Abstract
In her novel The Female Man, Joanna Russ partially shares the radical materialist feminist premise that positions women as a sex-class in a dual system of oppression created by patriarchy and capitalism. The Dialectic of Sex, a 1970 materialist feminist classic by Shulamith Firestone, utilises Marxist concepts to interpret patriarchal power structures, highlighting sexual difference as the most fundamental category of social division. Firestone argues that women's childbearing functions necessitate the original division of labour and establish the biological family as basic unit of reproduction. Based on this logic, technology, particularly artificial reproduction, liberates women from oppression and frees both the child and the mother from domination by the father. This sex-class antagonism, grounded in women's reproductive function, is evident in the way female characters in many of Russ's texts often secure their agency by appropriating control over reproduction. This chapter explores the dialectic of sex/gender in The Female Man and compares the novel with the The Dialectic of Sex.
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