Companion to Feminist Studies. Группа авторов
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of capitalist power.
This anthology, and Hennessy's (1993) work Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse, notwithstanding their attention to debates within feminism at that time, nonetheless create an impression of an organic transnational development of a “materialist feminism” that, despite its geohistorical spread and its venturing into new areas, supposedly came from a relatively homogenous analytical and political core.
In this chapter, we will see that the story of “materialist feminism” is far less straightforward. It presents significant historical and geographical variations, and not all those dubbed “materialist feminists” by Hennessy and Ingraham may themselves identify as such, or not in the same way. French materialist feminists, for example, were much closer in their analysis and politics to radical feminists of the Anglo world than they were to most Anglo‐world self‐identified materialist feminists.
This chapter, then, will explore the historical and sometimes parallel, sometimes distinct, and sometimes conflictual development of these three distinct understandings of materialist feminism: first, that developed by Christine Delphy and subsequently others in France in the 1970s (“French materialist feminism”); second, that developed in the UK by Kuhn and others (“British materialist feminism”); and third, the later use of the term by Hennessy and Ingraham to reconcile Marxian materialist analysis with intersectional considerations and to respond to the challenge of postmodernism (“US materialist feminism”).
Although all these groups of materialist feminists positioned themselves quite explicitly in relation to Marxism, and adapted Marx's historical materialism to explain male domination as grounded in material relations, they differed both from Marxist feminism and from each other in their analysis. Common to all strands, however, was the premise that gender is not natural or presocial but socially constructed through history as a material power relation. Materialist feminisms differ from postmodernism or Butlerian social‐constructionism (Butler 1990) – which also interrogate gender as open to change – in that they foreground the material (social, economic), structural, and ideological rather than (only) discursive or cultural underpinnings of these social relations. Indeed, their focus is more firmly on the social and economic relations than on individual positionalities, although US materialist feminism arguably attaches more attention to the latter, as do US social sciences, and US feminism, more generally (see also my discussion of Carol Stabile's work below).
Before proceeding, I should make clear my use of the terms “Marxian” and “Marxist.” I use the former term to refer to theories and interpretations of societies and politics that are grounded in or strongly influenced by either Marx's historical materialism or his theory of capital and the relations of production. The latter term refers either to intellectuals who self‐identify as such, or, more explicitly, to Marx‐inspired political movements, whether aligned with Communism (which in the 1970s and 1980s was far more mainstream in France than in the Anglo world) or with extreme‐left groups (such as Trotskyists or Maoists). As for the terms “Marxist feminist” and “socialist feminist,” these terms have often been used interchangeably, although the distinction is ostensibly that Marxist feminists have prioritized class and capitalist relations, while socialist feminists incorporated some radical feminist analyses of patriarchy, developing a “dual systems” theory whereby capitalism and patriarchy represented two systems of oppression that co‐existed and interacted. Further distinctions exist outside the Anglo world, for example in Continental Western Europe, where Marxist party politics have been more influential, and so the distinction between “Marxist feminist” (or in France, féministes lutte de classes: class‐struggle feminists) and “socialist feminist” more closely resembles the distinction between Anglo‐world “socialist feminists” and “(liberal) social democrats.” (For more on the Anglo‐world history of “Marxist” versus “socialist” feminism see Ehrenreich 1997 [1976]; Hartmann 1979.)
One more important comment to make before proceeding is to dispel the occasional confusion, particularly in the US, between materialist feminism and “material feminism,” as developed by Karen Barad in the late 2000s. Barad's material feminism revolves around concepts such as “agential realism” and “onto‐epistemology” and draws on the work of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and quantum physics (Barad 2007). It has no genealogical link with materialist feminism, but rather with poststructuralism, and will not be a focus of this chapter.
French Materialist Feminism
In 1970, an article titled “L'ennemi principal” (the main enemy) appeared in a special issue of the French journal Partisans devoted to the theme of “Women's liberation.” Signed Christine Delphy, the article took issue with the Marxist conceptualization of women's oppression as the result of capitalism. Like radical feminists across the Atlantic (Millett 1978 [1970]; Firestone 1979 [1970]), and drawing, like them, inspiration from Beauvoir (1949), Delphy framed the social relationship between women and men as one of class struggle, and sexuality and the family as key sites of that struggle (Delphy 1998a, b). Where Delphy's analysis was different, or perhaps went a little further, than some US radical feminist analyses, was in its use of Marxian materialism as a method to “analyze the relationships between the nature of domestic goods and services and the mode of production of those goods and services” (1998a, p. 34, my translation). That relationship of domestic and sexual production/reproduction would subsequently be termed sexage by Colette Guillaumin 2012 [1978]. Guillaumin's term evoked two others: esclavage (slavery) and servage (serfdom) – both of which Delphy had also referred to as a point of comparison with the appropriation of women's domestic labor, as qualitatively different from the appropriation of the labor of waged workers. At the same time, Delphy differentiated – as did Guillaumin – the domestic mode of production from serfdom. Serfs produce labor in exchange for their keep, whereas women, even when they work for a wage outside the home and so technically “keep” themselves, nonetheless continue to supply domestic labor for free, thus taking on a double workload, one remunerated and one not. Moreover, for French materialist feminists, the appropriation of women within the family and sexuality goes beyond the simple appropriation of women's domestic labor, as it extends to those “goods and services” produced by women, including sexual and reproductive services. As such, women's labor within marriage and the family constitutes a specific mode of production (Delphy 1998a; Guillaumin 1992).
In a later essay “Pour un féminisme matérialiste” (for a materialist feminism) first published in the journal L'Arc in 1975, Christine Delphy argued that Marxian materialism, based on analysis of class struggle, was traversed by a profound contradiction in that it excluded women as a category of sociopolitical analysis. Marx, and Marxist theorists, either completely ignored women's existence or relegated anything to do with women to the realm of the objectively unknowable: the private, the subjective, the emotional, the sexual – and most especially the “natural” – in which “women” were objects rather than subjects of history and class struggle. Yet the revolt of women showed that the situation of women was not natural or inevitable in some biological sense, but socially constructed and thus resistible.
For Delphy, feminist theory necessarily takes as its starting point that resistance by women. For “the class of the proletariat is not the result of Marxist theory of capital; on the contrary, it is Marxist theory of capital that is founded on the necessary premise of the oppression of the proletariat” (1998a, p. 281, my translation). Similarly, women's resistance is not the result of feminist theory but its initiator. In other words, the epistemological starting point for any analysis of oppression is the situation, and struggles, of the oppressed. In this, Delphy is perhaps closer to Lukács 2000 [1923] than to Marx, and to all the standpoint epistemologies than have developed since Lukács, from Césaire (1950) to Sandoval (2000).
A system of knowledge production that takes as its starting point the oppression of women thus “constitutes an epistemological revolution” (Delphy 1998a, p. 277). It challenges not only the pretentions to neutrality of masculinist knowledge, but also the often elitist production of “theory” and the technocratic and often arbitrary division of knowledge into discrete “disciplines,” each with its own jealously‐guarded