Materialist feminism is a theoretical current of radical feminism that was formed around the French magazine Questions féministes. It is characterized by the use of conceptual tools from Marxism—notably historical materialism—to theorize patriarchy and its abolition. Its body of literature includes an analysis of women's work within marriage and in the formal economy, criticism of other streams of feminism, deconstruction of sexuality and advocacy for an autonomous women's movement.

Jennifer Wicke defines materialist feminism as "a feminism that insists on examining the material conditions under which social arrangements, including those of gender hierarchy, develop... materialist feminism avoids seeing this gender hierarchy as the effect of a singular... patriarchy and instead gauges the web of social and psychic relations that make up a material, historical moment".

History

The term materialist feminism emerged in the late 1970s and is associated with key thinkers such as Christine Delphy, Colette Guillaumin, Nicole-Claude Mathieu, and Monique Wittig.

Rosemary Hennessy traces the history of materialist feminism in the work of British and French feminists who preferred the term materialist feminism to Marxist feminism. In their view, Marxism had to be altered to be able to explain the sexual division of labor. Marxism was inadequate to the task because of its class bias and focus on production. Feminism was also problematic due to its essentialist concept of woman. Material feminism then emerged as a positive substitute to both Marxism and feminism and pointed out the unequal distribution of social resources.

The Grand Domestic Revolution by Dolores Hayden is a reference. Hayden describes material feminism at that time as reconceptualizing the relationship between the private household space and public space by presenting collective options to take the "burden" off women in regard to housework, cooking, and other traditional female domestic jobs. Margaret Benston presents a similar sentiment in her 1969 article, “The Political Economy of Women’s Liberation,” stating that the material basis for discrimination against women will be gone when household work is moved from the private to the public sector. However, Benston argues that without actual freedom from housework, it is likely impossible for true equality to exist in job opportunity. A change to communal eating places, she argues, may simply mean that women are moved from a home kitchen to a communal one, not truly freeing them from the burden of domestic labor.

As feminism became postfeminism, the notion of femininity was "problematized, rather than taken as a given", says Stevi Jackson.

Theory

Christine Delphy affirms that materialism is the only theory of history that views oppression as a basic reality of women's lives, which is why women (and other oppressed groups) need materialism to investigate their situation. For her, "to start from oppression defines a materialist approach, oppression is a materialist concept". Delphy theorizes two modes of production in our society: industrial and domestic. The first mode allows for capitalist exploitation, while the second allows for familial and patriarchal exploitation. She argues that the domestic mode of production is the material basis of gender oppression, and that marriage is a labor contract that gives men the right to exploit women.

Materialist feminists therefore oppose any discourse that attempts to explain the situation of women by some internal characteristic of this group, in particular those of an anatomical nature, such as the capacity to give birth or a physical weakness of women relative to men, as well as those of a psychological or psychoanalytic nature, which presuppose a different psyche for men and women. There has also been a concern for the general ambiguity of materialist feminism. It has been called to question whether the differentiation between materialist feminism and Marxist feminism is great enough to be a worthwhile contribution to feminist theory.

Christine Delphy's contributions to materialist feminism have been the subject of criticism, for example by Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh. They suggest that the definition of materialism feminism has a very loose interpretation of patriarchy and that Delphy's article "Towards a Materialist Feminism" has a focus limited to the oppression of wives and fails to connect this to the global oppression of women in general.

However, the main criticism for materialist feminism involves the lack of intersectionality within the theory. By focusing on capitalist relations combined with patriarchy, materialist feminism is seen as failing to include women of different classes, sexualities, and ethnicities. Hazel Carby challenged the materialist feminist analyses of the family as universally oppressive to all women. She instead noted the ways that values of the family are different for black women and men, just as the division of labor is also racialized. Rosemary Hennessy commented in the late 1980s on how there had recently been pressure to recognize the differences within the definition of "woman" and how this intersects with not only class, but race, sexualities, and genders.

Stevi Jackson is critical of the recent resurgence of interest in materialist feminism, stating that many of the new ideas were reducing the material to capitalist ideas, and that "this might bring us full circle back to the least productive forms of 1970s Marxism".

Leading figures

  • Christine Delphy
  • Colette Guillaumin
  • Rosemary Hennessy
  • Stevi Jackson
  • Danièle Kergoat
  • Diana Leonard
  • Nicole-Claude Mathieu
  • Monique Plaza
  • Paola Tabet
  • Monique Wittig

See also

  • Antinaturalism
  • Criticism of marriage
  • Double burden
  • Feminist economics
  • Feminist metaphysics
  • Feminist urbanism
  • Social construction of gender

References