Concrete Matters: Feminist Cultural Materialism

Abstract

Historically rooted in 1970s socialist feminism, feminist cultural materialism straddles the social sciences and humanities as a field of inquiry and methodology committed to transformative, emancipatory politics. Initially elaborated as a feminist encounter with Marxist theory, feminist materialism was theorized in the late 1970s by feminists who attempted to explain women’s specific forms of oppression within capitalist and patriarchal structures. Early practitioners interrogated contemporary Marxism for its lack of attention to women’s work and unpaid labour (Dalla Costa and James 1972), and embraced the term “materialist feminism” on the grounds that Marxism needed to be reconfigured before it could be productively realigned with feminist concerns (Delphy 1975). As the field developed, practitioners increasingly worked to interrogate the implicit white, middle-class, heterosexual subject at the heart of much mainstream feminist organizing (Bunch 1975; Carby 1982; Joseph 1981), to think across global borders in order to recognize women’s specific positioning in patriarchal and capitalist systems (Alexander and Mohanty 1997), and to theorize the complexities of “global sisterhood” (Mohanty 2003). At stake, then, was a process of realignment that involved not just a transformation of Marxist notions of value and work, productive and unproductive labour, but also a transformation of whom feminism would speak for, what forms of knowledge would be valued, and how those knowledges would be produced. Feminists called for, as noted by Annette Kuhn and AnnMarie Wolpe, “a transformation of traditional institutionalized modes of acquiring knowledge” (1978: 2). In these terms, feminist materialism was a project that sought to theorize the systemic links between capitalism and patriarchy within historically specific contexts, to interrogate the implicit subject of feminist organizing, and to revalue collective organizing as a social practice intricately connected with broader forms of social organization.