A Review of 'Ideology and the Cultural Production of Gender' by Michele Barrett (original) (raw)
Related papers
Gender and Ideology: For a Marxist Critique of the Ideology of Gender
VIANA, Nildo. Gender and Ideology: For a Marxist Critique of the Ideology of Gender. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES, SOCIAL SCIENCES AND EDUCATION, v. 4, p. 1-7, 2017., 2017
The purpose of this paper is to discuss the issue of gender ideology in a critical and Marxist perspective. Criticism of the gender ideology is now a must, as well as present their social roots and their relationship to a particular historical period. Based on the critical analysis of the work of Joan Scott and his inspiring sources, especially Bourdieu, it seeks to show the ideological roots of gender conception. The present paper aims to discuss the issue of gender ideology. We won't do an archeology of genre term, as some have done 1 ,nor will pursue its etymological roots, nor its past uses, but only its recent use and its ideological character. The critique of gender ideology is, nowadays, a necessity as well as present its social roots and its bond with a certain historical period. Before we begin, let's clarify what we mean by ideology, since this is a polysemic term. Here we use the Marxist conception of ideology 2 , according to which it is a systematization of false consciousness, that is, a illusory thinking system. Ideology is a systematic way of false consciousness produced by the ideologists.What we term as gender ideology is the conception that places the construct 3 "gender" as a fundamental term of the analysis of the issue of women and even of society as a whole. We won't present here the most diverse works that discuss and use the construct "gender".We will elect one of the most cited and influential works on this issue for analysis, although other references are made throughout this text. It is the text of the historian Joan Scott 4 , Gender: A Usefull Category of Historical Analysis. Joan Scott presents in her text an overview of different conceptions of feminist thought and of the use of the construct (which she denominated category) genre. The various concepts are presented descriptively, with superficial observations, and the author's point of view is presented peripherally, with a minimum contribution to the discussion around the issue that is proposed to treat.In fact, this defect to take long descriptions of feminist conceptions, consisting of all or almost all of the text, is quite common and is repeated in Scott's article. She states that the term gender in its most recent use occurred among American feminists, "who wanted to insist on the fundamentally social quality of distinctions based on sex". This use was aiming to reject biological determinism that would be implicit in the use of the terms "sex" and "sexual difference". The term gender would present a relational view and would present men and women in reciprocal terms, preventing the separate study of both. But the author points out that more important than that is that gender "was a term offered by those who claimed that women's scholarship would fundamentally transform disciplinary paradigms" 5. A new methodology and epistemology would be with the term gender, giving it meaning. However, this position did not come right away: For the most part, the attempts of historians to theorize about gender have remained within tradicional social scientific frameworks, using longstanding formulations that provide universal causal explanations. These theories have been limited at best because they tend to 1 Stolke, 2004.
Notes on Gender in Marx's Capital
2017
As interest in Marxism and Feminism is reviving and Marx's views on 'gender' are receiving a new attention, some areas of agreement among feminists are emerging that also shape my approach to the subject.1 First, while denunciations of gender inequalities and patriarchal control in the family and society can be found in Marx's work from an early stage, it is agreed that Marx "did not have much to say on gender and the family" 2 and, even in Capital his views on the subject must be reconstructed from scattered observations. Nevertheless, Marx's work has given a significant contribution to the development of feminist theory, although not primarily based on his direct pronouncements on the subject. Not only has his historical materialist method helped demonstrate the constructed character of gender hierarchies and identities.3 Marx's analysis of capitalist accumulation and value creation have given feminists of my generation powerful tools to rethink t...
Femininities: a Way of Linking Socialism and Feminism?
Marxism, the Millennium and Beyond
The decline of socialist feminism When second wave feminism emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s Marxist or Socialist feminism was a vigorous part of the new ideas which emerged. By the late 1990s publishers' catalogues usually contained only some socialist feminist classics plus one or two books at most which aimed to revive materialist feminism. The reasons for this are legion, and a thorough analysis of them would take up the whole chapter. In no particular order, the following are certainly important. Then, Communist societies could be held up as a distorted but possibly promising illustration of the possibilities held out by communism for women: the percentage of Russian doctors or engineers who were women, good collective child care facilities and the ready availability of abortion could be seen as positive features, even if the lack of consumer goods, unreconstructed Russian males and the lack of democracy rendered Russia ultimately unattractive as a model. With the collapse of communism, however, the long and bloody history of the revolution and then of Stalinism could hardly be seen as a price worth paying to achieve a society whose leaders finally gave up on their own system, still less the dreadful suffering caused by the post-Communist Russian economy of today. A second set of problems has to do with whether Marxism provides a satisfactory description and set of guidelines for today's capitalist societies. Whether one turns to the class structure with the decline of the industrial working class and rise of a new middle class of technicians, teachers and service workers, the economic analysis with its problems about the declining rate of profit and the transformation of value into price, or the political analysis which has problems making sense of M. Cowling et al. (eds.), Marxism, the Millennium and Beyond
Studies in East European Thought, 2003
This article reflects on the difficultrelationship between Gender Studies and socalled `Culturology' in post-Soviet academia.Both approaches deal with culture but the modesof analysis differ significantly. The articleargues that Western feminism and Gender Studiesas its academic output challenged the methodsand paradigm of cultural analysis inpost-Soviet academia which was and still isimplicitly based on Marxist-Leninist premisesof social research. The article then goes on toanalyse why Gender Studies as well as Feminismare often perceived as `imported products' forwhich reason their reception in post-Soviethumanities is rather problematic. Brieflyspeaking, the intellectual potential andmethodological grounds of Gender Studiesremain questionable for scholars in post-Sovietuniversities.
Karl Marx's Critique of Political Economy and Measurement of Gender Inequality
Karl Marx"s critique of political economy is a sublation or Aufhebung of classical political economy, for opening up the frontiers of its future as a science, aimed at self-emancipation of the wage-labourer. He divided his corresponding task into 6 topics: capital, landed property, wage-labour; the state, foreign trade and, world market. His output continues to be published within the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe[MEGA] I-IV. Some of these materials are in the publication mode; the rest are either in the research mode or, are contained in his correspondences. Everything therein is open ended. One of the open issues here is that of wage-labour. Wage-labour and wageless-labour together constitute the universe of discourse of labour in the world as a whole. Both kinds of labour can be taken care of by time use studies. This paper proposes a research programme for extending the wage-labour related component of Marx"s critique of classical political economy, by utilizing the data generated on wageless-labour in gender inequality revealing time use studies.
Gendercraft: Marxism-Feminism, Reproduction, and the Blind Spot of Money
Science & Society 85:1, 2021
The plausibility of "gendered exploitation" as a sine qua non of capitalism, as articulated by both classic Marxist-feminism since the 1970s and more recently by authors of social reproduction theory, stands or falls with the evaluation of Marx's theory of value. From the standpoint of both Marx's monetary theory of value and the problem of quanti cation, the use of "women's oppression" in capitalist social reproduction appears to be questionable. This also necessitates a deeper analysis of the use of "gender" in the wider eld of pertinent Marxist-feminist literature. Arguments for "gendered exploitation" often hinge on unsound premises that introduce a naturalizing view of social relations. Analogous to Barbara and Karen Fields' intervention against "Racecraft," the term "Gendercraft" may represent this argumentative move. The notion of gender as the site of speci cally capitalist exploitation is thus challenged and countered with a new emphasis on struggles against the wage relation as the site of anticapitalist resistance.