αναδημοσίευση από Endnotes
Πρόκειται για ένα ιδιαίτερα αναλυτικό κείμενο για το ζήτημα του φύλου. Θεωρούμε ιδιαίτερα ενδιαφέρον το γεγονός ότι δεν αντιμετωπίζει το φύλο από μια υπερ-ιστορική σκοπιά. Αντίθετα ιστορικοποιεί την εξέλιξη της σχέσης μέσα στην περίοδο κυριαρχίας του καπιταλιστικού τρόπου παραγωγής και προσπαθεί να αναδείξει τη σύγχρονη διάρθρωση της σχέσης φύλο και τη σχέση του περιεχομένου των αγώνων των γυναικών στον αναδιαρθρωμένο καπιταλισμό με τον ορίζοντα της κομμουνιστικοποίησης.
W.
The Logic of Gender On the separation of spheres and the process of abjection
Within marxist feminism we encounter several sets of binary terms to analyse gendered forms of domination under capitalism.1 These include: productive and reproductive, paid and unpaid, public and private, sex and gender. When considering the gender question, we found these categories imprecise, theoretically deficient and sometimes even misleading. This article is an attempt to propose categories which will give us a better grasp of the transformation of the gender relation since the 70s and, more importantly, since the recent crisis.
The account that follows is strongly influenced by systematic dialectics, a method that tries to understand social forms as interconnected moments of a totality.2 We therefore move from the most abstract categories to the most concrete, tracing the unfolding of gender as a “real abstraction”. We are only concerned with the form of gender specific to capitalism, and we assume from the outset that one can talk about gender without any reference to biology or prehistory. We begin by defining gender as a separation between spheres. Then, having done so, we specify the individuals assigned to those spheres. Importantly, we do not define spheres in spatial terms, but rather in the same way Marx spoke of the two separated spheres of production and circulation, asconcepts that take on a materiality.
The binaries listed above appear to limit one’s grasp of the ways in which these spheres function at present, as they lack historical specificity and promote a transhistorical understanding of gendered “domination”, which takes patriarchy as a feature of capitalism without making it historically specific to capitalism. We hope to delineate categories that are as specific to capitalism as “capital” itself. We argue that these binaries depend on category errors whose faults become clear once we attempt to illuminate the transformations within capitalist society since the 70s. Forms of domestic and so-called “reproductive” activities have become increasingly marketised, and while these activities may occupy the “sphere” of the home, just as they did before, they no longer occupy the same structural positions within the capitalist totality, despite exhibiting the same concrete features. For this reason, we found ourselves forced to clarify, transform, and redefine the categories we received from marxist feminism, not for the sake of theory, but to understand why humanity is still powerfully inscribed with one or the other gender.
1 PRODUCTION/REPRODUCTION
Whatever the form of the process of production in a society, it must be a continuous process, must continue to go periodically through the same phases. A society can no more cease to produce than it can cease to consume. When viewed, therefore, as a connected whole, and as flowing on with incessant renewal, every social process of production is, at the same time, a process of reproduction.3
When Marx speaks of reproduction he does not refer to the production and reproduction of any commodity in particular; rather, he is concerned with the reproduction of the social totality. However, when marxist feminists speak of reproduction, what they often aim to specify is the production and reproduction of the commodity labour-power. This is because, in Marx’s critique, the relationship between the reproduction of labour-power and the reproduction of the capitalist totality is incomplete.
