[Fwd: MarxFem/MatFem III]

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: MarxFem/MatFem III
Date: Tue, 14 Jul 1998 13:32:16 -0600 (MDT)
From: Martha Gimenez <gimenez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Reply-To: M-Fem@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To: A place for marxist-feminists to hang out <M-Fem@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

     Rosemary Hennessy (1993) traces the origins of Materialist
Feminism in the work of British and French feminists who preferred
the term materialist feminism to Marxist feminism because, in their
view, Marxism had to be transformed to be able to explain the
sexual division of labor (Beechey, 1977: 61, cited in Kuhn and
Wolpe, 1978: 8). In the 1970s, Hennessy states, Marxism was
inadequate to the task because of its class bias and focus on
production, while feminism was also problematic due to its
essentialist and idealist concept of woman; this is why materialist
feminism emerged as a positive alternative both to Marxism and
feminism (Hennessy, 1993: xii).  The combined effects of the
postmodern critique of the empirical self and the criticisms voiced
by women who did not see themselves included in the generic woman
subject of academic feminist theorizing resulted, in the 1990s, in
materialist feminist analyses that "problematize 'woman' as an
obvious and homogeneous empirical entity in order to explore how
'woman' as a discursive category is historically constructed and
traversed by more than one differential axis" (Hennessy, 1993:
xii).  Furthermore, Hennessy argues, despite the postmodern
rejection of totalities and theoretical analyses of social systems,
materialist feminists need to hold on to the critique of the
totalities which affect women's lives: patriarchy and capitalism.
Women's lives are every where affected by world capitalism and
patriarchy and it would be politically self-defeating to replace
that critique with localized, fragmented political strategies and
a perception of social reality as characterized by a logic of
contingency.

     Hennessy's views on the characteristics of Materislist
Feminism emerge through her critical engagement with the works of
Laclau and Mouffe, Foucault, Kristeva and other theorists of the
postmodern.  Materialist Feminism is a "way of reading" that
rejects the dominant pluralist paradigms and logics of contingency
and seeks to establish the connections between the discursively
constructed differentiated subjectivities that have replaced the
generic "woman" in feminist theorizing, and the hierarchies of
inequality that exploit and oppress women.  Subjectivities, in
other words, cannot be understood in isolation from systemically
organized totalities.   Materialist Feminism, as a reading
practice, is also a way of explaining or re-writing and making
sense of the world and, as such, influences reality through the
knowledges it produces about the subject and her social context.
Discourse and knowledge have materiality in their effects; one of
the material effects of discourse is the construction of the
subject but this subject is traversed by differences grounded in
hierarchies of inequality which are not local or contingent but
historical and systemic, such as patriarchy and capitalism.
Difference, consequently, is not mere plurality but inequality.
The problem of the material relationship between language,
discourse, and the social or between the discursive (feminist
theory) and the non-discursive (women's lives divided by
exploitative and oppressive social relations) can be resolved
through the conceptualization of discourse as ideology . A theory
of ideology presupposes a theory of the social and this theory,
which informs Hennessy's critical reading of postmodern theories of
the subject, discourse, positionality, language, etc., is what she
calls a "global analytic" which, in light of her references to
multinational capitalism, the international division of labor,
overdetermined economic, political and cultural practices, etc, is
at the very least a kind of postmodern Marxism.  But references to
historical materialism, and Althusser's theory of ideology and the
notion of symptomatic reading are so important in the development
of her arguments that one wonders about her hesitation to name Marx
and historical materialism as the theory of the social underlying
her critique of the postmodern logic of contingency; i.e., the
theory of capitalism, the totality she so often mentions together
with patriarchy as sources of the exploitation and oppression of
women and as the basis for the "axis of differences" that traverse
the discursive category "woman."  To sum up, Hennessy's version of
Materialist Feminism is a blend of post-marxism and postmodern
theories of the subject and a source of "readings" and "re-
writings" which rescue postmodern categories of analysis (subject,
discourse, difference) from the conservative limbo of contingency,
localism and pluralism to historicize them or contextualizing them
by connecting them to their systemic material basis in capitalism
and patriarchy.  This is made possible by understanding discourse
as ideology and linking ideology to its material base in the
"global analytic."

     In Hennessy's analysis, historical materialism seems like an
ever present but muted shadow, latent under terms such as totality,
systemic, and global analytic. However, in the introduction to
MATERIALIST FEMINISM: A Reader in Class, Difference and Women's
Lives (1997), written with her co-editor, Chrys Ingraham, there is
a clear, unambiguous return to historical materialism, a
recognition of its irreplaceable importance for feminist theory and
politics. This introduction, entitled "Reclaiming Anticapitalist
Feminism," is a critique of the dominant feminist concern with
culture, identity and difference considered in isolation from any
systemic understanding of the social forces that affect women's
lives, and a critique of an academic feminism that has marginalized
and disparaged the knowledges produced by the engagement of
feminists with Marxism and their contributions to feminist
scholarship and to the political mobilization of women.  More
importantly, this introduction is a celebration of Marxist Feminism
whose premises and insights have been consistently "misread,
distorted, or buried under the weight of a flourishing postmodern
cultural politics" (ibid, p.5).  They point out that, whatever the
name of the product of feminists efforts to grapple with historical
materialism (marxist feminism, socialist feminism or materialist
feminism), these are names that signal theoretical differences and
emphases but which together indicate the recognition of historical
materialism as the source of emancipatory knowledge required for
the success of the feminist project.  In this introduction,
materialist feminism becomes a term used interchangeably with
marxist feminism, with the latter being the most prominently
displayed.  The authors draw a clear line between the cultural
materialism that characterizes the work of post-marxist feminists
who, having rejected historical materialism,  analyze cultural,
ideological and political practices in isolation from their
material base in capitalism, and materialist feminism (i.e.,
marxist or socialist feminism) which is firmly grounded in
historical materialism and links the success of feminist struggles
to the success of anticapitalist struggles; "unlike cultural
feminists, materialist, socialist and marxist feminists do not see
culture as the whole of social life but rather as only one arena of
social production and therefore as only one area of feminist
struggle" (ibid, p. 7).  The authors differentiate materialist
feminism from marxist feminism by indicating that it is the end
result of several discourses (historical materialism, marxist and
radical feminism, and postmodern and psychoanalytic theories of
meaning and subjectivity) among which the postmodern input, in
their view, is the source of its defining characteristics.
Nevertheless, in the last paragraphs of the introduction there is
a return to the discussion of marxist feminism, its critiques of
the idealist features of postmodernism and the differences between
the postmodern and the historical materialist or marxist analyses
of representations of identity.  But, they point out, theoretical
conflicts do not occur in isolation from class conflicts and the
latter affect the divisions among professional feminists and their
class allegiances.  Feminists are divided in their attitudes
towards capitalism and their understanding of the material
conditions of oppression;  to be a feminist is not necessarily to
be anticapitalist and to be a materialist feminist is not
equivalent to being socialist or even critical of the status quo.
In fact, "work that claims the signature "materialist feminism"
shares much in common with cultural feminism, in that it does not
set out to explain or change the material realities that link
women's oppression to class" (ibid, p.9).  Marxist feminism, on the
other hand, does make the connection between the oppression of
women and capitalism and this is why the purpose of their book,
according to the authors, is "to reinsert into materialist feminism
-- especially in those overdeveloped sectors where this collection
will be most widely read -- those (untimely) marxist feminist
knowledges that the drift to cultural politics in postmodern
feminism has suppressed.  It is our hope that in so doing this
project will contribute to the emergence of feminisms' third wave
and its revival as a critical force for transformative social
change (ibid, p. 9).

Martha E. Gimenez
Department of Sociology
University of Colorado at Boulder
http://csf.colorado.edu/gimenez/