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Yet Marx and Engels were attentive to gender issues, and they
developed a sophisticated theory of gender. As
they argued in The German Ideology, gender, like consciousness
itself, is a product of human labor and the gender hierarchy is
a product of the unequal division of labor and distribution of
resources. The categories "masculine" and "feminine"
are produced and reproduced, taking on different characteristics
in different historical circumstances according to changing relations
of production.
From its beginnings,
historical materialism has supported a critique of the ideology
of gender in social power relations that also recognizes the ways
that the academic division of labor facilitates the profit motive
and maintains class rule.
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 forty 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.
The
primary readings for this week--Woolf, de Beauvoir, and Mulvey--have
been chosen with a view to present something of the trajectory
of feminist theory in the twentieth century from the liberal feminism
of Woolf, to what I consider a more nearly Marxist-materialist
feminism in de Beauvoir, to Laura Mulvey's very influential psychoanalytic
theory-inflected, essay on the way women are constituted as viewing
subjects in traditional Hollywood realist film
One
parting thought I'll add about Woolf's essay. Though I would situate
it firmly within the liberal humanist Enlightenment tradition,
I was forcefully struck by how closely Woolf tracks toward an
"economic deteminism" argument when I read it in its
entirety for the first time a few years ago in preparation for
teaching it in a "Gender in the Humanities" course.
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