Companion to Feminist Studies. Группа авторов
Читать онлайн книгу.
strategy of compartmentalization and obfuscation, in that it masks the totality and coherency of systems of oppression and, moreover, removes theorization from its grounding in the lived experience of social relations. She directed the main thrust of this criticism toward psychology and psychoanalysis, by which many French Marxist theorists were attracted and via which they sought to explain the relationship between men and women and reconcile the “subjectivity/affect/sexuality” trio with Marxist materialism. This “Freudo‐Marxism” was popularized in France through the writings of such theorists as Jacques Lacan (1966) and Louis Althusser 1976 [1970]. According to Delphy, the attempt at reconciliation was a failure, due to the “exorbitant pretention” of psychoanalysis to be more than a theory of interpretation of subjectivity, but subjectivity itself, thus positioning psychoanalytic theorists as the only ones qualified to discuss it (Delphy 1998a, p. 279). Accepting this pretention meant accepting the entry of the enemy, “idealism” (understood in a Marxian sense – see below), into historical materialism.
For Delphy, feminist theory, in that it seeks to explain and combat oppression, must also, to be coherent, be a theory of history, given that the relationship of male domination of women has been constituted socially, thus, by definition, historically (Delphy 1998a, pp. 271–4):
A feminist interpretation of history is thus “materialist” in a broad sense, that is, its premises lead it to consider intellectual production as the product of social relationships, and to consider the latter as relationships of domination.
(Delphy 1998a, p. 274, my translation)
French materialist feminism is thus a radical departure from Marxist analysis even as it remains grounded in historical materialism, as well as a refusal of the then fashionable recourse to psychoanalysis as a way of dealing with what Marxist scholars understood as “subjectivity” (women remained relegated to this latter domain). Within the French feminist movement, the divergence between materialist feminists (also known as revolutionary feminists, and later, due to transatlantic influence, radical feminists) and Marxist feminists (féministes lutte de classes, who by and large were not tempted by Freudo‐Marxism either) was as strong as that between radical feminists and socialist feminists in the UK and the US.
French materialist feminists similarly rejected biological essentialism, just as Beauvoir, from whom they drew such inspiration, had famously done in 1949: “on ne naît pas femme, on le devient” (one is not born, but rather becomes, Woman) (Beauvoir 1949, Vol. I, p. 285). That is, “becoming woman” is a process of socialization that is at once material and ideological: there is no “feminine nature” or “essence” that is not the product of social relations. I note in passing that this celebrated sentence of Beauvoir's is one of her most mistranslated and misinterpreted (see Winter 1999). The import of the original sentence is that “one is not born this thing called Woman, one becomes this thing through socialization,” and that meaning is made very clear in the chapter in which it appears (“Childhood”), the first of the final section of Volume I, titled “Education/Training” (Formation). Radical lesbian theorist Monique Wittig – whose work, like that of other radical lesbians such as Colette Guillaumin, is grounded in French materialist feminism – was later to extrapolate that analysis to argue that because lesbians refuse to “become woman” within the system of heterosexuality, they can be said in fact not to be “women” in that Beauvoirian sense, “not economically, nor politically, nor ideologically. For in fact what makes a woman is a particular social relation to a man” (Wittig 2001 [1980], p. 63: my translation).
Delphy and other materialist feminists, and later, radical lesbians, thus took strong exception to the tendency in France known as “Psychanalyse et politique” (or Psyképo), which drew heavily on Lacanian psychoanalysis and produced a strongly biologizing framing of women within social relations. Delphy also famously criticized Annie LeClerc's book Parole de femme (1974) for its celebrating of women's biology and femininity (Delphy 1998c [1976]; see also Jackson 1996, 42 ff). This sort of celebration of women's “difference” through countervalorizing of constructions of femininity that are usually deployed to keep women down was comparable to the “compensatory sur‐evaluation” of racialized groups, using similar strategies, as famously discussed by Colette Guillaumin (1972).
The Delphy–Barrett and McIntosh Debate
In 1979, Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh published a critique of Delphy in the first issue of the British journal Feminist Review. Barrett and McIntosh take Delphy to task for arguing that the oppression of women has “a material rather than an ideological basis,” using Delphy's refutation of Freudo‐Marxism as the basis for their claim. Yet, this reading seems to be based on a misunderstanding of Delphy's argument and indeed the vocabulary she uses. Delphy does not refute “ideology” in either of the two essays discussed above (Delphy 1998a, b), nor indeed anywhere else in her writing; indeed, in her reply to Barrett and McIntosh published in 1982, she affirms the contrary, and emphasizes the inextricable link between the economic and the ideological (Delphy 2001).
The term she uses in the writings to which Barrett and McIntosh refer is not ideology but “idealism,” and she uses it in a Marxian sense. Marx's critique of “idealism” was not a refutation of the role of ideology per se; it was rather a refusal of the Hegelian premise that the starting point for understanding the world and the means for acting upon it were human contemplation. Marx argued rather than the material conditions of people's lives were a necessary starting point not only for reflecting upon the world but for acting to change it. Indeed, in his Theses on Feuerbach, a series of preparatory notes for a book he authored with Engels on, precisely, ideology (The German Ideology, 1932), Marx famously critiqued philosophers for seeking to understand the essence of the human in a solely ideational way, divorced from economic and social relations, and thus to understand the world in various ways without acting upon it, where the point was to act upon the world in order to change it (Marx 1845).
Similarly, Delphy's materialism is grounded in the understanding that, as Stevi Jackson puts it, “ideas in themselves cannot be seen as the cause of any form of social division or oppression. On the contrary, inequalities are rooted in actual social practices” (Jackson 1996, p. 38), and ideology develops not in isolation from these social practices but as a means of legitimizing them. Barrett and McIntosh thus misread Delphy's original argument: Delphy does not ignore ideology but locates it as the product of material relations of domination.
This, however, is not Barrett and McIntosh's only criticism. They also disagree with Delphy's analysis of marriage and domestic labor as a mode of production that is separate and different from the mode of production in waged work analyzed by Marx, and indeed historically anterior to it. Instead, they place the accent on the primacy of class as the fundamental oppressive structure. We find in this disagreement the core of the analytical and political difference between Marxist and radical feminists on both sides of the Channel, and a foreshadowing of what would become the major poststructuralist disagreement with radical feminism and some expressions of Marxist feminism: the place and role of discourse in the relationship of male domination of women. Barrett and McIntosh also dismiss Delphy for being too “polemical/political” and not sufficiently “theoretical”; they do so, however, in an article that is itself polemical.
In 1982, Delphy published a reply to Barrett and McIntosh, in which she argued that she had been disingenuously misrepresented, and criticized the authors for hierarchizing “theory” (valorized) and “politics” (devalorized). The core of her argument, however, is that Barrett and McIntosh, in criticizing Delphy for using Marx's method (materialism) without adhering to Marx's analysis of the relations of domination (solely located in capitalist class exploitation), have, like other Marxist scholars, confused Marx's method on the one hand with his analysis of capitalism on the other hand, or rather, “reduc[ed] the former to the latter” (Delphy 2001, p. 128, my translation). Delphy further argues that Marxists posit this amalgamated method‐analysis as the only possible interpretation of contemporary society. This totalizing approach that posits “Marx” as a whole package to take or to leave is a form of both deification and reification, a theoretical and political border‐policing that prohibits those who do not accept the