Beyond Sentimentalisms and Seductions: Toward a New Feminist Theory of the Market

Abstract

What are feminists doing to engage global capitalism, and how are they doing it? Should we return to traditional Marxist frameworks? Or does a radical feminist project require that we pursue greener, more critical pas- tures? Each of the texts under review asks us to consider feminist politics in the face of ever changing labor conditions, global poverty, militarism, and marketing. Laura Levine Frader has written a deeply researched study of the gender transformations that occurred in interwar France as laborers struggled to meet new production demands with a diminished postwar population. Hester Eisenstein argues that global capital has successfully appropriated feminist politics for purposes of maintaining and expanding its power base and that mainstream American feminists have allowed themselves to be seduced by this appropriation. Iain Ellwood and Sheila Shekar provide an uncritical example of the easy synergies that can be established between the marketing of women and stereotypes constituted from retrogressive frameworks of difference. I'll appraise these texts in this order and then offer some broad considerations of what it means to read them together. While Frader is certainly not the first to study twentieth-century French labor through the lens of gender, the detail she brings to Breadwin- ners and Citizens: Gender and the Making of the French Social Model makes it a masterwork of French history. Frader portrays France in a bind as it attempted to rebuild its economy, torn between dual commitments to xenophobia and gender. She illuminates an early interwar period in which