Historical Materialist Feminism

Feminism has a metaphysics problem. This isn't specific to feminism: it's just that feminism is a label applied to a variety of discourses which all claim to have the same political premise or subjective vantage, while differing in both respects—usually this is visible when describing white feminism, bourgeois feminism, liberal feminism, cishet feminism, in contrast to some idealized black feminism, proletarian feminism, radical feminism, trans feminism. It's a hall of mirrors no matter where you look. But I'm interested in the discursive function of "essentialism": a theoretical term which encapsulates a critique of naïve materialism, that one can't reduce social phenomena to a superficially materialist basis, which became a cudgel against any materialist analysis in general.

"One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex first distinguished between sex and gender, not as objective scientific reality versus subjective personal experience, but as categories of inert matter versus social extensions (roles, behaviors, characteristics) assigned to them. This wasn't a bad theoretical move as such, except for being perhaps a little pedantic by recasting synonyms as jargon, but it did engender bad theoretical moves derivative of itself. Specifically, despite de Beauvoir's own claim that sex and sexual relations provided some material basis for gender whose own implications spiraled out of control, there is a tendency in certain feminisms to forgo the materialist dimension altogether: instead embracing a social constructivism which exists in some platonic thought-realm and imposes its abstract terms on stupid matter.

I've talked about all this before in the context of Leslie Feinberg, Talia Bhatt, and the failure of the LGBT movement more generally, but to summarize: trans people are the lynchpin of social constructivist feminism (and, on the opposite side of the coin, naïve materialist feminism); not as such, but as an embodiment of gnostic subjectivity whose gender experience contradicts material reality as well as social imposition (which are identified with each other as an objectivity external of those subjective experiences, the difference between social-constructivist and naïve-materialist feminism being whether one prioritizes the latter or the former). Materialist analyses of gender/sex, whether to criticize patriarchal relations or build feminist programs, can be dismissed on the grounds of essentialism, i.e., (only apparently) excluding trans people. So can any anti-trans feminist dismiss constructivist analyses on the grounds of including trans people.

There's a gordian knot here, decades in the making, begging to be unraveled. Let's just ask: why? Why are we stuck here? It's easy to say it's because trans people are the central question of sexual politics today, but I don't think that's true, or at least that forces us to ask why again. I think it's because both perspectives foreclose meaningful politics, because both are essentialist (or properly speaking, idealist). Reducing feminist discourse to social constructivism or naïve materialism avoids the question of how social constructs emerge or how pre-social matter acquires social significance and extensions (and is transformed in turn). There is an implicit assumption either that patriarchy was imposed by the thought-realm on pure sexless beings, or that patriarchy is a product of organic sexual difference on a social scale. The only politics made possible are fascistic, at best identitarian, by politicizing the flashing image of a patriarchy in stasis. This certainly impacts trans people by supposing a purely subjective (barely socially constructed) basis for experiences deemed transgender, but the entire well of feminist and women's discourse is poisoned—impacting not just 1% but 50.5% of people, so to speak.

Maria Mies has become, in contrast, my absolute favorite feminist critic whose analysis takes seriously the dialectical engine of historical materialism. Whereas the historical models of Linda Gerner and Luce Irigaray start at prehistorical hunter-gatherer cultures and end at classical oikoi, prioritizing continuity, Mies prioritizes discontinuity: how does early modern capitalism appropriate patriarchal relations to facilitate its own social (re)production, and how is patriarchy transformed in turn? She analyzes the witch-hunts of early modern Europe not as excesses of dying feudal culture, but as a primitive accumulation of property and market share by men's organizations against economically independent women; this ultimately culminates in housewifization, the assignment of women both to the private sphere of domestic labor as well as to economic labor devalued by the women's supposed peripherality (since, it is assumed, the woman's husband is her primary breadwinner) despite their fields having the greatest profit margins, usually consumer goods manufacturing. Mies' feminist analysis is highly integrated with discourses of accumulation, imperialism (via world systems), and ecology, in which none are assumed to be primary because all are interlinked, structurally homologous, and mutually generative.

I first came into contact with Mies by reading Butch Lee and Red Rover's Night-Vision, which is understood by some to be a "sequel" to J. Sakai's Settlers, and whose analysis basically applies a neocolonial framework to later developments in settler race relations (since Settlers had applied a colonial framework) as well as "gender relations". Most chapters in the book are close-readings of other texts with authorial commentary, and the one which establishes a homology between race and gender as internal colonies is a long quotation from Mies on witch-hunts and housewifization, interspersed with awkward 90s queer slogans about gender contra sex a la Feinberg (which, of course, lovingly refers to trans people as a thought experiment of expanding gender against patriarchal genders). I forget if it's my partner or Todd in the Shadows who said this, but I got the same feeling reading this book as one does about listening to "50 Ways to Say Goodbye": why am I not listening to Paul Simon? So I bought Mies' Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, and then I was gagged by this passage which was conspicuously absent from Night-Vision's "abridged" version of the book:

‘Cultural feminism’ has also had great influence in the theoretical works of feminists. This is not the place to discuss the topic in detail, but one of the most important manifestations of cultural feminism is the conceptual distinction between gender and sex, first developed by Anne Oakley [MB: de Beauvoir did it first, but I suspect Oakley originated the more vulgar version]. According to this distinction, sex is connected with biology, is considered to be based on hormones, gonads, genitalia, whereas the gender identity [!] of men and women in any given society is considered as psychologically and socially, and that means historically and culturally determined. In order to avoid the confusion about sex being biologically determined, the concept gender was introduced to denote the socially and culturally differences between men and women. The internalization of these differences is then called ‘gendering’ (Oakley, 1972).

This distinction between sex as a biological, and gender as a socio-cultural, category may at first sight appear a useful one, because it removes the irritation that women’s oppression is time and again attributed to her anatomy [i.e., biological essentialism]. But this distinction follows the well-known dualistic pattern of dividing ‘nature’ from ‘culture’ (Ortner, 1973). For women this division has had a long and disastrous tradition in Western thought because women have been put on the side of ‘nature’ since the rise of modern science (Merchant, 1983). If feminists now try to get out of this tradition by defining sex as a purely material, biological affair and gender as the ‘higher’, cultural, human, historical expression of this affair, then they continue the work of those idealist patriarchal philosophers and scientists who divided the world up into crude ‘bad’ matter (to be then exploited and colonized) and ‘good’ spirit (to be manipulated by priests, mandarins, and scientists).

It is not surprising that this terminology has immediately been adopted by all kinds of people who may not otherwise feel much sympathy for, or even be hostile to, feminism [isn’t this familiar!?]. If, instead of ‘sexual violence’, we talk of ‘gender violence’, the shock is somewhat mitigated by an abstract term, which removes the whole issue from the realm of emotionality and political commitment to that of scientific and apparently ‘objective’ discourse. If the woman’s question is again removed to that level, many men and many women, who do not want to change the status quo, will again feel quite comfortable with the women’s movement [I've seen this film before!].

But let us not fool ourselves. Human sex and sexuality have never been purely crude biological affairs. Nor has the female or male body been a purely biological affair. ‘Human nature’ has always been social and historical. Human physiology has throughout history been influenced and shaped by interaction with other human beings and with external nature. Thus, sex is as much a cultural and historical category as gender is [compare with Butler].

By the dualistic splitting of sex and gender, however, by treating the one as biological and the other as cultural, the door is again opened by those who want to treat the sexual difference between humans as a matter of our anatomy or as ‘matter’. Sex as matter can become an object for the scientist who may dissect, analyse, manipulate and reconstruct it according to his plans. Since all spiritual value has been driven out of sex and encapsulated in the category of gender, the taboos which so far still surround the sphere of sex and sexuality may easily be removed. This sphere can become a new hunting ground for biological engineering, for reproduction-technology, for genetic and eugenic engineering, and last but not least for capital accumulation (cf. Corea, 1984).

In other words: the gender-sex distinction elides the viscera of patriarchal violence by attributing it to abstract platonic categories, and the way in which our relationships to our bodies (and our bodies themselves) are mediated and thereby transformed by society. This ideology kneecaps discourse around issues most pressing to women as such (which Mies outlines as abortion, beating, and rape), and trans people as such (which we might outline: healthcare, violence, and rape), and substitutes it with an abstract nothing politics which continues to facilitate those issues as well as the oppressive or repressive social relations which generate them. Would you like some girl power with those pronoun circles? Let's throw in a land acknowledgement to spice things up!

But it's not only liberal ideology which is guilty of aestheticizing politics, which we can take as a synonym or specific type of identity politics (i.e., a program centered on the actualization or maintenance of an identity). I've described before the tendency of so-called radical feminism to pursue a phallic identity for women, lesbians, trans lesbians, etc. on account of being deprived of such by the great patriarchal phallus. This is something for which Irigaray criticizes other feminists in terms of political organizations, asking why we are looking for inspiration from the structures of patriarchal institutions rather than inventing new structures of direct relationships (as opposed to abstract or representational ones). But I think this tendency goes deeper than organizational structure since it impacts the self-concept and demands of feminist politics. Bhatt's radical transfeminism can ironically be said to express penis envy, not because she felt deprived of phallic mastery upon transitioning, but because it was only through radical feminism that she could access a phallic identity which was always-already foreclosed to her. The proposed abolition of men, an increasingly abstract notion having been passed from Wittig's hands to Bhatt's, is also ultimately an identitarian demand which bait-and-switches a notion of gender as prime determinant to one of gender as historically specific expression. Big words to say and do nothing.

Again: the construction and destruction of identities is not just fascistic (this isn't a moral judgment), but utterly useless for making meaningful demands (which is the precise sense in which it is fascistic). No identity for you! What's the point? Let's stop playing games. What do we actually want and what prevents us from having it? Irigaray asks the questions, and Mies gives good answers. The two of them culminate in a complete and well-integrated feminist discourse, or at least my favorite vision of what such a discourse looks like. Also shout-out to Vandana Shiva, a feminist organizer and theoretical physicist (!) who co-authored Ecofeminism with Mies and whose other works I now also want to check out because her analysis is also very well-integrated with discourses of class, imperialism, and ecology. It's like I stumbled on a tradition of materialist feminism which I've been looking for this whole time.