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

Here are 2 sources that may be useful on this question:

Ortner, Sherry.  1996.  Making Gender.  Beacon.
        and
Barber, Elizabeth.  1994.  Women's Work, the First 20,000 Years.  Norton.


Ortner is an anthropologist, and Barber an archaelogist.

Ortner "...concluded that the ubiquity of male domination had its roots in
the facts of sexual reproduction."

Barber "concludes that two fundamental conditions were necessary for
patriarchy to emerge.  First, there was long-distance trade in metal
ores..." (an activity monopolized by men because women were burdened with
infants).  "Second, there was a `secondary products revolution' around
4000 BC..." which leads to full-scale agriculture, which "was necessarily
men's work as well."  Barber views the division of labor and gender as `an
inevitable evil once subsistence farming had been left behind'."

In other words, these scholars are both developing a materialist analysis
of the roots of gender stratification that certainly go beyond a
discourse-based analysis, and yet do not simply read gender off of sex.

[Quotes taken from the Lingua Franca article "The Women Warriors" by
Lawrence Osborne, January 1998.]