Date: Thu, 11 Dec 1997 01:19:43 +1100 From: Rob Schaap <rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au> Subject: Re: M-TH: Men and Feminism (was All Work...) G'day Doug, >Why is a gender-neutral class society unimaginable? In the >First World over the last 20-30 years, we've seen a reduction in gender >differentials at the same time we've seen an intensification of class >differentials. What is the theoretical limit on that continuing to happen? A testing question, Doug - and one that crossed my mind as I tapped out those last uncompromising words (Ebert makes a big call in introducing her theme, but doesn't seem to pursue all its components). My response is, I admit, simple orthodoxy pushed to a heterodox degree: The theoretical limit seems determined by our central category: class. Gender differentials have ballooned from a very low base, and I'm sure there's a *very* familiar class distribution within women's wage/security/conditions. The relative good fortune of pb/'middle class' women in the labour market in the few decades of generalised female wage labour would, I suspect, show up in the short term as a rapid convergence of gender aggregates. If I'm right, the time must come when gender differentials flatten and you get what marxists would expect. Once women are generally proletarianised (I'm using the strict sense of 'proletarian' here), their stats would reflect the distribution that pertains amongst their brothers. It's a bit (implicitly) Kautskyite of me, but I've always subscribed to the view that men and women were not in the same class while the latter were not generally engaged in wage labour - and on comparable terms at that. A woman who depends on her man is not in the same class position as her man. Her being is not his being and consequently her thinking is not his thinking. She relates to the world differently, and is related to differently, than is her man. So, at the risk of upsetting Louis, capitalism is only now showing signs of creating a grave-digging class of sufficient proportions and cohesion to fulfill that function. Maybe the downside of this trend (increasing heart disease, alcoholism, suicides etc among women - I even speculated as to rising alienation among women on M-Fem, but to an uninterested or skeptical house) has an upside then - men and women converging in objective material terms. I take Marxism as positing such a development as guaranteeing/allowing (depending on whether we read him as a determinist economist or not) the all-important 'class for itself' stage. One other thought: There is gender and then there is sex. So far, women have had wombs and breasts and men haven't (a transcendental material truth and thus, in itself, not a gender issue, but one of sex). When 'work' was mainly to do with consistent, repetitive, reliable and sustained deployment of brawn, pregnancy and nursing commitments (functions of sex) doubtlessly made of women a second-rate commodity on the shop floor. The nature of commodity labour has changed in the first world, the extended family has been replaced by commodified child care (yet another effective bias to the largely middle class female progress in the labour market), and the gender aspects of parenthood (ie. those not essentially determined by sex) are being blurred to order (blokes can 'mother' toddlers and older). What's more, technological developments are afoot to do for and to femininity what sperm banks had done for and to masculinity. Maybe the sex category itself may prove to be as historical as gender. Frozen eggs, frozen sperm, surrogate wombs, maybe even artificial wombs ... well, the limits of sex itself suddenly seem a bit rubbery. It all gets rather blurry after that ... All in all, not as useful a response as Yoshie's but a reiteration of something I still reckon worthy of a chat. Cheers, Rob. ************************************************************************ Rob Schaap, Lecturer in Communication, University of Canberra, Australia. Phone: 02-6201 2194 (BH) Fax: 02-6201 5119 ************************************************************************ 'It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being.' (John Stuart Mill) "The separation of public works from the state, and their migration into the domain of the works undertaken by capital itself, indicates the degree to which the real community has constituted itself in the form of capital." (Karl Marx) ************************************************************************ --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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