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Home , Monique Wittig, Radical feminism

Sexmat, revisited

Stella Sandford

As a genre of intellectual production, ‘’ as a thing of the past. With this distinction, theoretical emerged in the 1980s, hot on the heels of the criti- innovations concerning the basic categories of femi- cisms of the white Eurocentrism and nist theory – , , male, female, sex, of classic second-wave writing. The conjunction of – were mostly presumed to be the preserve of psycho- these criticisms and the growing influence of various analytic and poststructuralist (including Foucauldian philosophical and psychoanalytic theoretical elements and Derridean) feminists. developed, in one strand of feminist theory, into a This categorization overlooks the fact that the most questioning of the foundational categories of feminist far-reaching attempts to reconsider the foundational theory and politics itself: ‘sexual difference’, ‘woman’ categories of came – in the 1980s, continuing and ‘man’. In particular, under the influence of Laca- into the 1990s – in the work of the French material- nian psychoanalytic theory in specific fields – notably ist (and methodologically Marxist) feminists, most film theory in the UK – the role of the ‘representation’ famously and .3 In of reality in the constitution of reality itself became a contemporary anglophone feminist theory the domi- central concern. In feminist theory, then, this meant a nant reception of one of the most important aspects of concern with the constitutive role of the ‘representation’ this work – its systematic questioning of the category of sexual categories and a denial that these categories of sex – has been mediated through its transforma- – ‘man’, ‘woman’ – referred unproblematically to a tion in the work of .4 This questioning is pre-linguistic, pre-social reality. ‘Woman’ was not to now usually framed, in a predominantly philosophical be taken for granted; the construction of ‘woman’ as debate, in the following way: Is there such a thing as a category was, instead, to be explained. This position ‘sex’? Does sex exist? was retrospectively characterized as ‘constructivist’ or This article revisits some emblematic moments in anti-essentialist, though feminist anti-essentialism is by the short history of the relations between Marxist and no means reducible to this strand of feminist theory.1 feminist theory to reconsider the pertinence of the Despite the unsurprising scepticism, if not hostil- questioning of the category of sex for that relation. It ity, of some Marxist and socialist feminist theorists aims to clarify the specificity of the French materialist (for example, Michèle Barrett – at least for a while feminists’ part in this questioning in order to criticize – as discussed below) to these allegedly idealistic the form that the debate over ‘sex’ now tends to take new developments, many of these ‘constructivists’ and to explain some of the problems with it.5 conceived of their theoretical project as part of the ongoing attempt to bring Marxist and feminist theory The reproduction of sex together. In the UK the relatively short-lived but aca- The problems for a are well known. demically high-profile journal m/f was for a while the Can historical give an account of the main place of publication for this strand of feminist specificity of women’s ? Relatedly – to the theory. In the first number of the journal (1978) its extent that the sexual division of labour founded on the intellectual-political raison d’être explicitly concerns different roles of men and women in biological repro- the development of Marxist feminism.2 Even so, by the duction is part of women’s oppression – what is the mid-1980s, the first introductions to ‘feminist theory’ relation between social and biological reproduction? were distinguishing between Marxist and socialist ’s , first feminism, on the one hand, and psychoanalytic and published in 1970, proposed bold answers to these ‘poststructuralist’ , on the other. Radical questions. Although it is little read today, aspects of feminism and were the other two The Dialectic of Sex are, surprisingly perhaps, instruc- main strands identified, though , iden- tive as a way into the contemporary debate about ‘sex’. tified with its US variant, was already generally seen Firestone addressed the problem of a properly feminist

28 Radical Philosophy 145 (September/October 2007) materialist analysis of sex by reformulating it. Rather sitate the development of a sex class system based on than asking how to fit sex and biological reproduction domination – what others called ‘’ – until into materialist analysis, she asked how materialist such time as women are freed from this role. This analysis must be adapted when sex is prioritized ana- natural-biological problem becomes a political problem lytically. Firestone’s aim was ‘to develop a materialist – as it is now – when our capacity to overcome it exists view of history based on sex itself’, a project she but is not exploited. Sex is a natural material condition conceived as a transformative expansion of historical constraining and limiting human possibility, but ‘now, materialism, claiming to follow the analytic method for the first time in history, technology has created of Marx and Engels. ‘We shall need a sexual revolu- real preconditions for overthrowing these oppressive tion much larger than – inclusive of – a socialist one “natural” conditions, along with cultural reinforce- to truly eradicate all class systems’, Firestone wrote, ments.’11 Existing (natural) relations of reproduction and as the theoretician of this she claimed will soon be in conflict with the material (artificial) to take the class analysis of Marx and Engels one step means of reproduction at our disposal, creating the further, ‘to its roots in the biological division of the conditions for a , the transforma- sexes’.6 There is, Firestone claimed, ‘a whole sexual tions of which are necessary for the liberation of all, substratum of the historical dialectic’ that Marx and not just women. Thus Firestone’s first revolutionary Engels perceived only dimly, if at all. Reformulating demand is ‘the freeing of women from the tyranny Engels’s definition of historical materialism, the main of reproduction by every means possible [ultimately, thesis of The Dialectic of Sex is that artificial, ex-utero reproduction], and the diffusion of the child-rearing role to the society as a whole, men as The sexual-reproductive organization of society always furnishes the real basis, starting from which well as women.’ In the post-revolutionary period, when we can alone work out the ultimate explanation we will discover whether such a thing as the ‘instinct of the whole superstructure of economic, juridical for pregnancy’ really exists – Firestone doubts that it and political institutions as well as of the religious, does – ‘pregnancy … would be indulged in, if at all, philosophical and other ideas of a given historical only as a tongue-in-cheek archaism’. Let me be blunt, period.7 Firestone writes: ‘Pregnancy is barbaric … the tempo- The ‘dialectic of sex’ is the ‘great moving power of all rary deformation of the body of the individual for the historical events’.8 sake of the species.’ For this reason revulsion at the For Firestone economic class analysis needed to be sight of the pregnant female body, the waning of male given its basis in what she called ‘sex class’ analysis. sexual desire for the pregnant woman, is, she says, Unlike economic class, sex class – by which she a wholly natural phenomenon, not a cultural habit.12 seems to mean the oppressive social form of relations If, for Marx, the human species first distinguishes between men and women – ‘sprang from a biological itself from other animals through the social produc- reality’, ‘the sexual division itself’.9 Radical feminism, tion of the means of subsistence (social-historical she argued, was the first truly materialist analysis of reproduction), for Firestone women are effectively socio-economic forms and their forms of oppression still animals until biological reproduction, a merely because it was the first to acknowledge this real basis. natural phenomenon, becomes social through its being And although this insistence on the analytic priority technologically mastered. Biological reproduction is and explanatory function of sex is typical of certain part of the prehistory of the species. radical feminist accounts of women’s oppression, what Firestone is a fascinating anomaly in the history of follows in Firestone’s account is not. On the main feminism. Although she saw as points that constitute her distinctive contribution to her closest theoretical co-worker, the status of The Dia- feminist theory she finds herself in opposition to the lectic of Sex today is closer to that of ’s mainstream of US radical feminism. SCUM Manifesto, rather than . And it The biological reality of sex division is, she argues, is not hard to see why The Dialectic of Sex became, in itself fundamentally oppressive: ‘men and women in Ann Snitow’s phrase, ‘a demon text’13 of feminism. were created different, and not equal’, and ‘[t]he imme- Criticism tended to focus on Firestone’s account of diate assumption of the layman that the unequal divi- women’s role in reproduction and its misogynistic sion of the sexes is “natural” may be well-founded.’10 and/or masculinist assumptions. In the context of the Women’s role in reproduction is fundamentally oppres- Marxist and socialist feminist debates over the nature sive; that is, nature is woman’s first oppressor. The of women’s oppression and its relation to capitalism, reproductive functions that define sex division neces- especially in the 1970s at the height of Firestone’s

29 notoriety, the more typical radical feminist claim of Firestone, be addressed through the category of gender, the analytic and explanatory priority of sex was also analytically distinguished from sex.19 attacked. Now Barrett is surely right to question Firestone’s And yet Firestone was worth taking seriously. category of the biological family – at best an ill- According to Michèle Barrett (in her 1980 Women’s chosen metaphor, at worst a vicious contradiction in Oppression Today), ‘Attempts to combine an analysis terms. But Barrett’s position has its own problems. of social reproduction with an analysis of patriarchal Her focus on the category of gender, consequent upon human reproduction represent the fundamental problem the enthusiastic embrace of the sex/gender distinc- Marxist feminism faces.’14 Firestone at least tackled tion, leaves the question of the status of sex unasked, this head-on. She also correctly identified the family as allowing various untheorized assumptions about sex the central locus of women’s oppression,15 although for to stand. That is, Barrett questions Firestone’s second Firestone this means the ‘biological family’. The family claim, but not her first. Barrett attempts to chart a path is, according to Firestone, the ‘basic reproductive unit through Firestone’s biologism and what she sees as the of male/female/infant’, a biological reality prior to of the kind of feminist theory that collapses any particular, historical ‘form of social organization’ sex difference into the social construction of gender. and from which women’s oppression naturally springs. In Women’s Oppression Today Barrett explicitly refers The biological family is ‘an inherently unequal power to the feminist theory propounded in the pages of the distribution’ constituting a natural but oppressive divi- journal m/f.20 Had Barrett’s book been written fifteen sion of labour on the basis of ‘the natural reproductive years later, Judith Butler would have been identified as difference between the sexes’, a division of labour in the main anglophone exponent of this tendency. In con- which women and children, via women, are depend- trast Barrett, like Firestone, identifies sex difference ent on men.16 These claims represent, for Barrett, the – or biological differences more generally – as simply clearest example of the tendency in radical feminism to existing at a level of reality not open to question. For biologism, the reactionary retreat into the naturaliza- Barrett, following Sebastiano Timpanaro, tion of historical-cultural forms posited as causes.17 sex differences, along with other biological charac- As such, we may add, Firestone has not expanded teristics of human beings, … form part of the raw historical materialism, as she claimed, but moved onto material on which social relations are constructed an altogether different theoretical terrain, and despite and which they transform in the course of history. the title of her book there is no more a ‘dialectic of …[B]iology, the realm of the naturally given, [i]s sex’ than there is a merely natural dialectic. In fact we may distinguish two separate claims in Firestone’s analysis so far. First, the claim that there is a natural, biological division of the sexes, easily identi- fied; second, that this division is inherently unequal and, as the foundation of the biological family, is the basis of the oppression of women. It is this second claim that sets Firestone apart from the mainstream – indeed, the central and defining thrust – of most second-wave feminism, and that is most at odds with the radical feminism with which she is nevertheless often grouped. For Barrett, as for so many feminist theorists, ‘one of the early triumphs of feminist cross-

cultural work’ was the establishment of the distinction Echakhch,Lafita between a biological category of sex and a ‘social’ cat- egory of gender.18 In identifying a causal link between

sex division and social oppression Firestone’s analysis (Self-Portrait) Pin-Up undid this distinction, Barrett argues, and fell back into pre-feminist assumptions, speaking against its own professed feminist aims. For Barrett, the fundamental problem for Marxist feminism – the combination of 1999–2000 , ‘the analysis of social reproduction with an analysis of patriarchal human reproduction’ – must, contra

30 the infrastructure on which human social relations between social and biological reproduction, or nowhere 21 must necessarily be built. that does not, finally, concede the assertion of a causal Thus Barrett asserts her materialist credentials, accept- relation between sex and gender, however tenuated. ing, further – rhetorical hesitations notwithstanding As Barrett admits, at the end of her brief discussion – the idea of the ‘biological liabilities’ of the ‘female of Timpanaro: ‘in so far as the social oppression of condition’.22 women rests – in however small a way – on biologi- In her basic ontological commitment, then – the nat- cal difference our task is to challenge and change the 26 uralistic presumption about the being of sex – Barrett socially wrought meaning of that difference.’ In the completely agrees with Firestone. For Barrett, as for end, then, Barrett does not really contest Firestone’s Firestone, sex just is nature and natural-biological second claim either – the claim that the appropriation facts are, in themselves, unavailable for analysis or of women has a natural-biological basis. further consideration. Thus Barrett’s ‘materialism’ on Politicizing sex this question, because of her reliance on Timpanaro, reduces to a crude naturalism. Although her anti- In the context of her criticism of Firestone’s biolo- idealism allegedly consists in insisting on the relation gism, Barrett acknowledges the ‘major achievement between the natural and the social, the natural – sex of the work of Christine Delphy and others … the – is merely mentioned, and then completely subsumed development of a more properly materialist analysis in the analysis of gender relations, such that it is dif- of women’s oppression’.27 Ironically, from the per- ficult to see, in the final analysis, how her account is spective of Delphy’s later work, Barrett’s naturalistic effectively of a different type to the ‘idealist’ ones she presumptions about sex are as ‘reductionist’ as the dismisses. Thus, there is no analysis of sex in Barrett, biologism Barrett herself criticizes, and for exactly and – despite her claim that it constitutes the most the same reasons: ‘they subsume complex socially and important question for Marxist feminism – no account historically constructed phenomena under the simple of the relation of social reproduction and patriarchal category of biological difference’.28 Indeed, Barrett biological reproduction, qua biological reproduction. If occupies precisely that position on sex against which this, at least, is not an accusation that could be levelled Delphy and others – to the extent that they constitute a at Firestone, it is because she, on the contrary, fore- recognizable theoretical grouping, ‘French materialist grounds sex in an analysis that seems not to recognize feminism’ – seem to constitute themselves. a distinction between sex and gender. For Delphy and Monique Wittig, for example, the Barrett saw very clearly that the distinction between ‘traditional’ concept of sex as a natural, biological biological and social reproduction, which is neces- given (contrasted with the ‘social’ category of gender) sary for any non-reductive account of the relations of is revealed as an ideological misconception masking women’s oppression to capitalist relations of produc- the socio-economic nature of the relation of oppres- tion, brings with it its own problems. In particular, the sion called ‘sex’. Delphy and Wittig redefine sex in an need to include alternative or supplementary categories avowedly materialist way as social sex hierarchy and of analysis, or even systems of relations – such as that social sex opposition, refusing not only the traditional of ‘patriarchy’ – leads to conflicts over analytic priority concept of natural, biological sex as the determining and to difficulties, which even after 1980 Barrett still basis of gender relations, but also the sex/gender dis- saw as insuperable, in theoretical harmonization.23 She tinction in so far as, they argue, it cannot but reproduce did not, however, see the extent to which her embrace of the traditional concept of sex. These accounts are Timpanaro’s naturalism replicated and intensified these ‘materialist’ to the extent that ‘sex’ is thought as a problems at a deeper level. Her reliance on Timpanaro particular social relation enabling the reproduction of leads her to the contradictory position of claiming the means of existence in a particular social form. that a materialist analysis of women’s oppression must In ‘Rethinking Sex and Gender’ Delphy argues ‘take account of the relationship between the natural that ‘sex is a sign’ – not a natural fact preceding the and the social’24 (here, the relationship between bio- hierarchical division of gender but the marker of this logical and social reproduction), whilst simultaneously social division. Sex ‘serves to allow social recogni- having nothing to say about it beyond assertions of the tion and identification of those who are dominants explanatory irrelevance of nature (biological reproduc- and those who are dominated’.29 This marker ‘is not tion).25 But this is not an oversight. It is because there found in a pure state, all ready for use … [T]o be is nowhere else to go with a naturalistic concept of used as a dichotomous classification, the [several and sex in the attempt to say something about the relation variable] indicators [of sex] have to be reduced to

31 just one.’ Although there exist ‘anatomical sexual primary explanatory importance and the proposals for differences’,30 it is a social act to reduce these to the the abolition of biological reproduction. The contra- existence of an irreducible dichotomy (the production diction between the assertion of the ‘biological reality’ of the sign) correlating with the functional differences of sex division and its eventual disappearance36 is in between participants in biological reproduction. Thus fact the dialectic of The Dialectic of Sex, the exposure even ‘male’ and ‘female’ (and not only ‘man’ and of the error of its starting point. ‘woman’, as Colette Guillaumin seems to argue31) are The fact that the concepts of sex in Delphy, Wittig social categories denoting membership of a class – a and other French materialist feminists refer to a consti- sex class – which is both constituted by and maintains tuting social relation leads Alison Stone to the conclu- a relation of exploitation: the appropriation of the sion that the concepts are, in fact, reconfigurations of labour of one group (‘women’) by another (‘men’). the anglophone concept of gender.37 As this posits a Even more explicitly – and in direct opposition certain shared theoretical concern between the French to Firestone’s fundamental presupposition – Wittig materialist feminists and the anglophone tradition of famously claimed that ‘there is no sex. There is but gender theory, the specificity of the former, according sex that is oppressed and sex that oppresses. It is to Stone, lies not in the form of their concepts of sex oppression that creates sex and not the contrary.’32 (i.e., for Stone, gender) but in their additional, and For Wittig the apparently natural fact of sex is rather in Stone’s view analytically independent, denial of an ideological production of social life: the effect, the traditional biological concept of sex. Stone then masquerading as the cause, of the exploitation of defends a biological concept of sex against Wittig et the compulsory domestic and reproductive labour of al., and claims that such a concept is in fact, after all, women – women who are at the same time defined presupposed by their own non-biological concepts of precisely as women through the social obligation to sex. perform this kind of labour. As such sex is, for Wittig, Stone is right that the French materialist feminists’ ‘a category of dominance’,33 naming an oppositional concept of sex is not the ‘sex’ of the anglophone relation between socio-economic groups (or classes), sex/gender distinction, but this does not mean that it is the reality of which is masked by its naturalization. therefore a concept of gender. For there is something Delphy’s and Wittig’s achievement here is the for- specific about it as a concept of sex, distinguishing mulation of a properly political concept of sex. Their it from the prevailing anglophone concept of gender. is thus a form of analysis in The French materialist feminists’ concept of sex is which ‘sex’ and ‘the social’ already exist on the same the central element of a specific political analysis of analytic plane, such that sex is not a problem for mate- society, outside of which it is meaningless, whereas the rialist analysis, as it was for Barrett. Sex division or prevailing anglophone concept of gender is the name sex class is a political category referring to a specific for a social-psychological set of injunctions, behav- form of social relation, such that it makes sense to iours, identifications and so on, basically a sociological urge its abolition.34 It does not, on the other hand, concept which may or may not be part of a political seem to make sense that Firestone, with a conflicting analysis of society. It is precisely this – the relative conception of sex and a reversed claim about the rela- theoretical autonomy of the concept of gender – that tion between sex and oppression, should also end up caused Barrett and others so many problems in the with the same aim: ‘the end goal of feminist revolution attempt to produce a historically materialist account must be, unlike that of the first , not of women’s oppression. According to Barrett, Marxist just the elimination of but of the sex feminism ‘must identify the operation of gender distinction itself’.35 This reveals, however, both the relations as and where they may be distinct from, fundamental strength and the fundamental weakness or connected with, the processes of production and of The Dialectic of Sex. Its strength lies in the sys- reproduction understood by historical materialism’.38 tematic insinuation of sex as a fundamental category The fundamental theoretical gap between classic of analysis. But with no distinction between a political historical materialism and a feminism based on the and a biological concept of sex, Firestone’s thorough- concept of gender – an ad hoc concept in relation to going and often pitiless account of how sex matters in historical materialism – is encapsulated in this ‘as and every aspect of social and economic life, its structural where … distinct from … connected with’. This does importance, falls, disastrously – and, it must be said, not mean that feminist analysis must bend its will to sometimes comically – into the grounding thesis of the historical materialism, meekly accepting its terms and inherent inequality of biological sex difference and its conditions. It means that feminist analysis needs a

32 new concept in the formulation of a new materialism. Wittig’s claim that ‘there is no sex’ is, however, For the French materialist feminists that concept was, followed immediately by an assertion of its exist- precisely, ‘sex’. ‘Sex’ is thus not the disguised object of ence: ‘there is but sex that is oppressed and sex that a gender theory, or the disguised name for the social- oppresses.’ This parallels her claim that ‘“woman” psychological phenomenon of gender, but a conceptual does not exist’, while ‘women’ – ‘the product of a innovation that avoids the theoretical impasses of a social relationship’ – do.39 Wittig’s point in both cases Marxist feminism based on the concept of gender. is that the dominant biological category of sex and its terms ‘man and ‘woman’ are not ‘eternal’ categories, existing ‘a priori, before all society’,40 although they function as if they are. The denial of ‘sex’ is really the denial of the legitimacy of this function. Again, it is regrettable that Wittig should have chosen to explain this with a distinction between ‘being’ and ‘social relations’: ‘The category of sex is the political category that founds society as heterosexual. As such it does not concern being but relationships (for women and men are the result of relationships), although the two aspects are always confused when they are discussed.’41 This means: the function of the dominant, biological concept of sex is premissed on an idealist, metaphysical ontology, according to which the ‘being’ of sex and man and woman is determined outside of social relations. Wittig’s political concepts of sex, man and woman, on the other hand, afford them no being outside of their constituting social relations. But it is Milena Dopitová, Milena not therefore necessary to claim, as Wittig does, that the political concepts do not ‘concern being’, as this illegitimately presumes that all ontological claims are Dance metaphysically ideal, that all claims about the being , 2003 , of sex must be claims about its natural being. On the contrary, the possibility of a social ontology of sex The French materialist feminists’ political concept is attested in the very definitions of sex provided by of sex is a conceptual innovation intended to displace, Wittig and Delphy, definitions that, precisely, make through the revelation of its ideological functioning, claims about the social nature of its existence.42 the reign of the traditional biological concept of sex. This does not, however, equate to a simple denial of Sex matters biological sex. It is therefore regrettable that Wittig The French materialist feminists claimed that the should have said, in ‘The Category of Sex’, that ‘there functioning of the biological concept of sex masked is no sex’, for this obscures the nature of the problem, the socio-economic nature of the relation of oppression allowing (indeed encouraging) the terms and domain called ‘sex’. The misinterpretation of their work as a of the debate to shift unhelpfully. It allows attention denial of the existence or reality of sex has the same to be diverted from the political analysis, with its result: it masks the political form of their concept of political concept of sex, to a problem couched in the sex. In the context of the wider debate in feminist terms of a natural-realist ontology: do we, or do we theory, this suggests that the question of sex ought not not, find a thing called ‘sex’ in nature? Does sex (by to be either that of whether it exists (though it is now which is meant ‘biological sex’) exist, or does it not? In predominantly presented that way), or whether and response, texts like Stone’s ‘The Incomplete Material- how it can be identified. It ought to be the more precise ism of Materialist Feminism’ reassert the privilege of and extremely difficult question of the character of its the biological concept of sex in setting the naturalist, existence. realist terms of the debate – terms, according to As I have said, a political concept of sex need not which, only a naturalist, realist concept of sex can be involve a denial of biological concepts of sex, in the defended. sense that such a denial would refuse the discourse

33 of biology the right to its own concepts. The political these theorists exotic to their Anglo-American readers, concept of sex is political in the strong sense – both Delphy sees the category as imperialistic. It is worth noting that the category of Marxist feminism is also an constitutive of and constituted by the context of a polit- anglophone one. Delphy and Wittig identify themselves ical analysis. As such, the introduction of the political instead as ‘radical feminists’. concept of sex is, though, a criticism of the ideological 4. Of course some anglophone feminists were propounding functioning of an uncontested biological concept of and defending the French materialist feminists’ work before Judith Butler hit the big time in 1990 (Stevi Jack- sex, in which the latter is itself revealed as political, son, for example.) But Delphy’s and Wittig’s histori- in the weak sense of mattering politically. cal presence in anglophone women’s studies and other Can there be a biological concept of sex that does disciplines is now overshadowed, in contemporary in- ternationalized feminist and queer theory, by their me- not matter, politically? Perhaps, in another world. But diation via Butler, for good or for ill. See , the point is: there is no biological concept of sex that Christine Delphy, (Sage, London, 1996) for an account does not matter politically so long as the common of the reception of Delphy’s work (passim) and Butler’s biological concept of sex continues to perform the non-materialist appropriation of Wittig, in particular (pp. 136–7). ideological function that Delphy and others have iden- 5. This article is a revised version of a paper given at the tified. Under these conditions, any biological concept Radical Philosophy Conference, ‘Materials and Materi- of sex matters politically, regardless of the claims alism’, 12 May 2007, incorporating a response to Alison made for its neutrality and its analytic independence Stone’s paper ‘The Incomplete Materialism of French Materialist Feminism’, which is also published in this from gender. issue of Radical Philosophy, above. The political concept of sex does not entail a denial 6. Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for of anatomical differences, including anatomical differ- Feminist Revolution, Paladin, London, 1972, p. 20. See also pp. 12, 15. ences relevant to biological reproduction. But part of 7. Ibid., p. 14. the work of the political concept of sex in Delphy’s and 8. Ibid., p. 21. Wittig’s analyses is to reveal how the acknowledgement 9. Ibid., p. 16. of anatomical differences is overdetermined by the 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., p. 183. ideological function of the biological concept of sex. 12. Ibid., pp. 193, 216, 224, 188. That is, ‘anatomical differences’, which are multiple 13. Ann Snitow, ‘Feminism and Motherhood: An Ameri- and various, are overdetermined as ‘the anatomical can Reading’, Feminist Review 40, Spring 1992, p. 34. differences between the (two) sexes’. Strictly speaking, Mary O’Brien’s The Politics of Reproduction (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1981) is another interesting any further claims about anatomical differences, just anomaly. A Marxist like Firestone, O’Brien valorizes like any further claims about the biological concept of the female role in reproduction and sees the oppression sex, are outside the remit of these analyses. However, of women as a reactive result of men’s alienation from this natural process. in relation to the concept of sex at the most general, 14. Michèle Barrett, Women’s Oppression Today: Problems transdiciplinary level – which is only mistakenly in Marxist Feminist Analysis, Verso, London, 1980, equated with a biological concept of sex – the politi- p. 29. cal concept has the following virtue. It exemplifies the 15. Ibid., p. 152. 16. Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, p. 17. way in which the question of sex in which feminists 17. Barrett, Women’s Oppression Today, p. 195. have a stake does not concern opposing knowledge 18. Ibid., p. 13. claims. The struggle over the meaning of sex is not a 19. According to Barrett, Marxist feminism ‘must identify dispute to be settled; the struggle over ‘sex’ is part of the operation of gender relations as and where they may be distinct from, or connected with, the processes of 43 its meaning. production and reproduction understood by historical materialism’ (Ibid., p. 9). Notes 20. Ibid., p. 87. Barrett singles out one of Parveen Adams’s essays from 1979, ‘A Note on the Distinction between 1. For example, the influential anti-essentialism (and anti-bi- Sexual Division and Sexual Differences’, reprinted in ologism) of Lynne Segal’s Is the Future Female? (Virago, Adams and Cowie, eds, The Woman in Question, for London, 1987) was not exactly ‘constructivist’. particular opprobrium. 2. Some of the best known of the papers, and some of 21. Barrett, Women’s Oppression Today, p. 74. the editorials, from m/f are collected in Parveen Adams 22. Ibid., p. 75. Again, Barrett takes the idea of ‘biological and Elizabeth Cowie, eds, The Woman in Question: m/f, liabilities’ from Timpanaro. Verso, London/New York, 1990. 23. See ibid., pp. 10–29. 3. Delphy led the French challenge to the anglophone cat- 24. Ibid., p. 74. egory of ‘French feminism’, a category which tended to 25. See ibid., pp. 76–7. include Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva 26. Ibid., p. 76. to the exclusion of all other French feminists. To the 27. Ibid., pp. 13–14. extent that its reductive, homogenizing gesture made 28. Barrett, Women’s Oppression Today, p. 12. This criticism

34 of Barrett is explicit in Christine Delphy and Diana See also p. 8, where, it is claimed, it is about time to Leonard, ‘Parts of Capitalism: Accounts of Women’s abolish the ‘declaration’ of sex. Oppression in the Family by Traditional Marxists’, in- 35. Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, p. 19. Familiar Exploitation: A New Analysis of Marriage in 36. See ibid., pp. 16, 180–81. On the goal of the abolition Western Societies, Polity, Cambridge, 1992, pp. 46–7, of sex in Firestone see Mandy Merck, ‘Prosthetic Gesta- 48 fn 7. In the second edition of Women’s Oppression tion: Shulamith Firestone and Sexual Difference, New Today, with the new subtitle The Marxist-Feminist En- Formations 46, The Prosthetic Aesthetic, Spring 2002. counter (Verso, London, 1988), Barrett acknowledges 37. Stone, ‘The Incomplete Materialism of French Material- criticisms of the sex/gender distinction but maintains a ist Feminism’, p. 20. To be fair, Delpy, at least, has often common-sensical attachment to the evidences of biology proclaimed the usefulness of the category of gender, and (p. xxv). She did not, however, maintain her attachment on occasion even her preference for it. See Delphy, ‘Re- to Marxist analysis. Barrett’s ‘traditional Marxist’ criti- thinking Sex and Gender’; Jackson, Christine Delphy, cisms of Delphy can be found in Michèle Barrett and Chapter 5, ‘The Question of Gender’, p. 115 ff. Mary McIntosh, ‘Christine Delphy: Towards a Mate- 38. Barrett, Women’s Oppression Today, p. 9. rialist Feminism?’, Femimist Review 1, 1979. Delphy 39. Monique Wittig, ‘One is Not Born a Woman’ (1981), in replied with ‘A Materialist Feminism is Possible’, trans. The Straight Mind and Other Essays, p. 15. Diana Leonard, Feminist Review 4, 1980. 40. Wittig, ‘The Category of Sex’, p. 5. 29. Christine Delphy, ‘Rethinking Sex and Gender’ (1993), 41. Ibid., p. 5. trans. Diana Leonard, in Kelly Oliver, ed., French Femi- 42. The same kind of formulation of the problem occurs nism Reader, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham MD, 2000, in Colette Guillaumin’s ‘The Question of Difference’: p. 69. ‘[T]he idea of characteristics “appropriate” to a group 30. Ibid., pp. 69, 71. relies heavily upon a completely mythic belief in the 31. In ‘The Question of Difference’ (in Oliver, ed., French independence of the opposing groups, in their existence Feminism Reader) Colette Guillaumin argues that the per se. As if the groups of men and women could exist categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are ‘social groups in themselves and show a permanence which would which maintain a determined relationship’ (p. 114) in allow them to be defined outside of their relationship concrete forms – her example here is the hierarchy of to each other... In summary, somewhere behind all that wages – which guarantee ‘the physical material main- there lurks a conception of the sexes in terms of BEING’ tenance of one class, that of men (and the children (p. 107). Guillaumin also supplies the reply: ‘human of men), by another class, that of women’ (p. 112). societies consider themselves to be divided into men Like Delphy and Wittig, Guillaumin claims that the and women. In this they are not wrong, without, how- social form of the sex group or class is masked by its ever, being right about the mode of existence of the two ideological confusion with the biological category of groups. For there do exist in fact two groups in the heart sex. of society in which we live, two classes which are born 32. Monique Wittig, ‘The Category of Sex’(1976/1982), of a social relationship, and whose social existence is in The Straight Mind and Other Essays, , masked by anatomico-sexual division’ (p. 108). For an MA, 1992, p. 2. argument for the cogency of a non-essentialist existen- 33. Ibid., p. 5. tial ontology of sex, see Stella Sandford, ‘Contingent 34. See Wittig, ‘The Category of Sex’, p. 3: ‘The class strug- Ontologies: Sex, Gender and “Woman” in Simone de gle is precisely that which resolves the contradictions Beauvoir and Judith Butler’, Radical Philosophy 97, between two opposed classes by abolishing them at the September/October 1999, pp. 18–29. On the material same time that it constitutes and reveals them as classes. reality of gender categories see Jackson, Christine Del- The class struggle between men and women, which phy, pp. 116–7, 137–8. should be undertaken by all women, is that which re- 43. See Isabelle Stengers, ‘Diderot’s Egg: Divorcing Mate- solves the contradictions between the sexes, abolishing rialism From Eliminitavism’, Radical Philosophy 144, them at the same time that it makes them understood.’ July/August 2007, p. 7. subscribe online at www.radicalphilosophy.com www.radicalphilosophy.com www.radicalphilosophy.com www.radicalphilosophy.com www.radicalphilosophy.com

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