Intersectionality, Feminist Theory, and Global History Jana Tschurenev (Zürich) This demand to think contemporary power in its complexity and interarticulations remains incontro- vertibly important even in its impossibility. (Butler 1993: 19) 1. Introduction Post-structuralism, it seems, is currently sharing the fate of the grand narratives which the cultural turn set out to bury. Reduced to its gaps and inconsistencies, it ap- pears now as feminism’s impasse (Alaimo/Hekman 2008: 1). In their volume “Mate- rial Feminisms”, Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman thus called for a “material turn” in feminist theory. Instead of taking refuge from a dangerous biology in discourse and language, feminism should again try to grasp the full materiality of the human body and the natural environment. Within the diverse cluster of debates emerging around the “buzzword intersectionality” (Davis 2005), Cornelia Klinger and Gudrun Axeli Knapp (2008) at the same time called for a “social re-turn.” Intersectionality would be a perspective to revive the (feminist) Critical Theory tradition that has been in cri- sis due to the historical constellation which Fraser (1997) summarized as “the post- socialist condition” – most prominently the crisis of Marxism and the cultural turn’s challenge to societal macro-narratives. At the same time, they suggest, the debates on intersectionality would profit from a social theory which looks at the history and interrelations between modern structures of domination. Cultural analysis, Knapp and Klinger argue, the study of complex identities and experiences, needs to be com- plemented with structural accounts of inequality. The “social re-turn” they propose seeks to take seriously and at the same time go beyond the reflexivity achieved by the cultural turn. Knapp thus invites researchers to the ‘construction site’ of critical social theory. The aim is nothing less than a fundamental “re-vision” of European modernity. “European societies”, she argues, “historically emerged as simultaneous- ly modern, expansive-capitalist, bourgeois-patriarchal, nationalist and – in different degrees – imperial ones.” (Knapp 2008a: 56-7; transl. JT). And it is the critical heu- ristic device of intersectionality which can offer orientation for this project of revis- ing the fundamental patterns of societal organization as well as domination in mod- ern European societies, and which, moreover, would help bridging the gap between critical social theory and the politics of deconstruction (Knapp 2008a,b; Klinger/ Knapp 2008: 12). V. Kallenberg et al. (Hrsg.), Intersectionality und Kritik, DOI 10.1007/978-3-531-93168-5_13, © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden 2013 266 Jana Tschurenev In this paper1, I contrast Klinger’s and Knapp’s project with another current of research which aims at re-visioning modernity, the emergent field of global histo- ry. After a short review of how some earlier feminist theories have dealt with the core problem of intersectionality, i.e., the problem of different “vectors of power require[ing] and deploy[ing] each other” (Butler 1993: 18) in complex modern socie- ties, I argue that a current feminist social theory should take serious the interven- tions of post-colonial studies – one of the ‘post’-currents often associated with the ‘cultural turn’ – and the new approaches to writing global history inspired by it. I particularly refer to their efforts to overcome Eurocentric models of world histori- cal development which can be found in different versions of classical social theory, including Weberian accounts of rationalization and modernization theories, as well as some Marxist or historical materialist approaches. I suggest that the development of modern technologies and institutions of control and domination in Europe can- not be studied in isolation from the framework or a global modernity. I will conclude with some remarks on the question of how to deal with the infinite complexity of the global “informatics of domination” (Haraway 1991) when analyzing particular historical constellations of power and difference. 2. Linking Systems of Oppression Generations of feminists and other critical scholars have already “bit their teeth off ” (Winker/Degele 2008: 194) trying to conceptualize structural relations between dif- ferent forms of domination.2 The tricky question of how to theoretically grasp the relation between capitalism and patriarchy has been a major preoccupation of Marx- ist and materialist versions of feminism. In his “Ursprung der Familie, des Privat- eigentums und des Staates” (orig. 1884), Friedrich Engels identified the invention of private property as the common source of class domination, state power and patri- archy (for a critique, see Lerner 1987). Engels’ implicit expectation that, with the re- moval of the common source, all domination would disappear haunted the left for a long time. Moreover, Engels’ formulation of the materialist conception of history was both fundamentally challenged and further elaborated on in materialist feminist thought. On one hand, his assumption of the “production of means of subsistence” 1 Some of the issues raised here have been previously discussed with my friend and colleague Urs Lindner. I want to thank Patricia Purtschert and Christine Whyte for their comments on this paper. 2 Within the more or less orthodox Marxist framework deployed by many critical theorists of the 1970s, the debates were often centered on capitalism, i.e. the relation between capitalism and patri- archy, capitalism and racism. Significantly less attention was paid to the intersection of racism, class, and gender (Davis 1982). Intersectionality, Feminist Theory, and Global History 267 and the “production of people” as determining force of history3, was critically refor- mulated as the need to give equal explanatory weight to ‘material reproduction’ and ‘generative reproduction’ when it comes to understanding the dynamics and patterns of societal development (Beer 1990, 1993). More recent accounts usually add a third form that can be summarized as ‘symbolic reproduction’ (Jackson 2001, 2006). On the other hand, Engels’ dichotomous contrasting of labor and family, though heavily criticized, could be associated with ‘dual systems theories’.4 Feminist accounts which applied such a dual systems framework (for instance: Hartmann 1981), often associ- ated one mode of reproduction with one gendered social space: material reproduc- tion taking place in the male-gendered capitalist economy; generative reproduction in the female-gendered household. Within such a framework, the question was how to grasp the relation between the two systems, capitalism and patriarchy. The argument developed and contested within a broad international debate on the productivity of domestic labor (connect- ed to the ‘wages for housework’ movement) was the notion of a functional necessity of women’s unpaid domestic labor for capitalist economy, or at least, an enhance- ment of capitalists’ profit rate by their indirect (and within the family: direct) op- pression of women (Dalla Costa/James 1973). These debates stimulated feminist research and produced important insights, for instance on the historical emergence and contingent coupling of modern forms of domestic labor and the rise of capital- ist labor markets (Bock/Duden 1977). However, as Angela Davis critically pointed out, with their concentration on the figure of the housewife, they took the norma- tive femininity of white and/or middle class women of the second half of the 20th century as the paradigm of female experience in general. Pointing at a policies aim- ing at the “deliberate dissolution of [black] family life” in Apartheid South Africa, she argues that “domestic life” could actually “be dispensed with by the South Afri- can version of capitalism,” a fact disproving the assumption “that the services per- formed by women in the home are an essential constituent of wage labour under capitalism.” (Davis 1981). As Beer (1996: 24) suggested, feminist theory’s inability to prove the productive character of women’s domestic labor was not so much seen 3 „Nach der materialistischen Auffassung ist das in letzter Instanz bestimmende Moment in der Ge- schichte: die Produktion und Reproduktion des unmittelbaren Lebens. Diese ist aber selbst wieder doppelter Art. Einerseits die Erzeugung von Lebensmitteln, von Gegenständen der Nahrung, Klei- dung, Wohnung und den dazu erforderlichen Werkzeugen; andrerseits die Erzeugung von Menschen selbst, die Fortpflanzung der Gattung. Die gesellschaftlichen Einrichtungen, unter denen die Men- schen einer bestimmten Geschichtsepoche und eines bestimmten Landes leben, werden bedingt durch beide Arten der Produktion: durch die Entwicklungsstufe einerseits der Arbeit, andrerseits der Familie.“ (Engels 1892: 27-28) 4 Another factor for the development of dual systems theories might be a Victorian preoccupation with women’s ‘separate sphere’ which found its way into feminism (Bock 2006: 53). 268 Jana Tschurenev as a positive result of social scientific research, but rather as a failure of feminist so- cial theory itself. Other feminists suggested breaking free from the theoretical (and political) union with Marxism. They stressed that there was no necessary connection, but a political alliance of patriarchy and capitalism. Sexism, in this view, appeared as an instrument for creating fission in the labor class and for buying laboring men’s consent by means of gender privileges (Hartmann 1981). This was an important argument for feminist empowerment