Video recordings of the presentation by Nina Power discussed here, “Materialist Feminism and Radical Feminism: Revisiting the Second Wave in the Light of Recent Controversies,” as well my own, “Vertigos of Materiality: A Marxism of Moments,” are available on the Facebook page “Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities – Skopje.” Also available at that location are the video recordings of the other sessions from the same conference, “Xenofeminism and other forms of realist and materialist feminism: A vantage point of a radically novel politics.”
“Man’s innate casuistry! To change things by changing their names! And to find loopholes for violating tradition while maintaining tradition, when direct interest supplied sufficient impulse.” – Karl Marx
The Skopje Split
Over the past three decades feminist philosophy has undergone an immense shift. Once preoccupied with developing modes of thought and expression capable of representing the female ‘sex,’ the publication of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble in 1990, and her subsequent rise to the forefront of the discipline, announced a new line for feminist philosophy. No longer should the focus of feminists be on “the body itself.”[1] For should we look to it for answers, all we’re likely to find are the discursive issuances of the “patriarchy” or “the law.” The task of feminism, then, is not to seek refuge in the falsifying immediacy of self-identity. Instead, it must forge ahead in pursuing processes of discursive resignification that accord with our activistic impulses—and that relinquish the naïve notion of binary sex, itself a retroactive projection of the socially constructed binary of gender.
Since the early ‘90s Butler, stepping into the symbolic category previously occupied by Simone de Beauvoir, has been the closest thing feminism’s had to a consensus spokesperson. This is not to say the reception of her thesis has always been gentle. In the intellectual domain, many second-wave feminists—or younger feminists who swear fealty to the second-wave’s privileging of the notion of biological sex—have refused to depart the stage, warning of the perils that could ensue should feminism relinquish an ideal of female alterity upon which its politics can be constructed. These debates have more recently gained in urgency due to the controversy surrounding the question of “trans inclusion”: whether trans women should be admitted into ‘women’s spaces’ (change rooms, sports teams, etc.), and, more abstractly, whether they’re ontologically differentiable from cisgender women. For those feminists who side with Butler’s notion of gender (and, in turn, sex) as performative, support for trans persons comes naturally: for isn’t their very existence aiding in destabilizing the oppressive binary of sex? For those who do not, the unwillingness to hermeneutically distinguish between cisgender women and trans women among feminists is frequently seen as yet another depressing symptom of an institutional feminism that has long since given up any claim to defending the premise of female particularity.
These tensions were very much in evidence at the conference held in Skopje from September 10th-12th, Xenofeminism and other forms of realist and materialist feminism. United by Katerina Kolozova’s call for the cultivation (contra Butler) of a “reinvented feminism universalism” capable of applying “new forms of realism and (Marxist) materialism for feminist theory and political practice,”[2] what many of its participants shared in common was a desire to leverage the theoretical tools of Marxism to break out of the closed circle of signification that has for so long defined it. Yet what it also showed is that, even amongst those who identify with the semaphores of “materialism” or “Marxism,” there exists considerable dissension over just what kind of materialism should supplant the regnant post-structuralist feminism. The materialism of the Xenofeminists (Patricia Reed, one of the co-authors of the Xenofeminist Manifesto, was a keynote speaker at the conference) derives its Marxist strain indirectly, from the futurist and ‘productivist’ left feminisms put forth by thinkers like Shulamith Firestone and Donna Harraway (the influence of ‘neo-rationalists’ such as Ray Brassier and Reza Negarastani—both of whom have gestured equivocally towards Marxism in recent years—also looms heavily over their work). It is thus an anti-naturalist materialism; one that refuses “the glorification of ‘nature’”[3] qua identity in favor of the transformative vector of technological acceleration—a view that lends itself towards the strong support of trans peoples as being the Xenofeminist subjects par excellence. On the other side of the spectrum and also a keynote speaker at the conference was Nina Power, the xenos of the xenos. For Power, the post-Butler inflation of the domain of the social—of which the Xenofeminists are, for her, a part—threatens to undermine our ability to articulate a feminist politics with any degree of specificity. What is needed then in her view is not a rejection of nature but a return to it, so as to put forth a Marxist feminism capable of doing justice to the ‘sensuous,’ socially reproductive activity of the (non-trans) female sex.
As can be seen from the above, the Skopje conference proffered two versions of feminism that, while both influenced by Marx, remain starkly opposed: an automation-happy, trans inclusive feminism of the alien other which celebrates capitalist alienation as the means through which (to quote Marx) “feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations”[4] can be liquidated. And on the other hand, a trans exclusionary feminism that seeks to attenuate alienation on account of the way in which it estranges women from their (to quote Marx again) “natural” or “vital powers.”[5] An incisive critique of the limitations of Xenofeminism’s use of Marxism has, to this author’s mind, already been put forth by Katerina Kolozova, who notes in the Capitalism’s Holocaust of Animals[6] that it’s inadequately examined commitment to “rationalism” (whether “situated” or no) prevents it from breaking with the ideological image of reason as being the axis upon which reality turns. But as her own reformulation of feminism along Marxist lines has been to this point less exposed, it’s worth dwelling a bit on Nina Power’s attempts to devise a Marxist materialism that parlays biological sex into a basis for philosophizing.
The Sublime Subject of Sexuality
Power’s presentation was titled “Materialist Feminism and Radical Feminism: Revisiting the Second Wave in the Light of Recent Controversies.” As such, it largely functioned as an attempt to revive the problematic of second-wave feminism—namely, of how to develop a universalism which does not succumb to the masculinizing pull of “techno-capitalism,”[7] and which proceeds from the acknowledgement of female sexual difference. It kicked off with a recapitulation of the thesis Catherine Malabou’s monograph Changing Difference. For Malabou, women have, throughout much of history, only been able to define themselves as ontological nullity; through the violence that has been done to them. This violence is both social and theoretical, and Malabou notes that the negation of the notion of a female essence by post-structuralist feminists in a sense a continuation of this stratagem. But while skeptical of the current post-feminist state, she also sees in it (apropos her Hegelian heritage) the opportunity for women to discover within themselves an ontological remainder that resists incorporation into patriarchal universality—and to accordingly develop a concept of woman that is positive yet acknowledges the inexorability of change.
In Power’s view, Malabou is correct to characterize the hollowing out of the female essence as another episode in the long history of violences waged against women (though Malabou makes this point more tentatively than Power[8]). Where she errs, though, is in assigning too great an importance to the role of negativity—a position that renders her in some measure complicit with the foreclosure of the category of ‘sex’ as well as (in Mary Daly’s words) “the deep and universal intent to destroy the divine spark in women.”[9] For Power by contrast, for a bona fide anti-capitalist feminism to be constituted, it must acknowledge the gap between gender and sex. This is because—as Martha Gimenez has suggested[10]—absent this recognition, feminism will be unable to recognize the relationship between biology and social reproduction (the performance of ‘unwaged labor,’ such as birthing and raising children) which is at the root of women’s oppression.
A crucial resource for realizing this vision of feminism, in Power’s opinion, resides in the Lacanian notion of the “parallax”: the idea according to which material existence of the subject is paradoxically attested to by their absence from their own field of vision[11]. Pro-trans activists are committed to an inherently contradictory standpoint, in that they affirm both a) the reality of biological sex, in the sense of it being an ontological category that coincides with the “inner feeling” of the individual, and b) the unreality of biological sex, in the sense of it being a socially constructed category from which one can transition. Elided by this “consumerist” vision of sexuality is the fact that sex is a “transcendental condition”[12] that discretely yet decisively shapes how we perceive the world. This was recognized by both Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray; the former of whom saw “woman” as “the most deeply alienated of all the female mammals”[13] on account of her biology, and the latter of whom viewed mathematics as being sexed in masculine fashion. It was also recognized by Jacques Lacan, who saw sexual difference as inevitable but as being iterated incongruously in different contexts (though for Power, psychoanalysis is flawed in so far as it reduces sexuality to sexuation—an error that dates back to Freud’s rejection of the notion that the object-choice of desire can be explained in terms of anatomical sexual difference). It is not, however, recognized by the socially constructivist theory of gender development pioneered by Butler—a theory that has had “serious empirical repercussions”[14] upon the practice of feminism.
What these empirical repercussions are was described by Power in the last—and surely most provocative—section of her presentation, titled “parallax mother.”[15] In Power’s tragic vision, our present-day culture has spurred on a relentless assault upon maternity qua biology—something seen (as a for instance) in the controversial prohibition of millions of forum users of “Mumsnet.com” from describing women as “human females,”[16] as well as the harassment endured by dissident feminists who refuse to relinquish the category of biological sex. Taken collectively these episodes amount to a “matricide” or “femicide”[17]: an attempt to erase the motherhood we “rely upon to bury the relics of our conflicts”; the motherhood “we fear due to its proximity to death.”[18] Intolerable in this climate is the notion that female “identity” could be seen as a complex negotiation of the biological and the social. Instead it can only function aporetically as opposed to synthetically: as oscillating between “tautological identity formulation” (“I am whatever I say I am”) and “pure social constructionism” (“I am whatever you say I am”)[19]. Feminists should resist, then the dephysicalizing injunction of late capitalism—and come to terms with the fact that there is a “cut” that incises the male and female sexes.
Specular Sophistries
The “Marxist feminism” outlined by Power above is strongly influenced by the early, pre-German Ideology Marx. But Power also goes further than even the early Marx did in incorporating the influence of Feuerbach (something which is not terribly surprising, given that she has written and commented extensively on his work). From Marx, Power takes the notion of the producer as being alienated from their product. By interpreting this biologically, through the lens of the female as social reproducer, she is able to bracket the question of (to simplify) productive forces and to reactive Feuerbach’s designation of the the essence of man as his species. Thus for Power the “essence” of the female is her ability to biologically reproduce. This inner truth, apropos Feuerbach’s inversion of Hegel, enjoys priority over its subsequent elaborations—remember that for Feuerbach the shift from religion to theology to philosophy is an obfuscation of origin. Power’s Feuerbachian influence also explains why her interpretation of the co-functioning of the parallaxes—which she divides into the ‘male’ and ‘female’—is, in contradistinction to Lacan, a complimentary one. Having dispensed with the possibility of acquiring absolute knowledge of the historical, Hegelian sort, as well as of dialectical synthesis more generally, Feuerbach seeks it more locally, in the unity of man (essence) with woman (existence). Likewise, for Power a holistic or ‘combinatory’ view of reality can only be attained when we add up the male and female parallaxes—a definite instantiation of Feuerbach’s logic of complementarity.
These comments are extremely schematic. But they help contextualize the often rather loose way that Power applies the texts of second-wave (or second wave-sympathizing) feminists: as supplements to a pre-established framework based upon a Marxist interpretation of Feuerbach’s (to quote Althusser) “transcendental biologism.”[20] This reading is, as we see it, bedeviled by a serious contradiction. Power in her presentation criticized pro-trans activists for their contradictory commitment to “tautological identity formulation” (“I am whatever I say I am”) and “pure social constructionism” (“I am whatever you say I am”). This is not a wholly unfair comment, as it demonstrates an awareness of the incapacity of activism that takes its cue from post-structuralist thought to situate an ‘outside’ from which to oppose the status quo in a social context that is said to be wholly defined by discursive power relations (though her related remark that they simultaneously affirm the reality and unreality of gender only makes sense if one believes that it is biological sex that is being referred to in both cases). If third-wave pro-trans feminists cannot meaningfully distinguish between essence and existence, however, the same can be said of Power’s system—a system that only speaks in tautologies. In truly pre-Kantian fashion, Power claims to have noumenal knowledge of the transcendental subject: it is, she informs us without further argument, a dyadic and sexed subject (in the sense that sex is a “transcendental condition” of thought—though Power cannot be bothered with transcendental deduction). With this axiom established, Power is able to assimilate the entirety of the “lived experience” of females to the essence of their biology, which she identifies with maternity. But what has really been accomplished here? Since Power doesn’t work through her claims what she’s left with is a specular and self-confirming relation in which sex = essence = self-consciousness = absolute knowledge[21]. If one agrees with her presupposition, they’ll likely find this convincing; if they don’t, they likely won’t.
Towards a Marxist Solution
If Power’s proposed system is a dead end, is there still a way to think female identity with recourse to Marx? And relatedly, to develop a Marxist, material position on the issue of trans inclusion? The tautological character of Feuerbach’s work became apparent to Marx prior to his after his reading of Max Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own in 1844. It’s for this reason why he announced his independence from him with. The German Ideology, off-shifting the Grund of his theoretical apparatus from essence of man to a now-familiar conceptual lexicon: of social formations, productive forces, relations of production, and on. These categories are in turn applied to clarify the problematic of gender in Engels’ The Origin of Family, Private Property, and the State. In The Origin…, it’s argued—in what amounts to an exegesis on Lewis Henry Morgan’s 1877 Ancient Society—that the cleavage of society into two classes and the rise of the nuclear family is a consequence of the appropriation of agricultural surpluses by men at the dawn of ‘civilization.’ If for Engels in the family the man “is the bourgeois,” and the woman “represents the proletarian,”[22] [23] what this suggests is that—just as the bourgeoisie was able to constitute itself as a class on account of the transformation of the bourgs into commercial centers in the eleventh century—the class of “man” was able to constitute itself on account of the establishment of private ownership in early communal societies. Lending force to this thesis is the fact that, as Leslie Feinberg has observed, in the North American indigenous context so decisive to Morgan’s researches many tribes—from the Zuni to the Crow—were not organized binomially[25].
As can be seen from the above, Engels’ argument in The Origin… entails that the creation of the classes of “man” and “woman” is a consequence of the scission between exchange-value and use-value that grips societies once commodity exchange is established (with women remaining within the domain of use value production, or “social reproduction,” and men differentiating themselves by virtue of their engagement in the sphere of exchange value circulation). This angle is developed and brought into the context of contemporary capitalism in Maya Gonzalez and Jeanne Neton’s seminal 2013 essay, “The Logic of Gender: On the Separation of Spheres and the Process of Abjection.” An ambitious synthesis of value-form theory, post-operaist feminism, and Butler, Gonzalez and Neton argue for the need to understand the category of gender (and its retroactive attribution to sex) as corresponding to capitalism’s anchoring of individuals to either the “directly market mediated” or “indirectly market-mediated”[26] spheres[27] (terms which Gonzalez and Neton put forth as more theoretically precise alternatives to the paid/unpaid labor distinctions). And while Gonzalez and Neton agree with Butler that the “sex/gender binary [is] socially-determined and produced through social conditions specific to modernity,” where they disagree is in positing a female gender that is signified not just through “an array of ‘feminine’ or gendered characteristics,” but through a “price tag” (or “gendered average”) for the cost of biological reproduction[28] [29].
Understanding the binary organization of gender—and its later attribution to sex—as a consequence of the generalization of the commodity-form can help us formulate an authentically Marxist response to the question of biological sex qua trans inclusion. For Power, the “consumerist” view of sex as being something claimed by enunciation is a consequence of the entrenchment of capitalist social relations which seek to rob us of our collective origins. This is not untrue: clearly the expansion of the labor force to encompass women and the accompanying gains achieved by feminists have led to a de-naturalization of gender (and with it, sex). But the “origin” Power seeks is not a biological one, but is rather rooted in the exchange of commodities and the subsequent emergence of capitalism. Moreover, where capitalism sanctions these kinds of multivalent expressions, it also must simultaneously repress them, so as to insure the continuance of a binary organization essential to its own reproduction. The emergence of “transgender” as a socially acknowledged category is thus not a threat[30] [31]. What it points to, instead, are the immanent contradictions of capital—contradictions that can only be resolved when the commodity-form which undergirds our sexual dispensation is swept aside once and for all.
To Power’s tautological thesis then we offer the consul of Marx. One can, should they wish, shout into the Teutonic forests. But “it is common knowledge that the forest echoes back what you shout into it.”[32]
References
[1] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1999), 160.
[2] Katerina Kolozova. “Preface,” in After the “Speculative Turn”: Realism, Philosophy, and Feminism ed. by Katerina Kolozova and Eileen A. Joy (Santa Barbara: punctum books, 2016), 15.
[3] Laboria Cuboniks, “Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation,” 2018, 0x01, https://laboriacuboniks.net/manifesto/xenofeminism-a-politics-for-alienation.
[4] Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, trans. Samuel Moore and Frederick Engels, ch. 1., https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#007.
[5] Karl Marx, Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan and Dirk J. Struick (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1959), Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Economic-Philosophic-Manuscripts-1844.pdf.
[6] Katerina Kolozova, Capitalism’s Holocaust of Animals (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 129-133.
[7] Nina Power, “Materialist Feminism and Radical Feminism: Revisiting the Second Wave in the Light of Recent Controversies,” (Xenofeminism and other forms of realist and materialist feminism, Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities, Skopje, North Macedonia, September 11, 2020).
[8] Malabou has further elaborated her position on trans subjectivity in her latest text, Le plaisir effacé: Clitoris et pensée.
[9] Mary Daly, “From Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism,” 486, https://womrel.sitehost.iu.edu/Rel433%20Readings/DOUUGF~K.PDF.
[10] In fact, Gimenez is decidedly more circumspect than Power about the role that biology ought to play in Marxist feminism. In the essay by her that Power drew from for her presentation, “What’s material about materialist feminism?,” she states that foregrounding of “abstract pronouncements” about biology is suggestive of an “an empiricist focus on the immediately given” that neglects to take into consideration the determinant causal effects of our overarching economic structure (and is therefore more characteristic of generic, “materialist feminism” than the “Marxist feminism” she advocates). [Martha E. Gimenez, “What’s material about materialist feminism?: A Marxist Feminist Critique” (2000), Radical Philosophy, https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/whats-material-about-materialist-feminism].
[11] Power in her presentation advanced a ‘combinatory’ view of the parallax, in which a more holistic understanding of reality can be divined by adding up the male and female parallaxes. However, this has been omitted due to the point made by Alenka Zupancic in the discussion that followed the presentation: that Lacan did not see a holistic view of reality as being obtainable (as the disparity of the parallaxes points towards its ontological incompleteness).
[12] Power, “Materialist Feminism and Radical Feminism: Revisiting the Second Wave in the Light of Recent Controversies.”
[13] Simone de Beavoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (New York: Vintage, 2011), 66.
[14] Power, “Materialist Feminism and Radical Feminism: Revisiting the Second Wave in the Light of Recent Controversies.”
[15] Ibid.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Louis Althusser, “On Feuerbach,” The Humanist Controversy and Other Texts, ed. François Matheron, trans. G.M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 2003), 96.
[21] This formulation is adopted from one Althusser provides to explain Feuerbach in his essay “On Feuerbach”: that “species = essence = self-consciousness = absolute knowledge.”
[22] Frederick Engels, The Origin of Family, Private Property, and the State, trans. Alick West, 39, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/origin_family.pdf.
[23] It is not coincidental, then, that Power in her presentation explicitly rejected this comparison.
[25] Leslie Feinberg, “Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come,” The Transgender Studies Reader, eds. Susan Stryker and Stephen Wittle (New York: Routledge, 2006), 207-209.
[26] Maya Gonzales and Jeanne Neton, “The Logic of Gender,” Endnotes, https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/3/en/endnotes-the-logic-of-gender.
[27] Though Gonzales and Neton do point out that certain activities that are not directly productive of value are nevertheless waged, as with e.g. state employment.
[28] Ibid.
[29] Gonzalez and Neton’s essay also puts forth “the concept of the abject”/”abjection”—in other words, the process through which IMM activities which have become waged (such as childcare) lose this status, correspondingly decreasing the freedom enjoyed members of the female gender.
[30] Even as one can soberly acknowledge that—due to the status of biological sex as a ‘real abstraction’ as well as the way it indexes to certain objective biological traits—trans inclusion will not necessarily be possible tout d’un coup in every instance.
[31] While we’ve attempted to avoid virtue signaling in this essay in favor of overall philosophical rigor, it’s difficult to fully ignore the fact that Power’s exposition of the supposedly egregious harms inflicted upon trans-exclusionary feminists was unaccompanied by any significant acknowledgement of the daily violence experienced by (a far greater number of) trans people. There’s surely a pun lurking here about One-Dimensional Woman…
[32] Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Introduction, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm.