Introductory Comments--Feminism and Gender Studies

On page 272 of her essay in the Gibaldi text Naomi Schor writes:

Feminism is not a methodology or a theory unified by reference to a single propler noun (e.g. Marx or Freud) or, as has also been suggested, merely a playful eclecticism or pluralism (Kolodny), a female form of what Claude Levi Strauss famously called bricolage. Rather, it is a radical and always political form of interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary critique . . . this critique can and probably should be applied to all cognitive paradigms whose claims to universal knowledge are grounded in an indifference to sexual difference.

Indeed I wish feminism was "always a radical and political form of critique." Unfortunately, and perhaps inevitably with a movement as widespread and successful as feminism, the term is often invoked for ends quite conservative and reactionary. As a Marxist, I find myself sympathetic to the political agenda of feminism, but often at odds theoretically with the humanist framework of assumptions of liberal feminists--the group which comprises by far the majority of feminists in the academy. What this dilution of the revolutionary force of feminism demands is a cogent articulation of the different strands of the movement that Schor alludes to above, and a winnowing out of the strands that don't really deserve the name. I'll leave that task to Schor and to Mary Klages of the University of Colarado, whose brief background essay on the topic is provided here.

But I will say something about Marxism and feminism. Marxism has a somewhat uneven record in relation to feminism. As Schor implies with her mention of Marx and Freud as two "single proper noun[s]" which stand for entire bodies of theory and methodologies, feminists have rejected Marx and Freud along with other modern thinkers as patriarchal theorists who are oblivious to or hostile to the recognition of gender oppression. Specifically, feminists have criticized Marxists for producing reductive, oversimplified understandings of gender oppression, and for assuming that gender oppression is simply a side-effect of class oppression.

On the other hand, Engels, in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, produced a pioneering materialist account of the exploitation of women in the bourgeois family, and twentieth-century Marxist thought offers a long history of critique and opposition to patriarchy. In the last thirty years or so, feminist critiques have challenged Marxism's limits and expanded its capacity to address the differential historical situation of women. This tradition of feminist engagement with Marxism constitutes what is variously known as socialist, marxist or materialist feminism, as distinguished from liberal feminism or radical feminism.

In order to supplement the Schor text from Gibaldi, I've included some suggested essays for further reading that you may find interesting,: an essay by Rosemary Hennessy and Chrys Ingraham on "anti-capitalist" feminism; an essay by Martha Gimenez on materialist and Marxist feminism; an essay by Carole Stabile on postmodernism and feminism; and an essay by Jennifer Drake on "third-wave" feminism and "postfeminism."