Dialectic & Dystopia - draft of chapter forthcoming in Juliet Mitchell & the Lateral Axis: Psychoanalysis and Feminism in the 21st Century (original) (raw)

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

Gender and Sexuality in Early Marxist Thought

This paper intends to examine how the development of the Marxian socialist movement in Europe intersected with issues of sexuality. Marxist and socialist feminist discussions have been more interested in discussing proletarian identities. Sexuality has not always been the central issue. Discussions will focus mainly on Marx and Engels, and German and Russian social democracy till 1917, with brief digressions either spatially or temporally where necessary. An attempt has been made to explore the relationship between class struggle and a number of issues – marriage, childbirth, equal opportunity within the context of inequalities due to different life situations, birth control, prostitution, women’s right of choice, same-sex relations, the role of love in human (especially women’s) life. The core argument is that early Marxism was less patriarchal – which does not mean not patriarchal-- than the dominant strain of twentieth century socialism, that is, parties and political practices influenced by Stalinism. However, it would be erroneous to state that all was well before Stalinism. But despite its limitations, socialist discourse and practice often did provide a degree of alternative in issues of sexuality. Utopian socialists saw relationships between the sexes and within the family as core issues. In Classical Marxist view heterosexual relationships were, at one stage, not governed by tight control over women exercised by men. Women’s subordination, including male control over their sexuality, male definition of what female sexuality is or should be, were located in historical time, rather than in nature. A prehistoric mother-right centred social order was superseded at a particular juncture by patriarchy. Within the Marxist movement, however, the most influential figures were August Bebel, Kollontai, Armand whose relatively unprejudiced visualisation of sexual needs and patterns created a new dimension. Bernstein was in fact the first Marxist to speak out against the persecution of gays. A number of Marxist women played an important role in the birth control movement, which was connected to women’s right to choose. Finally, it is argued that political radicalism and radicalism in matters of sexuality were not automatically directly related, by examining the contrasting positions of several Bolsheviks.

Sex and the Feminist, Economic and Political Weekly Vol - XLVII No. 43, October 27, 2012

This article has been written as a response to a talk by Gloria Steinem in Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, earlier this year. While the immense provocation of some of the political assumptions of the talk inform the tone of this piece, it also is an attempt to grapple with what is one of the least addressed areas of mainstream feminist theorising - the relationship between sex and work. This preliminary reflection is an attempt to rescue labour from modernist imperialist frames for instance, the rights discourse. It seeks to address frontally the ‘problem’ of sex most often theorised in the context of sexuality, family, or even ' love'. What happens then if we shift the ground and make sex the site for understanding labour? While the labouring body has been studied in many different contexts such as factories, fields etc., it is striking that there is a tremendous anxiety doing the same in the context of sex. It is this anxiety that this brief paper wishes to draw attention to, as indeed to the implications it has for messy terrain of what is seen as 'feminist' politics.

Imagining the Feminist Revolution

2020

Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, first published in 1970, is often remembered for promoting a dystopian vision of babies developing in artificial wombs.1 Feminists critiqued Firestone for taking a reductionist approach to women’s oppression because she saw it arising from biological reproduction. Victoria Margree’s re-visiting of Firestone’s work makes a persuasive case that she has often been misunderstood and has continuing relevance for feminism. Neglected or Misunderstood grew from Margree’s 10 years of teaching Firestone, which may explain its engaging pedagogical voice. In the 12 bite-sized chapters of this short book, Margree systematically takes readers through different elements of Firestone’s argument, making an intriguing case for her historical-materialist account of women’s oppression as based in human reproduction. Margree introduces The Dialectic of Sex as a feminist manifesto, which Firestone, aged 25, wrote over a few mon...