Читать книгу Companion to Feminist Studies - Группа авторов - Страница 69

In the introduction to her 1993 book Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse, Rosemary Hennessy effaces the distinction between British and French materialist feminism, stating that “Annette Kuhn, Anne [sic] Marie Wolpe, Michele Barrett, Mary McIntosh, and Christine Delphy were among the initial promoters of ‘materialist feminism,’ favoring that term over ‘Marxist feminism’ on the basis of an argument that Marxism cannot adequately address women's exploitation and oppression unless the Marxist problematic itself is transformed so as to be able to account for the sexual division of labor” (Hennessy 1993, p. xi).

Her revisiting of the socialist/Marxist‐feminist version of materialism is in response to a body of feminist literature that emerged during the 1980s and that “questioned the adequacy of a generic ‘woman’ and a gender‐centred feminist inquiry” (Hennessy 1993, p. xii). This now familiar argument, however, is based on a misinterpretation. Materialist feminists, whether British or French, have never suggested that all women are the same, for their focus was not “woman” as an entity but on the social relations that constitute women as an oppressed class (or group, or caste, depending on the terminology one prefers). Similarly, criticizing feminist inquiry as “gender‐centred” is to suggest that the central object of such inquiry lacks political and thus theoretical validity. The very point of feminism is to challenge unequal social relations between men and women; it is difficult to do so without being “gender‐centred.” All of this said, the critiques to which Hennessy refers are legion, and many of them are demonstrably true: namely, that many Western feminists and much Western feminist theory (although, I would argue, particularly liberal feminism, rather than materialist feminism, however theorized) have overlooked or underestimated the importance of other social relations, notably race and geopolitical location. (Hennessy also refers to lesbians, although I note that Christine Delphy and indeed a number of other French materialist feminists are openly lesbian, and many of them, and the radical lesbians who drew inspiration from them – most famously [Wittig 2001] – framed the social relation of male domination as ideologically and structurally one of heterosexuality).

Hennessy was responding to the postmodern turn in feminist theory and notably its emphasis on the discursive construction of social subjects, at a time that she saw as a moment of feminism's “crisis of authority,” a term she used with reference to feminism in the academy rather than the feminist movement more broadly (Hennessy 1993, p. 137). Drawing inspiration from a range of poststructuralist, postmodern, and indeed Freudo‐Marxist theorists, Hennessy argued for a materialist feminism that would be more responsive to multiplicities of female subject positions and to the geohistorical specificities and discursive elements of their constitution. She further argued for a greater self‐awareness among materialist feminist theorists that “their mode of reading, like any revolutionary practice, is in history and so provisional, always circulating in a field of contesting discourses that challenge and redefine its horizons” (Hennessy 1993, p. 138).

The US style of materialist feminism that has been largely associated with Hennessy and Chrys Ingraham (Hennessy and Ingraham 1997a,b) thus presents some significant differences from either the British or the French. These differences emerged within the context of the postmodern turn in both feminist and Marxian scholarship more generally in the US at that time, both of which were heavily influenced by Foucauldian poststructuralist discourse analysis and Althusserian and Lacanian Freudo‐Marxism, as translocated for a US academic public. Although Hennessy and Ingraham continue to insist on the importance of the materiality of social relations, their focus shifts to encompass the positionality – indeed multiple positionalities – of the subjects constituted both through those relations and the way the latter are talked about: in short, their discursive construction, even as many, even most, of the volume's contributors remain deeply critical of the postmodern discursive turn. Hennessy in particular is concerned with the necessity of distrusting any theories, including materialist feminism, that may have “totalizing” pretentions, and argues for a materialist feminism that is more responsive to contingency and change.

Also central to the US reframing of materialist feminism is a core focus on ideology in an Althusserian sense, as “the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (cited in Ingraham 1994, p. 203), in which what is not said is as important to analyze as what is said. Moreover, “because it produces what is allowed to count as reality, ideology constitutes a material force and at the same time is shaped by other economic and political forces” (Ingraham 1994, p. 207).

Drawing inspiration from, among others, Adrienne Rich (1980) and Monique Wittig (2001 [1986]), and indeed Christine Delphy, Chrys Ingraham took feminist sociology to task for having adopted the “heterosexual imaginary” and thus having failed to cast a critical eye over heteronormativity. She focused in particular on the social, cultural, and economic institutions of marriage and the family – and famously critiqued weddings and other rituals of heteroromance as “[help]ing to constitute the heterosexual imaginary's discursive reality” (Ingraham 1994, p. 212; see also Ingraham 1999). This critique is fascinating to reread over two decades later, in a context in which same‐sex marriage has become the dominant political, cultural, and indeed, ideological frame through which lesbian and gay lives and rights are represented in contemporary discourse. Perhaps one needs to apply, like Ingraham, Althusser's “symptomatic reading” of the same‐sex marriage sociocultural “text” for both what it does and does not say, within the contemporary “homonormative imaginary” (with a nod to Lisa Duggan [2002], who coined the term “homonormativity”).

Perhaps somewhat ironically, given Hennessy's and Ingraham's emphasis on the need to pay attention to the discursive, geohistorical and ideological context in which theories are produced, their analyses are informed by the intellectual context in the US of the time: the love affair of Marxian scholarship with French poststructuralism and psychoanalysis (as refashioned for a US intellectual market); the emergence of queer theory; and the growing body of “postcolonial” or “Third‐World” (as it was called then) feminist writing (produced largely, however, by women employed at US universities). This last criticized Western feminism for ignoring geopolitical and raced relations of power and privilege, and for positing a unitary category or subjectivity of women, Mohanty (1984) and Spivak (1988) being among the most celebrated academic texts of the time. Mohanty argued that Western feminists negated differences among women, notably of race and geographical context. Moreover, non‐Western feminists, she suggested, did not necessarily always prioritize gender in their political struggles and Western feminists needed to acknowledge these differences. Similarly, Spivak, in asking “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, posited a hierarchical relationship between Western and “subaltern” non‐Western women, and argued that Western feminists silenced critical voices from outside the West. These critiques were important, particularly in the US context of the time where the liberal version of feminism favored by white middle‐class women appeared dominant, and where class and race divisions were so entrenched. Mohanty and Spivak, both of whom were born in India, themselves drew inspiration from a body of critical women‐of‐color writing published in the US in the early 1980s (most famously: Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981; Hull et al. 1982; Smith 1983). At the same time, the extent to which political divisions neatly aligned Western and non‐Western (or white and non‐white) feminists on opposite sides of a race and geographical divide remains debatable. Just as Western feminists do not all speak with one voice, neither do non‐Western ones. Moreover, the critiques made by Mohanty and Spivak appear to consider US liberal feminism as synonymous with “Western” feminism – again, a function of the context in which they were working. Finally, it is debatable whether materialist feminists, of whatever strand or nationality, really did ignore race and class considerations – they certainly considered class – but the race critique nonetheless demanded engagement, not only within the polarized US context, but also more broadly, as non‐Western feminist writing started to become more accessible to Western audiences (including, among other things, through translation into English).