Re: gender: Judith Butler's pseudo materialism and cultural feminism.(fw

Dennis, that is what i said:

"Marxist feminism sees gender as socially constructed rather than
biologically determined, instrinsic to unequal social orders such as
capitalism, but historically contingent and changing".

I did not say that power relations are eternal. On the contrary, I said
that they are the products of historical and societal developments apart
from human nature. Gender inequalities and stratification are NOT built
into human nature. For example, we can not say by looking at hunting
gathering societies that this is what we were in the past and this
is what we will be in the future assuming that gender inequality is part
of the original sexual division of labor. First, this approach is
ahistroical and assumes that human nature is static and unchanging. It
does not take into consideration the historicity and sociability of human
nature. It does not also explain if the original sexual division of labor
was as unequal and as systemic as gender division of labor now. It
conflates the past with the present.

Second, We do not have an accurate notion of hunting gathering societies
and human nature to begin with. Thanks to distortions of socio-biology.
Socio-biology sees human nature as individualistic, hierarchical and
sexually opressive, speaking continually of avarice, domination, desires,
and profit. They do not even bother to show that "early" societies had
these notions even or that they were useful or advantageous to them. What
benefit women gain if men oppress them and this oppression is natural and
unavoidable? These guys talk about human nature, and it is, in fact,
social "men" they depict. Accordingly,they seriously conflate sex with
gender and reduce political and social inequalites to biological
differences and human ature. AS i said before, bilogy is innocent and it
does not determine anything. What it provides is a material subtext
from which our bodies develop and evolve with the enviroment. there is a
problem in our "perceptions" of biology" not in our biologies. Biology
is not oppressive; it is the social system (capitalist patriachy) that is
oppressive.


Of course, gender inequality predated capitalism. Capitalism is a later
come whereas patriarchy is an early arival. Think about slave societies.
However, what we need to understand is how these two systems  of 
oppression interacted as a social order oppressive of women in order to be
able to change and eliminate them. Without understanding their historical
development and mechanisms of oppression, we can not change
them.What role did capitialism play in the reproduction of patriarchal
order and reorganization of gender relations? That was the original
question I posed.

Engels traces this development to the emergence of the notion
of possession, and turning point in history when people first settled on
the land and claimed right to private property. Many anthropological and
historical studies show that sexual stratification (gender inequality)
occured with the inceasing productiveness, specializationa and complexity,
for example through the "establishment of settled agriculture, private
property and state" (Heidi Hartman, "Capitalism, Patriachy, and Job
Segregation by SEx, Signs, 1976, no.3). Thr first inequalities emerged as
human societies emerged from the hunting gatjering bands and became 
civilized. In hunting gathering societies, inequalities had a
primitive nature, and in fact more sexually egalitarian despite the sexual
division of labor. The important thing was that the original
sexual division of labor was not  YET translated into systemic gender
inequalities. It was not yet universalized or bacame widespread as we
have in capitalist societies. As HArtman says " with the advent of
public/private seperations such as those created  by the emergence of
state apparatus  and economic systems based on wider exchange and larger
production units, the problem for men bacame one of maintaining their
control over the labor power of women, in other words, a direct personal
system of control was translated into an indirect, impersonal system of
control, mediated by society-wide institutions". this was the first
origins of  the extensions of sex ordered division of labor (primitive
inegalitarianism) to the wage labor system.



The bottom line is that we MUST HAVE AN ACCURATE NOTION OF HUMAN NATURE TO
BE ABLE TO HAVE AN ACCURATE UNDERSTANDING OF GENDER RELATIONS. This should
be the immediate task of feminists. we should solve the problem of human
nature, and deal with the socio-bilogical distortion of our bodies, men
and women together...


Mine

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2000 04:47:29 -0800 (PST)
From: Dennis R Redmond <dredmond@OREGON.UOREGON.EDU>
To: WORLD SYSTEMS NETWORK <wsn@csf.colorado.edu>
Subject: Re: gender: Judith Butler's pseudo materialism and cultural 
feminism. (fwd)

On Mon, 20 Mar 2000 md7148@cnsvax.albany.edu wrote:

> narratives such as feminism and marxism. That is why post-modernists are
> mad at the words "emancipation" "equality" "socialism". They think they
> are over-extension of power relations.  hence, according to them, we are
> trapped in power. My critique of her is that is if were are trapped in
> power and can not change power relations, there is no point in arguing
> that "gender is a social construct"

<Everyone is trapped in power-relations; that doesn't mean they're
<eternal,
>only that they can seem that way.


-- Dennis