A Feminist Re-reading of Theories of Late Modernity: Beck, Giddens and the Location of Gender

Abstract

This article is a critical reappraisal of the understandings of gender and the location of women within theories of late modernity. These theories, as articulated by Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck, have gained a wide use, not the least since they claim to account for changes in intimate relations. We will use four major feminist interventions for our argument — the problematization of the public-private divide, feminist theorizing of kinship, feminist understandings of labour, and the heterosexual matrix. We argue that the late-modern story is made through violently created presences — of the reinvention of the heterosexual matrix, the private sphere as the location of women/gender, reproduction coupled to biology, and gender as an intimate relation between women and men — and absences of analysis of reproductive and productive labour, of the role of the state, and of gender as a social relation constituted through and within other social inequalities.