File spoon-archives/marxism.archive/marxism_1994/94-11-30.000, message 114


Date: Sat, 5 Nov 1994 22:46:14 -0500 (EST)
From: wesley david cecil <wcecil-AT-ucs.indiana.edu>
Subject: Re: Marxist Feminism




On Fri, 4 Nov 1994, Justin Schwartz wrote:

> 
> Wes, someone might almost think she was talking with a normal person in a
> shared language and then you produce a sentence like the following:
> 
> > 	For my part, I am interested in question of how materiality is 
> > figured in the two discourses since both often rely heavily on issues of 
> > materiality to ground various arguments.  
> 
> Materiality? Discourses? Materiality being figured in discourses? You got
> me beat. How IS the materiality figured in the two discourses, and can you
> whistle me a few bars so I can learn the tune? Less flippantly, what are
> you talking about?

Well, not wishing to make any particular claim to normalcy, what I meant 
in this rather compressed passage is that much feminism appeals to the 
actual body and bodily experiences to ground arguments and thus contains 
an implicit or explicit theory of materialism(of what material reality is 
constituted and how we apprehend this reality).  Similarly, Marxism in 
its many forms has spent a great deal of time on the material basis of 
reality --means and modes of production determining social interraction 
that kindoff thing-- and thus also presents multitude generally but not 
always explicit theories of what constitutes materiality.  Now, my 
problem is that in the few articles I have read -- 5 or 6 -- that claim 
to be Marxist/Feminist it is assumed that marxist materialism is in 
perfect accord with Feminist notions of materialism although such is not 
necessarily the case(I will send you an example when I am in my office).  
So the question of how the material is figured-- that is presented in an 
essay -- is very interesting to me.

Wes

> 
> 
> --Justin Schwartz
> 
> 
> 


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