, in: Tijdschrift voor Biografie, 1, 3 (2012), 10-21.I am grateful to Annie Wright for the translation.