Responding to supergee's posting on Freudianism in the US in the 50s has reminded me that I meant to post this weekend about some ideas arising from the discussion of my Dorothy Hodgkin as a woman in science post of last week.

This is a thought, or set of thoughts, I've had sloshing around for some time (and which has made its way into some of my published or about-to-be published articles). It's about the way that change and development takes place in marginal and liminal spaces and mostly as a result of the activities of marginal and liminal people.

In terms of the history of science and medicine in the C20th, what we see is the emergence of new areas and disciplines, which didn't fit into accepted models (cf Hodgkin's problem of where crystallography could possibly 'fit' into the existing Oxford sciences set-up). They didn't provide safe 'jobs for the boys' so they tended to attract people who couldn't play the 'getting on in a solid career game', because they weren't, for reasons of gender, class, ethnicity, political views, educational history, or all of the above, going to be let anywhere near that playing field. This also applied to psychoanalysis and Freudian theory for several decades of the C20th. The fields themselves tended to be, at that point, fluid, and without rules and structures and not putting many constraints on who might get involved. The people who did, brought, among other things, a non-orthodoxy influenced (or, at least, less) perspective to what they are doing, as well as the talents which, because of the aforementioned exclusionary factors, weren't going to be let into the established academy and its institutions.

(My female pioneers of gastro-enterology would fit in here, with their jobs at unglamourous hospitals in the East End slums, their work on the routine diseases of childhood, their non-standard origins and career paths - one of them was Australian and had to work for several years as a lab technician to pay her way through medical school.)

Then these fields become more established and start setting rules and boundaries and terms of admission and also, quite often, rewriting their histories to produce a solid patriarchal genealogy, trying to un-inscribe their complex, fluid and unorthodox origins. This process doesn't however, usually allow for the inclusion as 'the right people to be doing this' of various marginalised groups... and may even be intended specifically or by implication to exclude them.

I think this model could also be extended to the arts. In the C19th the novel, for example, was being written by people who were not Oxbridge graduates with a classical education (these might, however, write poetry, criticism or essays), and there was no particular boundary between litfic and genrefic. But with the genre-fication of literature this has changed: see the gendering and hierarchification of various genres.

This also works for particular literary movements: it's been argued by various scholars, e.g. Ann Ardis and Jo-Ann Wallace, that by the 1920s modernism was busily trying to erase its early history in women's experimental writing of the late C19th-early C20th.

This possibly also relates to my belief that exciting work in the arts, which is also popular with and accessible to a wide audience, often tends to happen in non-respectable and liminal areas like the theatre in the Age of Shakepeare, or the novel in the Age of Jane Austen ('oh, it is only a novel'); and maybe film in the earlier C20th? I think there's some connection, something to do with lack of institutionalisation and imposed rules of who can and can't do things and hierarchies.

Conceding that my interest in margins and liminality may have something to do with my own position: archivists being per se pretty marginal creatures, and then me personally myself trying to have some kind of scholarly career [ETA: (in, moreover, a fairly marginal field of history)] outside the normal structures of the academy ('Don't you ever want to get a real academic job?') while also being one.