Marxist and Socialist Feminism

Rationing health care by ordeals is likely to have different effects on women and men, and on distinct groups of women. I show how such putative effects of ordeals are relevant to achieving gender justice. I explain why some ordeals may disproportionately set back women’s interest in discretionary time, health and access to health care, and may undermine equality of opportunity for positions of advantage. Some ordeals protect the interests of the worse-off women yet set back the interests of better-off (...) women in equal opportunities. I suggest how we can use ordeal design to advance particular aims of gender justice. (shrink)

Marx is generally reckoned to have had too little to say about what has come to be defined as ‘social reproduction’, largely as a consequence of too narrow a focus on industrial production, and a relative disregard for issues of gender. This paper argues in contrast that the approach he developed with Engels and in Capital, Volume 1, provides a powerful framework for its analysis. After an introductory discussion of recent literature on social reproduction the second section sets out Marx’s (...) approach to the ‘production of life, both of one’s own in labour and of fresh life in procreation’. The third addresses his account of reproduction in Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 23. The fourth and fifth compare the relationship of the family to industry and exchange as depicted in Capital and in the present day respectively. The conclusion suggests some implications for theories of social reproduction. (shrink)

Since 2015, the ‘refugee crisis’ is possibly the most photographed humanitarian crisis in history. Photographs taken, for instance, in Lesvos, Greece, and Bodrum, Turkey, were instrumental in generating waves of public support for, and populist opposition to “welcoming refugees” in Europe. But photographs do not circulate in a vacuum; this book explores the visual economy of the ‘refugee crisis,’ showing how the reproduction of images is structured by, and secures hierarchies of gender, sexuality, and ‘race,’ essential to the functioning of (...) bordered nation-states. Taking photography not only as the object of research, but innovating the method of photographìa— the material trace of writing/grafì with light/phos—this book urges us to view images and their reproduction critically. Part theoretical text, part visual essay, "Reproducing Refugees" vividly shows how institutional violence underpins both the spectacularity and the banality of ‘crisis.’ This book goes about synthesising visual studies with queer, feminist, postcolonial, post-structuralist, and post-Marxist theories. "Reproducing Refugees: Photographìa of a Crisis" offers theoretical frameworks and methodological tools to critically analyse representations, both those circulated through hegemonic institutions, and those generated from ‘below’. It carves a space between logos and praxis, ways of knowing and ways of doing, by offering a new visual language that problematises reified categories such as that of the ‘refugee’ and makes possible disruptive, alternative, resistant perceptions. The book contributes to the fields of migration and border studies, critically engaging visual narratives drawn from migration movements to question dominant categories and frameworks, from a decolonial, no-borders, queer feminist perspective. (shrink)

This text was prompted by a forum discussing the legacy of Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, twenty-five years after its publication. In this short essay, I explore the book’s influence on the fields of Marxism, post-Marxism, and beyond. With the problematic of heritage and legacy in mind, I raise the questions of sexual difference and dissemination as that which comes to interrupt the genealogical logic of inheritance understood as filiation and reproduction. I show that Derrida’s book, besides questioning reception and (...) influence, yet remains to be read, especially in light of ongoing archival research on Derrida’s numerous engagements with Marx and Marxist thought in a series of unpublished seminars from the 1970s. This is done more specifically through a reading of an unpublished seminar from 1974-1975, dealing with the Marxian concepts of ideology and division of labor – which Derrida interrogates more particularly in relation to sex, sexuality, and sexual differences. This text was published in the section "Ambivalent Promises—Reproductions of the Subject: A Forum on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx after 25 Years, Part IV", Contexto Internacional, 42 (1), pp. 125-148. (shrink)

Cet essai présente une description de plusieurs travaux inédits de Jacques Derrida au sujet de Marx et d'Althusser datant des années 1960 et 1970. Au-delà du travail philologique, il s'agit aussi d'une étude théorique de notions telles que 'idéologie', 'fétichisme', 'reproduction', 'division du travail', 'différence sexuelle', 'domination', 'économie politique', 'matérialisme dialectique', ou 'production culturelle' — tout autant à travers les textes marxistes que dans les lectures déconstructives qu'en propose alors Derrida. Durant les années 1970, dans le cadre de son séminaire, (...) Derrida s'efforce de penser une autre économie politique, au-delà de l'économie du propre qu'il identifie aussi bien chez les économistes classiques que chez leurs critiques marxistes. Ces lectures détaillées et combattives de textes marxistes restent aujourd'hui inédites. Leur prise en compte contribue à redéfinir l'image de Derrida et de la déconstruction, en témoignant de ses discussions très avancées de Marx, d'Althusser, et de la pensée marxiste — et ce dès la fin des années 1960 et le début des années 1970, plus de 20 ans avant la publication de Spectres de Marx (1993). -/- Une version plus courte de cet article fut traduite en espagnol par Ramiro Parodi, et publiée en 2019 dans le numéro 7 de la revue Demarcaciones — numéro consacré au 25ème anniversaire de la publication de Spectres de Marx. (shrink)

El texto Feminism for the 99% A Manifesto, es la caracterización de un feminismo anticapitalista que considera imprescindible erigir vı́nculos con el marxismo, antirracismo, ambientalismo, derechos de los obreros y migrantes. Lo anterior busca distanciarse de posturas como el “feminismo liberal” cuya estrategia es la incorporación de la mitad de las mujeres de elite a altos cargos de las compañı́as, lo cual es criticado por las autoras, ya que no involucra un “feminismo de las masas” (de ahı́ el 99%), sino (...) de una minorı́a de mujeres privilegiadas. El libro contiene once tesis que identifican la crisis del capitalismo como origen de las problemáticas actuales y un epı́logo que consta a su vez de cinco partes, en donde se proponen las soluciones a tales problemáticas. (shrink)

Recent studies have revealed how workers’ movements adapted republicanism into a language of anticapitalism in the nineteenth century. Much less attention has been paid, however, to the role feminists played in this process. This essay addresses this oversight by introducing the voices of the utopian socialists under July Monarchy France. These socialists insisted that there could be no social revolution without sexual revolution. Although they are often positioned outside of the republican tradition, this essay argues that the utopian socialists are (...) better understood as rendering the legacy of classical and French republicanism compatible with nascent workers’ movements in the 1830s. By foregrounding the feminist Flora Tristan, this essay shows how utopian socialists weaponized republican tropes to address the social question, thereby expanding what a republican critique of capitalism could look like. (shrink)

This essay reflects upon the category of femonationalism as theorised in Sara Farris's book, In the Name of Women's Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism, with a focus on her critique of theories of populism. Farris's approach, it is argued, productively pinpoints the exceptional position of Muslim and non-western migrant women in the reproduction of the material conditions of social reproduction in western Europe. However, the force of Farris's Marxist theorisation of femonationalism is partly undermined by the absence of any reference (...) to the conditions of the countries these women come from. A critique of neoliberal capitalism, which centres on the problem of Muslim migrant workers in Europe, should not be indifferent to different complex configurations of Islam with capitalism. Furthermore, while Farris's account of the power politics of different factions in Europe and their fusion of reaction and emancipation is invaluable, she does not articulate her insights into a global politics of emancipation or anti-capitalist struggle. In other words, the book does not address the question of how migrant women could attempt to liberate themselves from their ‘victimhood’ under the conditions lucidly depicted in this book. (shrink)

Laruelle's version of Marxism is termed "non-Marxism" whereby the "non-" is stated to stand for bracketing out Marxism's "philosophical sufficiency" and seeking to radicalise Marxism. It stands for the Laruellian non-philosophical variant of Marxism. It is precisely the non-philosophical use of Marx that has enabled the analysis at hand, demonstrating that at the heart of patriarchy and capitalism stands philosophical reason and its treatment of the Animal (both human and non-human). Women are de-realised even as use value and what is (...) exchanged in patriarchy is abstraction or the commodified femininity, which serves the multiplication of the surplus value or rather the pure value of masculinity. Just as the “C” in the M-C-M formula can be expunged as it is a mere relay for the endless repetition of the M-M automaton, so, to paraphrase Marx, because not an atom of matter enters the composition of woman as commodity, the material woman can be excluded from the equation P(hallus)-P(hallus). The less physicality in the pure value of femininity the more perfect the finite automaton of patriarchy. The fetishised femininity, as any form of commodity, is reified abstraction. The token of femininity is exchanged only in order for masculinity to engender itself. Masculinity (or the pure value of the Phallus), speculative reason, and rationalism are endowed with the same contempt for the physical, narcissistic circularity of thought and disgust for the woman outside the signifying automaton of fetishisation. (shrink)

Este ensayo presenta una descripción de los escritos inéditos de Jacques Derrida sobre Marx y Louis Althusser en la década de 1970, y un estudio de conceptos como ideología, diferencia sexual, reproducción, violencia, dominación o hegemonía en perspectiva deconstructiva. Se trata de pensar en una otra economía, más allá de la economía del cuerpo propio. El artículo fue publicado en el Volumen 7 de la Revista Demarcaciones, "a 25 años de Espectros de Marx.".

he paper analyses migration flows from the Philippines in two gendered occupations: domestic helpers and computer programmers. The international division of labour theory claims that foreign investment determines migration from developing countries, especially of women, towards low-skilled gendered occupations in developed countries. This paper shows that the division of labour is neither gendered nor international in the predicted sense. For instance, data from Philippines Overseas Employment Agency shows that the theory is Eurocentric as Northern America and Europe are destinations for (...) only 3 per cent of domestic workers’ flows. The paper argues that neo-Marxism creates bias in gender and migration research and hinders understanding of important gendered effects concerning migrants. Two examples of such gendered effects are highlighted here: the higher vulnerability to legislative change of migrant men employed as domestic workers in Italy and the higher penetration of women into computer programming in the migrant flows to the U.S. (shrink)

Neoliberalism, we are told, has “seduced” feminism. What is meant is that the libertarian and democratic hopes that have scoped this radical social movement have been reconfigured and re-energised by neoliberal project that models all our freedoms upon the market. Misgivings about “seductions” and “betrayals” require that feminist theory adopts the role of the arbiter on goals and meanings and this puts strains upon its deep commitment to democratic epistemologies. The following paper finds that the leading theorist of feminism as (...) critique in a neoliberal age has failed to fully grasp the normative tension that is involved. Nancy Fraser fails to rethink the tasks of critique in terms that is sufficient to its role as arbiter on meanings. I suggest that this rethinking might be done without betraying the demands of a democratic epistemology if we reconstruct the emancipatory idealisations that underpin Fraser’s account of a democratic epistemology. While this rendering of feminism as critique retrieves a representation of feminist ideals that might unmask neoliberal distortions, it does so without betraying the responsiveness to self-interpreted needs that is also claimed by a critical and democratic feminist theory. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the transition and its meaning of the central figure used by Donna J. Haraway. Along with her achievement in primatology and gender, her prior manifesto about cyborgs, in which she utilized the image of hybrids from science fiction as a tool for analyzing actual women, has received significant attention and has made her an essential researcher in feminist science studies. On the other hand, her recent concern has led her to publish another (...) manifesto about species relationships, discussing ethics in coexistence and cohabitation. Influenced by her complicated portrayal of “companion species” and the expression of artless intimacy with dogs, previous studies had often incorrectly interpreted Haraway’s new manifesto as a simple renunciation of her older notion of cyborg by the new companion species. The present study interrogated the validity of those interpretations by examining other texts and statements by Haraway published between the two manifestoes. As a result, this study elucidates that both manifestoes include a sustained inclination to create a specific type of solidarity to replace heteronormativity and human exceptionalism. It provides a broader philosophical basis for the consideration of difference and solidarity. (shrink)

The nurturing that produces love, care, and solidarity constitutes a discrete social system of affective relations. Affective relations are not social derivatives, subordinate to economic, political, or cultural relations in matters of social justice. Rather, they are productive, materialist human relations that constitute people mentally, emotionally, physically, and socially. As love laboring is highly gendered, and is a form of work that is both inalienable and noncommodifiable, affective relations are therefore sites of political import for social justice. We argue that (...) it is impossible to have gender justice without relational justice in loving and caring. Moreover, if love is to thrive as a valued social practice, public policies need to be directed by norms of love, care, and solidarity rather than norms of capital accumulation. To promote equality in the affective domains of loving and caring, we argue for a four-dimensional rather than a three-dimensional model of social justice as proposed by Nancy Fraser. Such a model would align relational justice, especially in love laboring, with the equalization of resources, respect, and representation. (shrink)

What it would mean for phenomenology to move in an ontological direction that would render its relevance to contemporary political movement less ambiguous while at the same time retaining those aspects of its method that are epistemologically and politically advantageous? The present study crafts the beginnings of a response to this question by examining four configurations of consciousness that seem to be respectively tied to certain oppressive contexts and certain kinds of oppressed bodies: 1. false consciousness, 2. bad faith, 3. (...) double consciousness, and 4. se faire objet (making oneself an object). Such a comparison both promises to widen our understanding of the ontology of consciousness in general and generate a suggestive vision of what it would take to follow through, ontologically speaking, on the idea that consciousness is fundamentally and irrevocably of a bodily nature. (shrink)

Although G. A. Cohen's work on Marx was flawed by a lack of gender-awareness, his work on Rawls owes much of its success to feminist inspiration. Cohen appeals effectively to feminism to rebut the basic structure objection to his egalitarian ethos, and could now appeal to feminism in response to Andrew Williams's publicity objection to this ethos. The article argues that Williams's objection is insufficient to rebut Cohen's ethos, inapplicable to variants of this ethos, and in conflict with plausible gender-egalitarian (...) ethoses. The article also advocates an understanding of basic structuralism and publicity consistent with feminism, and argues that Rawlsians need not reject plausible domestic egalitarian ethoses on either publicity or liberty grounds. To Michèle, G. A. Cohen's Harriet Taylor. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to argue the thesis that, 25 years after the fall of communism, with the exception of former Yugoslavia, there has been and still is, a lack of „women’s movements“ in the post-communist countries. The author also proposes some explanations as to why there are dozens of women’s organizations but no women’s movements. In order to support her thesis, Raynova emphasizes the difference between “women’s movements”, “feminist movements” and “social movements”, and shows the weakness of (...) some current definitions. Instead of a definition, she indicates the conditions for a women’s movement, which are: (1.) women’s oppression and discrimination as a prevalent situation, which motivates a movement when that situation is perceived as intolerable; (2.) ideas and concrete strategies on how to proceed in order to change this situation; (3.) some kind of organization or leading personalities, able to coordinate and unite women in a mass movement and to ensure continuity of action until the goals of the movement are achieved; and (4.) large masses of women who are motivated and ready to fight resolutely for changing their situation. The provided analyses show that these conditions have not been always given, but that the persisting problems of women’s problems can be resolved only if women engage more actively in civil society so as to enforce their claims. (shrink)

How can we radically change the inhuman conditions existing in the world today? In this paper, I answer this question by explaining the how, when, and who of radical socio-political transformation. We need both critical theorizing and transformative practice to explain how we can change the world. We must theorize the moment of the limit in the objective domain of power to answer when the transformative agency becomes possible. I introduce the idea of the “political subject-in-outline” that moves within the (...) tension of minimal closure and permanent openness to theorize a who, which remains inclusive and has the strength to transform the status quo. Marx’s and Adorno’s thought remains central to theorize socio-political transformation today. (shrink)

This article is a critical examination of Nancy Fraser's contrast of early second-wave feminism and contemporary global feminism in “Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History,” (Fraser ). Fraser contrasts emancipatory early second-wave feminism, strongly critical of capitalism, with feminism in the age of neoliberalism as being in a “dangerous liaison” with neoliberalism. I argue that Fraser's historical account of 1970s mainstream second-wave feminism is inaccurate, that it was not generally anti-capitalist, critical of the welfare system, or challenging the priority (...) of paid labor. I claim Fraser mistakenly takes a minority feminist position as mainstream. I further argue that Fraser's account of feminism today echoes arguments from James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer (2001) to Hester Eisenstein (), but such arguments ignore contemporary feminist minority positions. I challenge Fraser's arguments that feminism legitimates neoliberalism to women, that women's NGOs are simply service-providers enabling the state to withdraw services, and that criticisms of microcredit lending programs can be generalized into criticisms of women's feminism and women's NGOs today. I argue that these claims are vast over-generalizations and ignore countertrends. I give empirical evidence to support my objections by considering women's activities in post-communist European countries, which Fraser discusses. (shrink)

Why does the world have the pattern of patriarchy it currently possesses? Why have patriarchal practices and institutions evolved and changed in the ways they have tended to over time in human societies? This paper explores these general questions by integrating a feminist analysis of patriarchy with the central insights of the functionalist interpretation of historical materialism advanced by G. A. Cohen. The paper has two central aspirations: first, to help narrow the divide between analytical Marxism and feminism by redressing (...) the former's neglect of the important role female labor has played, and continues to play, in shaping human history. Second, by developing the functionalist account of historical materialism in order to take patriarchy seriously, we can derive useful insights for diagnosing the emancipatory challenges that women face in the world today. The degree and form of patriarchy present in any particular society is determined by the productive forces it has had at its disposal. According to historical materialism, technological, material, and medical advances that ease the pressures on high fertility rates (such as the sanitation revolution, vaccinations, birth control, and so on) are the real driving forces behind the positive modulations to patriarchy witnessed in the twentieth century. (shrink)

This paper reconsiders Marcuse's Eros and Civilization from the perspective of Gayle Rubin's classic article “The Traffic in Women.” The primary goals of this comparison are to investigate the social and psychological mechanisms that perpetuate the archaic sex/gender system Rubin describes under current conditions of post-industrial capitalism; to open possible new avenues of analysis and liberatory praxis based on these authors’ applications of Marxist insights to cultural interpretations of Freud's writings; and to make clearer the role sexual repression continues to (...) play in all forms of oppression, even in a public world seemingly saturated with sex. (shrink)

Between Feminism and Materialism is a bold attempt to make sense of the relationship between feminist theory and capitalism. Addressing a number of philosophical problems that have engaged feminists over the last few decades--universals and reason, nature and essentialism, identity and non-identity, sex and gender, power and patriarchy, local and global--this innovative book breaks through feminist waves and explains the paradoxes of feminist theory by demonstrating the on-going relevance of dialectics and the concepts of exploitation, ideology, and reification. Drawing on (...) first, second, and third "waves" of feminist theory, this exciting combination of existentialism, phenomenology, and critical theory delivers a proactive feminism ready to respond to the challenges presented by our thoroughly modern times. (shrink)

In “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System” (Lugones 2007), I proposed to read the relation between the colonizer and the colonized in terms of gender, race, and sexuality. By this I did not mean to add a gendered reading and a racial reading to the already understood colonial relations. Rather I proposed a rereading of modern capitalist colonial modernity itself. This is because the colonial imposition of gender cuts across questions of ecology, economics, government, relations with the spirit world, and (...) knowledge, as well as across everyday practices that either habituate us to take care of the world or to destroy it. I propose this framework not as an abstraction from lived experience, but as a lens that enables us to see what is hidden from our understandings of both race and gender and the relation of each to normative heterosexuality. (shrink)

The group Féminin Masculin Avenir was founded in autumn 1967. It took part in the events of May 68, and subsequently became Féminisme Marxisme Action. It then dissolved into the women¹s liberation movement (MLF) when the latter started in 1970. Le groupe Féminin Masculin Avenir s’est constitué dès l’automne 1967. Il a participé aux événements de mai 68, devenant alors Féminisme Marxisme Action. Il s’est ensuite dissous dans le Mouvement de libération des femmes lorsque celui-ci a éclaté en 1970.

This paper provides a memoir and overview of Iris Young's philosophy and a discussion of her account of gender identity.

This article discusses the fortuitous genesis of the book of my conversations with Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy and traces some of the intellectual and philosophical sources that informed the specific questions and approaches that inform the dialogue. Davis’ relationships to Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer, as well as to Foucault, are discussed. Similarly, Davis’ place within a critical black American political-philosophical tradition is analyzed. The essay focuses mainly, however, on the way in which Davis’ work on the prison industrial (...) complex profiles an unsuspected contribution to political philosophy that links up the disciplinary origins of American democracy with its racial contract to give rise to the prison contract. In the tradition of Charles Mills, Davis’ radical theory of penality unmasks and denounces the over-determined relationship between surplus punishment and the racial character of the US polity in terms of theproductivity of the prison system. (shrink)

Both feminists and Marxists have realized that it is necessary to avoid reductionism and recognize the intersections between gender, race, and class. But we donot have a methodology sufficient to develop this idea. I argue that Bertell Ollman’s book Dance of the Dialectic provides a way to think about intersectionality usingMarx’s methodology of abstraction and his theory of internal relations. As a relational abstraction, gender is intersectional. We may legitimately focus on it, as longas we treat it dialectically. We can (...) recognize that it is not homogeneous but stands in relations of identity and/or contradiction with other social relations. (shrink)

Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud provided powerful accounts of systematic interested ignorance. Fifty years ago, Anglo-American philosophies of science stigmatized Marx's and Freud's analyses as models of irrationality. They remain disvalued today, at a time when virtually all other humanities and social science disciplines have returned to extract valuable insights from them. Here the argument is that there are reasons distinctive to philosophy why such theories were especially disvalued then and why they remain so today. However, there are even better (...) reasons today for philosophy to break from this history and find more fruitful ways to engage with systematic interested ignorance. (shrink)

: My contribution intends to show that the traditional philosophical concept of work (Marx, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marcuse, Arendt, Habermas, and the rest) leaves out a crucial dimension. Work is reduced, for example, to the interaction with nature, the problem of recognition, or economic self-preservation. But work also establishes an ethical relation having to do with the needs of others and to the common good—a view of work that should be of particular interest for feminist and gender philosophy. This dimension makes (...) visible, as socially necessary work, the so-called reproductive sphere pertaining to giving birth and raising children, but it also generalizes the aspect of care, which plays a significant role in traditional woman's work. The ethical relation to the other is a characteristic feature of human work and in this sense, the possibility of working is a part of a good life. (shrink)

Have we entered a historical moment of 'post-feminism'? This volume presents a timely and convincing 'no'. These essays demonstrate that there is a new generation of French women who take up questions of equality and difference from a position distinct from either first or second wave feminism, a position that often attempts to move beyond the binary of equality and/or difference to a new form of the individual.