Why Materialist Feminism Is (Still) Possible—and Necessary

Abstract : The title of this article comes from Christine Delphy's (1980) reply to her critique of Marxism, which was formulated at a time when feminist theory was primarily concerned with material social inequalities. Since then, we have witnessed the so-called "cultural turn", with the result that perspectives concerned with social structures, relations and practices have been marginalized. However, not all feminists have shared this turn, and recently there have been signs of a resurgence of materialist feminism. In assessing the impact of these theoretical shifts and making a case for the continued relevance of materialist feminism, I will focus on the analysis of gender and sexuality. Here I will argue that a sociological, materialist approach has more to offer feminism than more culturally oriented postmodern and queer perspectives.

introduce

The title of this article borrows from Christine Delphy’s response to her Marxist critics: “Materialist Feminism is Possible” (Delphy, 1980). Michele Barrett and Mary McIntosh (1979), among others, have criticized Delphy for her casual use of Marxism, for borrowing Marx’s methods and some of his concepts without being faithful to the letter of his texts, and, most importantly, for daring to suggest that the methods of historical materialism could be applied to patriarchal relations of production within the family. Importantly, Delphy’s affirmation of materialist feminism was in response to another, more traditional Marxist version of materialism. However, within a few years, many of those who considered Delphy a half-hearted Marxist had abandoned materialist analysis altogether, as a result of the so-called “cultural turn,” which Michele Barrett describes as a shift in feminist emphasis away from “things” (such as women’s work and male violence) and toward “discourse,” toward questions of language, representation, and subjectivity (Barrett, 1992). This development is sometimes called the "linguistic turn", associated with the movement of second-wave feminism in the early 1980s away from a "modernist" agenda and towards a postmodern perspective.

However, not all feminists have turned to culture or embraced postmodernism. Many continue to work within a broad materialist framework, addressing modernist preoccupations such as the pursuit of freedom, justice, and equality. Moreover, in the early 1990s, when postmodern feminism seemed to have become the accepted theoretical orthodoxy, materialist feminism began to revive or resurface, especially in the United States (Hennessy, 1993; Hennessy & Ingraham, 1997; Landry & MacLean, 1993). More recently, even Judith Butler (1997) has invoked historical materialism to counter the view that sexual oppression is “merely cultural.” Because I want to argue for the continuing relevance of materialist perspectives, I welcome the resurgence of interest in material social relations. However, I am concerned about some of the forms it has taken, particularly the tendency to reduce materiality to capitalist economic relations—evident in Butler’s (1997) article and elsewhere. This would risk returning us to the least productive form of Marxism of the 1970s, in which every inequality that does not contribute significantly to capitalism is declared immaterial. This is precisely the form of Marxism that Delphi challenges.

Given that the term “materialist” has been claimed by a number of competing theoretical positions, I should make it clear that I am using it to refer to views derived from Marx’s historical materialism. My own theoretical lexicon is materialist feminism as it developed in France from the 1970s onwards, particularly in its variant associated with Christine Delphy. Materialist feminism first emerged in opposition to traditional Marxism and difference feminism. Its exponents include, in addition to Delphy, Co-lette Guillaume, Nicole-Claude Mathieu, and Monique Wittig. They are radical feminists in that the object of their analysis is primarily patriarchy rather than capitalism—they refuse to see the former as a derivative of the latter—but they see historical materialism as a way of analyzing the relationship between men and women as social rather than natural.

Materialist feminism is not an economic determinism. As Delphy and Leonard (1992) remind us, one of the original strengths of Marx’s materialism was that it saw the economy not as an abstract system with its own inherent laws, but as a field of social relations that are constructed through social activity. I want to argue for a version of materialist feminism that foregrounds the social – social structures, relations and practices – but does not reduce all social structures, relations and practices to capitalism. In my view, patriarchal or gendered structures, relations and practices are as material as those of capitalism, as are those that derive from racism, colonialism and imperialism. Of course, all of these intersect and interact, often in unpredictable and contradictory ways, so that the social order is not some seamless monolithic entity. Taking a materialist stance, therefore, does not preclude recognition of differences among women: on the contrary, fully understanding these differences requires that we attend to material social qualities and everyday social practices. Nor does materialism ignore questions of language, cultural representations and subjectivity, but it does require situating them in their social and historical contexts. Most importantly, materialist feminism does not reduce women’s oppression to a single cause; it avoids attempts to synthesize grand theories and transhistorical, universal claims (see Delphy, 1984, pp. 17–27).

For me, a materialist perspective is necessarily a sociological one; therefore, in reasserting the importance of the material and the social, I am also seeking some fundamental sociological insights. My understanding of the social encompasses all aspects of social life, from structural inequalities to everyday interactions. It is concerned with meaning, not only in our broader culture, but also in our everyday social lives. It includes subjectivity, in that our sense of who we are in relation to others constantly guides our actions and interactions, and in turn, who we are is in part a result of our position on gender, class, race, and other divisions, and of the social and cultural circumstances in which we live.

I will return to these different aspects of society later in this article. First, however, I will give a very brief and necessarily cursory overview of the trajectory of the cultural turn, with a particular focus on gender issues and the category of "woman". Finally, I will further develop my arguments in relation to current debates about gender and heterosexuality.

Cultural Turn and the "Female" Issue

Until the early 1980s, the dominant perspectives in feminist theory came from the social sciences and were often informed by or formed in dialogue with Marxism. It was these perspectives that were displaced by the cultural turn and subsequently shelved or discarded as the source of past errors. Because these theories focused on social structures, analysing women’s oppression as a product of patriarchal and/or capitalist social systems, they were often portrayed as flawed in their fundamentalism and universalism, and were suspected of being essentialist, racist and heterogeneous (see, for example, Flax, 1990). Yet this early feminist theory gave feminism some of its most important and enduring insights, most importantly the idea that sex and gender are socially constructed, and the progressive politics of social transformation.

In Britain, and to a lesser extent in the United States, it was Marxist feminists who led the move away from theories of social structure and towards theories of culture, literature and philosophy. They have been resistant to such ideas as French materialist feminism, which radically reformulated Marxism (Barrett and McIntosh, 1979), but have been more receptive to ideas that might extend the influence of Marxism without challenging its core tenets. The problem is that, despite its strengths as a systematic theory of social oppression, Marxism cannot explain all aspects of gender relations. Even in areas that are within the remit of the Marxist tradition, particularly women’s labour, it is difficult to explain why women should occupy a special place in the capitalist order – for example, as the reproduction of labour power or as a reserve army of labour power.

The latter question was at the heart of the Marxist feminist journal m/f Project, founded in 1978. The editors saw the question of ‘how women as a category are produced’ as key to explaining their social subordination (Adams, Brown & Cowie, 1978, p. 5). The journal was highly influential in expanding the scope of Marxist feminism in the UK, but it was not the only voice. Others became interested in ideology, psychoanalysis and the work of French structuralists such as Althusser, Lacan and Levi-Strauss (see Coward & Ellis, 1977; Mitchell, 1975). At first, these new approaches maintained a loose connection with more traditional forms of Marxism through Althusser’s conceptualization of ideology as relatively independent of economic relations. This made it possible to theorize women’s subordination as ideological and cultural without necessarily linking it to the capitalist mode of production. However, as poststructuralism replaced structuralism, the concept of ideology gave way to discourse and structural analysis gave way to deconstruction. Later, postmodern skepticism about truth claims and metanarratives further questioned the analysis of systemic economic and social oppression. Ultimately, these theoretical forms led feminists to move completely away from socially based materialism.

However, the issues that have contributed to these shifts are well worth exploring. In particular, the category of ‘woman’ certainly needs to be questioned rather than taken for granted. First, it is important to ‘negate’ women and emphasise that women are a social and cultural category. However, within the logic of the cultural turn, ‘female’ can only be considered in a limited way; ‘woman’ and ‘feminine’ are cultural constructions that, through symbols or our psychological representations, emphasise gender difference rather than social hierarchy. While some embrace a feminism of difference, others seek a less essentialist deconstructive approach, viewing ‘woman’ and ‘man’ as ‘unstable identities’ (Riley, 1988) or binary divisions of gender as ‘regulatory fictions’ to be subverted (Butler, 1990). In doing so, however, they lose touch with material social structures and practices. It is impossible to think of ‘woman’ and ‘man’ as social categories, products of structural hierarchies – a view that materialist feminists are developing and that fundamentally questions the idea that gender categories are natural and pre-social (Delphy, 1984, 1993; Wittig, 1992). The cultural turn effectively sidelined this materialist analysis and emptied the concept of gender of its social significance as a hierarchy between men and women.

In the 1980s, there was another compelling reason to question the category of ‘woman’, as it obscured differences between women and privileged definitions of femininity constructed from the perspective of white Westerners. Once this ethnocentrism was exposed, ‘woman’ was never a unitary category (Brah, 1991). There was a growing recognition that feminists needed to confront the complexity of women’s lives in a postcolonial context, including the global economy, histories of colonial migration, and current labour migration and refugee displacement. All of this was seen by some feminists as a further mandate for postmodern theory, as a means of avoiding the exclusion of an imagined universal woman (Flax, 1990).

There is no doubt that the ways in which sexism intersects with other forms of inequality, particularly those based on racism and colonialism, have so far been under-theorized. Even more questionable is whether postmodernism offers the best corrective to this situation. There is no doubt that postmodern, postcolonial theorists have played an important role in reorienting feminist theory from the standpoint of the previously marginalized “other” (see, for example, Spivak, 1987). However, as some critics have pointed out, much postmodern work perpetuates the same exclusions as other theories that themselves presume to speak for the excluded, or claim to be concerned with diversity while refusing to confront racism directly (Modleski, 1991; Stanley, 1990).

Moreover, postmodernism does not have a monopoly on theories of diversity and complexity. Like Sylvia Walby (1992), I see no reason why a social structural analysis, provided it is not crudely reductionist, cannot address the different positions that women occupy in local and global contexts. There is also a danger in dismissing structural inequalities in the name of doubting universal truths. The “differences” that postmodernists focus on are often more than just “differences”—the most important of which are based on real material inequalities. Institutionalized racism, the legacy of centuries of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism, and local and global divisions of labor are at least as important as differences in cultural composition. Moreover, if we ignore the structural and material dimensions of social life, we may overestimate the differences that oppression and inequality produce. Mira Nanda (1997) makes this point in her critique of ecofeminism in the Indian context. She notes that the celebration of Indian women’s inherent connection to nature does not question the division of labor that gives them “privileged access to nature” and that leaves them to perform unpaid, unvalued work. Ultimately, she argues, this emphasis on cultural difference is a form of resistance to global capitalism that ignores local patriarchal relations and serves to glorify women’s vulnerable position.

Materialist analyses of systemic inequalities are as relevant now as they have ever been, and remain necessary to grapple with the complexities of the postcolonial world, including the intersections of gender, race, and nationality. We live today in a global environment marked by extremely pronounced and growing material inequalities—and it is often women who are most disadvantaged at the intersection of global and local exploitation (see, for example, Mohanty, 1997). Gender class and racial inequalities also persist in wealthy Western countries (see Walby, 1997). The oppressive “things” that feminists identified in the 1970s—male violence, exploitation of women’s domestic work, and low-wage labor—continue to shape what it means to be a woman, although the exact constraints we face and what they mean for us vary according to our respective particular social locations.

Back from the ‘cultural turn’?

While many feminists resisted the temptation of the cultural turn, others began to find ways back to materialism. In the 1990s, there were signs of a retreat from the extreme anti-materialist influence of postmodernism, acknowledging the continued need for a "critique of social totalities, such as patriarchy and capitalism" (Hennessy, 1993, p. xii). Some recent work has reaffirmed the basic tenets of Marxism (Hennessy & Ingraham, 1997), but some work has revised Marxism through the lens of postmodernism. For example, JK Gibson-Graham (1996)3 views the Marxist interpretation of capitalism as a discursive construction, not as a denial of materiality, but as a means of focusing on contextualized and localized processes and practices. Gibson-Graham argues that by dismantling the hegemonic representation of capitalism as a monolithic global system, we can reveal what such representations reveal: the continued presence of non-capitalist processes and practices. In this way, she is able to analyze the appropriation of women's labor in the family as a non-capitalist class process. The idea that men appropriate their wives' labour, which was considered heretical by Marxists when Delphy (1977) first proposed it, now seems ripe for reinvention as post-Marxist.

Many materialist feminists, while still supporting structural analysis, have moved away from “grand theory” toward empirical research based on specific problems and contexts. These trends are consistent with Mary Maynard’s (1995) suggestion that feminists should develop what sociologists call “middle range” or “middle order” theories. These theories bridge the divide between abstract “grand theory,” which is often far removed from everyday social life, and untheoretical empiricism. They focus on the details of specific social contexts, institutions, and relationships, offer foundation-based generalizations rather than universal, overarching models of the whole of society, and are more easily integrated with empirical research. Here, the emphasis is on theorizing rather than producing “theory” with a capital “t.” It suggests a more open, eclectic approach rather than insisting on theoretical purity, making use of conceptual tools that seem useful for a particular purpose rather than being guided by a dogmatist commitment to a particular set of concepts. Thus, we can analyze women’s everyday existence and the meanings they give to their lives without ignoring structural patterns of domination and subordination.

Empirically grounded theory, focusing on the material conditions of local women’s lives, allows us to see connections between aspects of society that were once thought to be separate areas of inquiry, such as sexuality and work. For example, Lisa Adkins (1995) drew our attention to the gendering of women’s labour in the service sector. Sexuality has been largely ignored in analyses of gendered labour markets, or when it is considered, it is often treated as an aspect of workplace culture that is unrelated to gendered work structures. Her empirical investigations of a hotel and a leisure park allowed her to see that the persistent gendering of women’s labour – their use as display objects, the particularities of the dress code, the expectation that dealing with sexual harassment from customers is ‘part of the job’ – is no accident. This ‘heterosexualisation’ is encoded into the gendered division of labour: it is a hidden aspect of the ‘personal norm’ for particular jobs and of everyday recruitment and work discipline. She can therefore argue that sexuality may play a larger role in gendered labour market structures than is often assumed.

Daily social life

When we turn our attention to the everyday, localized contexts of women’s lives, it becomes clear that the material and the social cannot be understood solely in terms of social structure. We also need to consider subjectivity and agency; the patterns of gendered interaction in everyday life and the institutional hierarchies within which this occurs; the ways in which such interactions are imbued with meaning for and affected by the participants; the micro-levels of power configurations and resistance, and the macro-levels of systemic domination. Considering all of this requires a degree of social analysis that does not reduce every aspect of our lives to the effects of social structure—and that allows us to understand the extent to which social structure itself is constantly evolving through human practices.

However, replacing society with culture does not necessarily provide the answer. The social world includes the cultural world, of course – but the cultural world is not the whole of the social world. Whether we define culture narrowly as the symbolic and representational, or broadly as the shared way of life of a particular society or community, cultural practices are also social practices. Culture is woven into the social fabric of our everyday lives and cannot be understood as separate from the social practices and social relations in which it is embedded. Yet many Marxist feminists turned to cultural theory, to linguistic and symbolic structuralism, and then to poststructuralism and postmodernism, to explain aspects of life that traditional Marxism had failed to address.

These theories are often sold to feminists as a means of countering essentialist ideas about the human subject and the sociocultural world she inhabits. For example, according to Chris Weedon (1987), poststructuralism reveals that there is no essential social self, that language is not a transparent medium of communication, that meanings change as they are contested and renegotiated, and that knowledge is a social construction rather than a revelation of absolute truth. For those with memories of sociology in the 1960s and 1970s, none of this will be news, as all of these ideas were familiar tenets of certain micro-sociological theories at the time, that is, theories that focused on the interpretative processes underpinning everyday life rather than on social structures. These included symbolic interactionism and forms of phenomenological sociology such as ethnography.

These neglected theories may allow feminists to develop a more nuanced understanding of many elements of social and cultural life, enabling us to re-examine the meaning and subjectivity of the everyday realities of women's lives and the broader social and cultural contexts in which these lives are situated. In the 1970s and early 1980s, these perspectives influenced analyses of the social construction of gender and sexuality (Gag-non & Simon, 1974; Jackson, 1978; Kessler & McKenna, 1978; Plummer, 1975; Stanley, 1984) and critiques of mechanistic notions of "roles" and "socialization" (Stanley & Wise, 1983, 1993). Many feminists continue to work productively within the traditions of interactionist and phenomenological sociology, drawing on them to address contemporary theoretical issues such as embodied sexuality and gender (DeNora, 1997; Lindemann, 1997) and gender ambiguity (Kessler, 1998). While there have been some very prominent feminists who have drawn on these theories, such as Dorothy Smith (1987, 1993), this type of work has generally been a minority effort and little known outside of sociology.

Why is this? Given that these ideas were available and known to feminists, why were they not used to fill the gaps in the Marxist theories that inspired the cultural turn? In part, this is simply because they were not popular in the 1970s and early 1980s, as their emphasis on everyday social practices was incompatible with the structural analysis that was dominant at the time. As a result, the critical perspectives they provided were ignored and later replaced by new theoretical forms. For example, interactionists had effectively critiqued the concept of sexual repression in the early 1970s (Gagnon and Simon, 1974), but these arguments were ignored until they were given credibility by Foucault's (1981) critique of the "repression hypothesis" (see Jackson, 1999). Su-zanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna (1978) offered one of the earliest critiques of sexual difference, arguing that there is no pre-given gender, only socially constructed gender. Following Garfinkel (1967), they argued that gender is produced and maintained through processes of performance and attribution (or "reading" the concrete existence of others). This was again ignored. By the time Judith Butler (1990) popularized the concept of “performative gender,” the concept’s ethnomethodological roots had been forgotten.

There is another reason why these approaches have not been more widely adopted during periods of cultural transformation. While they offer a theory of social subjectivity, they lack any ready-made mode of articulation with Marxism – unlike psychoanalysis, which can be linked to the Marxist project through Althusser’s (1971) notion that ideology posits us as subjects.7 Moreover, the sociological concept of subjectivity does not at first glance fit in with the poststructuralist critique of essentialism, since it relies on the notion of a reflexive social self. This idea is sometimes resisted on the grounds that it presupposes a presocial, or prediscursive, “I” that functions as a reflexive self. However, if we take this idea back to the work of George Herbert Mead (1934), it does not presuppose an essential, intrinsic “I” but rather an “I” that is merely a fleeting movement of a socially constituted self. There is no self outside of society; it exists and is produced only in relation to the social “other.” This self is not a fixed structure but is always “in process” by virtue of its constant reflexivity.

One recent way to analyze this reflexive self-construction is through the concept of gendered and sexual narratives of the self, which is rooted both in the social logic tradition of interactionism and in more recent discourse analysis (Jackson, 1998; Plummer, 1995; Huisman, 1996). This perspective allows us to see subjectivity as a personal, socially situated, biographical product—but in contrast to older socialization perspectives, in which the present adult self was seen as a product of the past child self. Rather, the present significantly reshapes the past as we reconstruct our memories, our sense of ourselves, through the stories we tell ourselves and others. Experience is thus continually processed, interpreted, and theorized through the narrative forms and means available to us (Jackson, 1998). Of course, these cultural resources are historically specific; therefore, particular modes of self-construction become available at different historical moments (Plummer, 1995).

What makes this conception of the self potentially consistent with a materialist perspective is that it situates the individual subject and biography within a specific historical, social and cultural context, linking the self to the reality of social existence. If we are theoretical purists, there may also be a problem that the symbolic interactionist tradition in which this conceptualization is rooted does not allow for an analysis of social structures. However, in keeping with Mary Maynard's (1995) call for middle order theory, and in order to be more pragmatic and eclectic in our use of concepts and perspectives, we can now certainly acknowledge that social life is multi-layered, multifaceted, and that contradictory processes are often at work within it. We can locate ourselves within social structures and cultural categories (e.g., gender, class and "race") and still possess agency, interpret events, attribute meaning to them, and act on the basis of our everyday practical knowledge of the world. On this basis, I argue that the time is ripe for a reassessment and development of these micro-sociological perspectives, building on the contributions of feminists who continue to explore their potential for analyzing subjectivity, meaning, agency and everyday social practices.

Redefining social construction

These micro-sociological perspectives were the original source of the basic ideas of social construction that were later applied to gender and sexuality in the 1970s. It is because this has been forgotten that social constructionism is often mistakenly seen as a newer, poststructuralist innovation. I would argue that these newer conceptualizations are often not social at all and are more accurately cultural constructionisms.

The way we conceptualize society profoundly shapes our understanding of the processes of social construction—this is central to my understanding of the feminist project. Ever since Beauvoir made her famous claim that “one is not born, one becomes a woman” (Beauvoir, 1972, p. 295), feminists have argued that femininity is a social and cultural construction rather than a natural one, and that there is nothing inevitable about male domination (or any other system of social inequality). If society is multifaceted, as I have argued, then the processes of social construction are also multifaceted, involving at least four intersecting levels relating to structure, meaning, everyday practices, and subjectivity. Here I will make this point in relation to gender and sexuality, a much-debated area in feminism and one where cultural theory has had a significant impact.

At the level of social structures, gender is a high-order relationship, made up of social beings and social persons, maintained through the division of labour and other means, notably the heterosexual marriage contract. Here, gender intersects with institutionalised heterosexuality, bound by law, state and social conventions. The heterosexual system is inherently gendered; it relies on the assumed normalcy of particular forms of social and sexual relations between men and women. Gender is also constructed at the level of meaning, through cultural differences between men and women, the unspoken and taken-for-granted ways in which we embody and recognise one another as feminine or masculine, and the more overt norms of appropriate femininity and masculinity. Sexuality is socially constructed at the level of meaning, through its constitution as an object of discourse, and through the particular discourses about sexuality that circulate at any historical moment; these discourses serve to define what sex is, to distinguish between what is ‘sexual’ and what is ‘normal’, and to delimit masculine and feminine forms of sexuality as appropriate. However, meaning also resides in social interaction and therefore finds its expression at another level – in our everyday social practices, through which each of us negotiates and makes sense of our own gender and sexuality. Here, too, gender and sexuality are constantly constructed, reconstructed, enacted and reenacted in specific social contexts and relations. Gender and sexuality are thus socially constructed by the actual behaviour of specific individuals. Finally, sex and gender are socially constructed at a subjective level through complex social and cultural processes through which we acquire sexualised and gendered desires and identities (see Jackson, 1999, pp. 5-6).

What cultural constructionism does, in contrast to social constructionism, is to exclude the first level, structure, entirely. The all-important hierarchical dimension of gender emerges from view, just as gender hierarchies underpin heterosexuality. Meaning becomes central, but primarily at the cultural and discursive level, rather than as meanings actually deployed in everyday social contexts. Sometimes practices are included—for example, in Butler’s (1990) discussion of performativity—but these practices are rarely present in any social context. Finally, subjectivity is often theorized through psychoanalysis, which completely abstracts subjectivity from its social context. It is this cultural, rather than social, approach to gender and sexuality that has set the agenda for recent theory, particularly through the influence of queer theory.

Questioning heterosexuality and undermining gender stability

Queer theory is not particularly easy to define, and indeed the continued use of the term has been controversial. Generally speaking, it refers to a form of postmodern theory that is influenced by deconstructionist and psychoanalytic perspectives, and in particular by Foucault's (1981) analysis of sexuality. It tends to focus on texts, discourses, and cultural practices rather than the social conditions of our sexual lives (see Seidman, 1997). Over the past decade, feminists have also engaged in debates about heterosexuality, sometimes with queer perspectives and sometimes following entirely different paths (Richardson, 1996; Wilkinson and Kissinger, 1993). Queer theory and feminism share some common concerns: both question the inevitability and naturalness of heterosexuality, and both argue that neither the division of sex nor the boundaries between heterosexuality and homosexuality are determined by nature. There are also divisions between primarily feminist and primarily queer critiques, notably that the former takes male dominance in heterosexuality as its starting point, while the latter is more concerned with undermining the binary divisions that maintain normative heterosexuality.

I have recently argued that a valid standard of heterosexuality must address both heteronormativity and male dominance (Jackson, 1999). However, I am not proposing a simple synthesis between queerness and feminism, but rather an analysis based on a materialist feminist understanding of gender as a hierarchical social division, not simply a cultural difference (see Delphy, 1993). Gender is key to a critical understanding of heterosexuality. Not only is heterosexuality, by definition, based on the polarity of gender, but the binary division between straight and homosexual is meaningless in the absence of gender; the desire to be "same-sex" or "straight-sex" requires gender as a social, cultural, and subjective reality. Without gender, heterosexuality, homosexuality, and lesbianism cannot exist (see Jackson, 1996).

To develop this argument, I will briefly discuss aspects of Judith Butler’s work that can be read as both queer and feminist, and to some extent as involving marital feminism (Butler, 1990, 1993, 1997). Like most queer theorists, Butler seeks to subvert heteronormativity. She also places gender at the center of her analysis, but, consistent with her queer and postmodern perspectives, gender is more a matter of cultural difference than social hierarchy. Her argument is most effective in revealing the artificiality of gender, its status as a construct that is not necessarily tied to a particular body or sex (Butler, 1990). She makes it clear that gender is not a fleeting, voluntary performance, its effects are coercive and restrictive, and it is equally constructed material (Butler, 1993). However, she discusses the “objectification” of “sexualized” bodies almost entirely in terms of norms—without knowing where these norms come from or why they reproduce gender divisions or heterosexual hegemony (Hennessy, 1998; Ramazanoglu, 1995). Society is thus reduced to norms, and what the norm is becomes unexplainable.

More recently, Butler (1997) has made some concessions to social structural analysis, questioning whether questions of gender and sexuality are “solely cultural.” In doing so, she invokes a form of Marxism that incorporates Levi-Strauss’s ideas about the exchange of women. However, this leads us back to an ahistorical and functionalist conception of kinship that avoids confronting the historical and cultural specificities of the various social practices that produce gender and sexuality (see Fraser, 1997; Hennessy, 1998). Butler does distance herself from Levi-Strauss’s universalism, arguing that queer studies could be a way back to a critique of the family “based on mobile insights into socially contingent and socially transformable kinship” (1997, p. 276, emphasis in original). But it is clear that the current structure of gender and sexuality depends on the functionality of the heterosexual family for capitalism! Butler traces the history of the cultural turn in reverse, through structuralism to the most simplified form of Marxism.

Butler also reduces the material to the economic, which, as Nancy Fraser has pointed out, defines the materiality of non-economic social processes (Fraser, 1997). What Fraser fails to note, however, is that Butler reduces the economic to capitalism and to class relations, a reduction that Fraser herself replicates. This strategy obscures the workings of non-capitalist economic processes, such as men’s appropriation of the labor of their wives and dependents (Delphy, 1984; Delphy and Leonard, 1992). Thus, neither Butler nor her critics connect the oppression of homosexuals to the exploitative gender order that underpins institutionalized heterosexuality. This omission is rather surprising given Butler’s early reliance on the work of Monique Wittig, for whom the heterosexual contract is a labor relationship, not just a sexual one, a relationship that constitutes women and men through their class relations to one another (see Wittig, 1992). However, Butler (1990) filters out much of Wittig’s materialism in focusing on sexuality in a narrow sense (Jackson, 1995). This may help explain the wide gap between the function of heterosexuality in Butler’s theory (for capitalism), the norms that enforce heterosexuality (asserted but never fully explained), and the representations and performances of gender production in everyday life.

Gender and heterosexuality are maintained not only through structural hierarchies and social norms, but also through our everyday sexual and social practices. The gendered heterosexual order therefore requires us to constantly reaffirm its continuation. As ethnomethodologists tell us, most people “do gender” and “do heterosexuality” every day without critically reflecting on these behaviors. This is done through talk and action, through specific practices of dress and mannerism, through active participation in normal institutional settings, and through the mundane activities of daily life. Cultural approaches (Butler and others) not only ignore socially structured understandings of gender that help explain why it persists in its current form, but also ignore everyday social practices that reveal how gender and heterosexuality are constantly constructed and reconstructed in everyday social interactions.

Of course, queer theorists have said a lot about “erasing,” or at least disrupting, heterosexuality and the non-normativity of gender, the instability of male/female and straight/homosexual binaries. However, this is by no means equivalent to the total elimination of gender and heterosexuality per se—to eliminating them. Butler’s performative subversion, for example, is not so much about erasing gender in new ways as it is about erasing gender in new ways (Butler, 1990). 9 Moreover, deviant sexual and gender performances have little social impact if they do not erode the material inequalities associated with the gendered division of labor and resources and dismantle the institutions that maintain heterosexuality’s privileged position in society.

There is another problem inherent in much of the current cultural thinking about gender. With its focus on deconstructing the binary, the subversion of gender is widely seen as a process of multiplication: making the boundaries between genders more fluid and creating more genders by moving and combining elements between the existing two. This does not challenge gender per se: you don’t subvert a hierarchy by introducing more hierarchies between dominants and subordinates. Moreover, it departs from the social constructionist understanding of gender, which assumes that the whole of human potential is equal to the sum of its gendered parts – that all we can achieve is a mixture of identities and subjectivities constructed through gender divisions. From a more socially informed materialist perspective, this cannot be the case. If humans are social beings, then what kind of people we are depends on the society and culture in which we live. If men and women are the product of hierarchical relations, very different subjects, identities and desires can emerge within those relations – and none of them have anything to do with gender.

in conclusion

As Christine Delphy comments, “Only the day we can imagine non-gender will we truly be able to think about gender” (Delphy, 1993, p. 9). Today, much of what is seen as radical is more narrow in scope, so that the end of gender hierarchies and the collapse of institutionalized heterosexuality seem unthinkable. If we cannot imagine a radically different social world, we limit our own ability to think critically. To make this imaginative leap, we need to see more clearly the social order in which we live, removing the tinted glasses that the cultural turn has imposed on our vision. Of course, we can never pay attention to everything at once, never hope to grasp the full, kaleidoscopic, and ever-changing complexity of the social and cultural world, but we can collectively try to see more. If we succeed, we may recover the transformative vision of feminism and our ability to imagine the unthinkable: not only a world without gender, but also a world without the countless inequalities and injustices that condition women’s lives today.