Verbatim Mac

Notes

SCREW PATRIARCHY

I do not suggest reading this against a policy aff; it’s best for K affs. The framework part is thus not super in-depth. But on framework, all of the links are answers too.

Questions: [e-mail]

1nc

The affirmative’s ludic theorization of the world inherently supports bourgeois ideology and forecloses materiality—their analysis is confined to mediation severed from the economic ties critical to understanding social positions and oppressive structures

Ebert 95 (Teresa, Professor of Humanities at the College of Arts and Sciences at the University at Albany who specializes in Critical and Cultural Theory, Feminist Critique, Marxist Theory and Globalization Theory, “(Untimely) Critiques for a Red Feminism” from Post-Ality, Marxism and Postmodernism, edited by Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, Teresa Ebert and Donald Morton, https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/ebert.htm)//meb

No matter how much ludic theorists try to erase questions of class, poverty and the economic from their work, their analysis is haunted by the relations of production and divisions of labour. We find this "return of the repressed" of the relations of production in Butler's ludic analysis in the opening chapter of Bodies that Matter, in which she attempts to "discern the history of sexual difference encoded in the history of matter" through a "rude and provocative" re-reading of Plato (54, 36). She begins by positing matter within the metaphysical binary of matter and form, and confines her argument to this metaphysical circuit. But at two points in her text, when she attempts to explain why Plato has constituted the category of the "excluded" in the way he has, she is forced to move beyond the domain of discourse to the relations of production and the division of labour. As Butler explains, "This xenophobic exclusion operates through the production of racialised others, and those whose 'natures' are considered less rational by virtue of their appointed task in the process of labouring to reproduce the conditions of private life" (48, emphasis added). And again, she says, "There is no singular outside, for the Forms require a number of exclusions; they are and replicate themselves through what they exclude, through not being animal, not being the woman, not being the slave, whose propriety is purchased through property, national and racial boundary, masculinism, and compulsory heterosexuality" (52). All these exclusions are part of the same "singular outside": the material relations of production which construct all of the social divisions and differences around labour and the appropriation of social resources. In other words, for all Butler's discursive displacements, the concealed, sutured over base of her own theory-as it is of any theory or knowledge practice-is still the (occluded) economic base. We can see the consequences of these different theories of materialism by briefly examining the construction or "materialisation" of female gender-what Butler calls "girling." To describe this process, Butler adapts Althusser's concept of "interpellation" which means the ideological process of "calling" a person to take up (identify with) the position "named" (e.g., girl). According to Butler, medical interpellation ... (the sonogram notwithstanding) ... shifts an infant from an 'it' to a 'she' or a 'he,' and in that naming, the girl is 'girled,' brought into the domain of language and kinship through the interpellation of gender.... The naming is at once the setting of a boundary, and also the repeated inculcation of a norm. (7-8) Butler understands this naming ("girling") as placing the infant in a "regulatory regime" of discourse (language and kinship). But for historical materialists, ideological interpellation does not simply place the infant in discourse, but more important it also places the child in the relations of production, in the social division of labour (according to gender, heterosexuality, race, nationality). Butler's theory of performativity completely eclipses this dialectical relation between ideology and the economic. Butler is concerned with changing how "bodies matter," how they are valued. But without relating ideological "interpellation" to the relations of production, no amount of resignification in the symbolic can change "What counts as a valued body"-for what makes a body valuable in the world is its economic value. This truth is painfully clear if we move beyond the privileged boundaries of the upper-middle class in the industrialised West (for whom basic needs are readily fulfilled) and see what is happening to "girling" in the international division of labour — especially among the impoverished classes in India. Here the "medical interpellation" (naming) of infants/foetuses, particularly through the use of the sonogram, immediately places "girled" foetuses not only in discourse but also in the gender division of labour and unequal access to social resources. About 60 per cent of the "girled" foetuses are being immediately aborted or murdered upon birth (female infanticide) because the families cannot afford to keep them. The citational acts, rituals, and "performatives" by which individuals are repeatedly "girled" such as expensive ear-piercing ceremonies and exorbitant bride dowries-are not simply acts of discourse, but economic practices. In India, under postcolonial capitalism, the appropriation of women's surplus labour is increasing to such an extent that these rituals and "performatives" of "girling" are becoming highly popular and widely exploited sources of capital and direct extraction of surplus labour. So much so, the unmarried woman's family is itself being "girled" in order for its combined labour to collectively produce the surplus value taken from the "girled body" (e.g., bride dowries). Revolutionary praxis and not simply "resignification" is necessary to end the exploitation and murdering of hundreds of thousands of economically de-valued "girled" bodies. Six How is making discourse or the matter of the body the ground of politics and social analytic any less reductive than the economic base? Yet, while economic reductionism is to be avoided at all costs according to ludic theories, a discursive reductionism or a theological matterism is widely embraced as a complex, sophisticated, and open multiplicity. The issue here is not whether "reductionism" is negative: it is not-ask any rigorous scientist (Weinberg, "Two Cheers for Reductionism"). To articulate the relations connecting seemingly disparate events and phenomena is in fact a necessary and unavoidable part of effective knowledge of the real. Rather the question is why are some reductions-particularly those connecting the exploitation and gender division of labour to the accumulation of capital-suppressed and rendered taboo in ludic (socialist) feminism while other reductions-such as the discursive construction of sex/gender or a matterist resistance as performance-are championed and widely circulated? The answer, of course, does not lie in the "logic" of the argument, although that is the way it is commonly represented. On a purely epistemological or logical level both moves establish a necessary relation between two phenomena. Instead, the answer is in the economic, social and political interests these two forms of "reductionism" support and the power of bourgeois ideology to discredit historical materialist knowledges. Thus what is at stake in this displacement of the economic by discourse is the elision of issues of exploitation and the substitution of a discursive identity politics for the struggle for full social and economic emancipation. Marx and Engels' critique of the radical "Young Hegelians" applies equally to ludic cultural materialists: they are only fighting against 'phrases.' They forget, however, that to these phrases they themselves are only opposing other phrases, and that they are in no way combating the real existing world when they are merely combating the phrases of this world. (The German Ideology 41) This is not to say that the conflicts over ideology, cultural practices and significations are not an important part of the social struggle for emancipation: the issue is how do we explain the relation of the discursive to the non-discursive, the relation of cultural practices to the "real existing world"-whose objectivity is the fact of the "working day"-in order to transform it? Obviously this relation is a highly mediated one. But for ludic materialists the relation is so radically displaced that it is entirely suppressed: mediations are taken as autonomous sites of signification and consequently the actual practice of ludic cultural analysis is confined entirely to institutional and cultural points of mediation severed from the economic conditions producing them. The analysis of "mediations" becomes a goal in itself, and the operation of "mediations" is deployed to obscure the "origin" (surplus labour) and the "end" (class differences) that in fact frame the "mediations." It is only in the context of historical materialism that one can point up the politics of this erasure of "origin" (arche) and "end " (telos) in poststructuralist theory. In ludic feminism the arche and telos are erased as if they were merely metaphysical concepts. My point is that the erasure of arche and telos serves a more immediate and concrete purpose: it makes it impossible to connect the "mediated" to other social practices, and consequently the inquiry into and analysis of the "mediations," themselves, take the place of knowledge of the social totality in which mediations are relays of underlying connections. For historical materialist feminists, however, cultural and ideological practices are not autonomous but are instead primary sites for reproducing the meanings and subjectivities supporting the unequal gender, sexual and race divisions of labour, and thus a main arena for the struggle against economic exploitation as well as cultural oppression. The untimely time of red feminism has come.

Even if pre-capitalist structures served as the basis for domestic roles in labour, capitalism reified, strengthened and intertwined with patriarchy so as to make them completely interconnected—root cause arguments don’t matter

Menon 13 (Nivedita, feminist writer and Professor of Political Thought at Jawaharlal Nehru University, “Capitalism, Sexual Violence, and Sexism: Kavita Krishnan” Kafila, https://kafila.org/2013/05/23/capitalism-sexual-violence-and-sexism-kavita-krishnan/)//meb

Sexual violence cannot be attributed simply to some men behaving in ‘anti-social’ or ‘inhuman’ ways: it has everything to do with the way society is structured: i.e., the way in which our society organizes production and accordingly structures social relationships. Once we understand this, we can also recognize that society can be structured differently, in ways that do not require – or benefit from – the subordination of women or of any section of society. What are the material structures that underpin sexual violence? As I address this question I will also engage with some of the arguments made in two recent articles which offer a professedly Marxist analysis of sexual violence and women’s subordination in India; one is ‘On the Empowerment of Women’ by Prabhat Patnaik, People’s Democracy, January 27, 2013, and the other is ‘Class Societies and Sexual Violence: Towards a Marxist Understanding of Rape’, by Maya John, Radical Notes, May 8, 2013. Prabhat Patnaik analyses the differences between gender oppression in advanced capitalist countries and countries like India. He notes, rightly, that the development of capitalism in the advanced capitalist countries was accompanied by a destruction of their pre-capitalist structures, facilitated by colonialism and the resulting large-scale emigration into the so-called ‘new world’. Whereas in India, “the “old community” associated with our pre-capitalist structure…continues to remain with us.” The persistence of pre-capitalist structures and extremely stubborn feudal survivals in India is undoubtedly significant in producing the specifically Indian variant of patriarchal oppression. A glaring instance of this is the phenomenon of khap panchayats that pass diktats and death sentences on couples who marry by choice, especially those that do so in defiance of caste norms. However, some of Prabhat Patnaik’s arguments and conclusions are questionable. Among them is his assumption that it is only pre-capitalist structures that provide a base for patriarchy; and consequently that in the advanced capitalist countries, gender oppression remained only in the form of “patriarchal attitudes”, “essentially as a part of the superstructure.” This goes against the grain of Marxist analysis, and an entire body of work which has painstakingly mapped out the structural basis of gender oppression in capitalism. Central to this understanding is the role of the gendered division of labour, whereby the burden of reproductive labour has been privatized and assigned to women. Production (involving wage labour that produces surplus value) and reproduction (of life in a literal sense as well as of the necessities of life, involving women’s unpaid household labour) are both equally central to capitalism. The gendering and privatization of reproductive labour, whereby the socially necessary labour of child-care, cooking, cleaning, etc became ‘women’s work’ to be done inside the household, took place in class societies pre-dating capitalism. Capitalism itself displays contradictory impulses. On the one hand it seeks to draw everyone – men, women, children – into production. On the other, it has an interest in retaining reproductive labour as ‘women’s work’ so as to ensure that the cost of such labour is minimized – both for the wage-paying capitalist as well as for the capitalist State. Patriarchy is therefore one of the axes of the capitalist system; part and parcel of the structural edifice of capitalism. Patriarchal ideology does not hang unsupported in the air; it is not a matter of ‘mindset’ or ‘attitude’ alone: notions of feminine ‘nature’, ‘duties’, ‘good and bad women’, and sexual propriety for women, are produced, nourished, and deployed to mask, mystify, and justify women’s unpaid reproductive labour and the patriarchal family where such labour takes place. The tension between women entering the workforce and continuing to bear the burden of ‘housework’, has been a factor in forcing the State, in some countries, to concede State-funded child-care, healthcare, education, and so on. But in neoliberal times, with the State adopting ‘austerity measures’ to bail out capitalism in crisis, we are witnessing a global cut-back in such social spending. Any State that pursues such policies, needs to persuade women to accept the burden of housework as ‘women’s work’, and to dissuade women from rejecting traditional roles. It is notable that some of the worst rape culture remarks by US Republican Senators (who could compete with India’s patriarchal lawmakers in misogyny) have been made recently to promote arguments against the right to abortion. The enormous resistance to, and organized reaction against conceding the right to abortion or same-sex marriage in the US is an instance of how much the capitalist class still invests in the family institution and the control of women’s sexuality and reproduction within it. One should also be wary of locating the structural basis for gender oppression in India, solely in pre-capitalist structures. Capitalism in India, and the Indian State also have a stake in the gender division of labour and the patriarchal ideology that supports it. The character of capitalist development in India, too, is such that it promotes caste and gender oppression, including several of the regressive elements associated with the pre-capitalist structures. Moreover, global capital too is implicated in the project of Indian patriarchy. International media coverage of the Indian anti-rape protests tended to discuss the issue as unique to ‘Indian/Asian culture.’ They chose to overlook the fact that gender violence, sexism and rape culture are thriving in the West, and moreover that neoliberal policies pursued by global capital are complicit in perpetuating women’s oppression and redeploying patriarchal structures and attitudes in order to exploit women’s labour in, say, Bangladesh or India! The case of Bangladeshi women producing for Walmart in exploitative and unsafe sweatshops, that prey on and promote their insecurity and subordination, has come to light time and again, especially in the recent tragedies of factory fire and building collapse that killed hundreds of young working women. The Indian reality is equally grim. In Tirupur and Coimbatore districts of Tamil Nadu, under the ‘Sumangali’ scheme (Sumangali means auspicious married woman in Tamil), MNC garments manufacturers including those who produce for prominent European and US garment companies like C&A, GAP, Diesel, Marks & Spencer, Tommy Hilfiger and others, would get young minor girls, many of them Dalits, to work in virtual bondage and highly exploitative conditions, to be paid a ‘lump-sum amount’ that, as the Scheme’s name indicates, is meant to be a thinly veiled dowry! Caste oppression and patriarchal anxieties about marriage and dowry are thus mediating the entry of women into the global labour market. Their insecure working conditions create greater hurdles and challenges for these women in their struggle against patriarchy. And, of course, primitive accumulation by multi-national corporations that grab land, minerals and other resources in India, is not only, as Prabhat Patnaik correctly notes, a source of corruption, it also unleashes state repression and sexual violence against women who are the forefronts of movements against corporate land grab. The global upswing in gender violence (including sexual violence and domestic violence) and misogynistic rape culture, ought then to be traced at least in part to the imperatives of global capitalism and imperialism and their local agents, to justify an increased burden of social reproduction for women, the availability of women from the former colonies as pliant labour, and rape as a weapon against people’s movements resisting primitive accumulation. The fear of violence contributes to disciplining women into suitable labourers, both for global production as well as reproduction. That is why the abusive husband and the rapist cannot be understood as isolated perpetrators who are ‘anti-social’ aberrations that pose a threat to the system. It is no coincidence that perpetrators of gender violence find powerful advocates (not just in India but across the world) in the misogynistic and rape culture statements by the custodians of the political, religious, and law-and-order institutions.

The alternative is to reject the aff in favor of a feminist material analysis—such an analysis opens space for both cultural and transformative politics that directly challenges the way institutions distribute resources and cultural power

Ebert 93 (Teresa, Professor of Humanities at the College of Arts and Sciences at the University at Albany who specializes in Critical and Cultural Theory, Feminist Critique, Marxist Theory and Globalization Theory, “Ludic Feminism, the Body, Performance, and Labor: Bringing ‘Materialism’ Back into Feminist Cultural Studies” https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1354189.pdf)//meb

Contemporary feminism has, for the most part, retreated from "materialist" politics into a form of "discursive" or what I call "ludic" politics.1 Broadly, materialist feminism is a political prac- tice aimed at social transformation of dominant institutions that, as a totality, distribute economic resources and cultural power asymmetrically according to gender. But this project has been put in question by postmodern theories that announce the end of transformative politics (indeed, the end of history itself) and sub- stitute a ludic cultural politics in its place. In this essay, I will argue for the possibility of a postmodern feminist cultural studies de- voted to materialist politics-transformative social change-and indicate why I find ludic or discursive politics ineffective for feminism. I will thus use a materialist frame to engage both levels of politics: cultural politics (intervening in and changing cultural representations, specifically those concerning gender, sexuality, and race) as well as transformative politics (radical social inter- ventions in the historical economic, political, and labor relations underlying cultural representations). My discussion, however, will focus on a critique of and engagement with cultural politics, first, because cultural politics, in its ludic mode, has become the pri- mary form of dominant feminism and, second, because a mate- rialist critique of cultural representations is an effective inaugural move in opening up a space for transformative politics. Whether postmodernism is seen as what Fredric Jameson calls "the cultural logic of late capitalism" or is associated with the writings of Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard, with Derridean poststructuralists or Lacanian psychoanalysts, it has in- timated the end of transformative politics. In short, the dominant postmodern theories-what I have called "ludic" postmodern- ism2-have problematized the notion of politics and rearticulated it as solely a cultural politics: that is, as a language-effect, a mode of rhetoric aimed at changing cultural representations, rather than as a collective practice through which existing social institu- tions are changed so that (economic) resources and cultural power can be distributed without regard to gender, race, class, sexuality. This prevailing ludic postmodernism has so displaced and dis- credited politics as emancipation as to make it nearly impossible. After Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and such ludic feminists as Luce Irigaray, Alice Jardine, Susan Suleiman, and Donna Haraway, emancipation-the collective social struggle to end exploitation-becomes simply a metaphysical project: a meta- narrative. The appropriate critical and political stance is thus, in Lyotard's words, an "incredulity toward metanarratives" (The Postmodern Condition xxiv): an incredulity, in short, toward eman- cipation as the necessary social struggle against "real" systems of exploitation, like patriarchy or capitalism.3 Such social systems (totalities) are, for ludic postmodernists, merely discredited meta- narratives rather than social "realities" to be contested. As a leading ludic social critic, Ernesto Laclau, claims, even "'society,' as a founding totality . . . is an impossible object" ("Transfor- mations" 40). Moreover, power, as Foucault argues, is now seen as a "mul- tiplicity of force relations" engendering "local and unstable" states of power that are "everywhere" (92-93). Power, then, is diffuse, asystematic, and "aleatory" (that is, marked by chance and arbi trariness) rather than historically determined. It produces its own immanent "plurality of resistances": for as Foucault says, "where there is power, there is resistance" (95), rather like the natural resistance to a physical force. The ludic notion of power, in short, substitutes a logic of contingency for the logic of social necessity. In doing so, it preempts any need for collective, organized social transformation-any need, in other words, for emancipation, and more important, it dispenses with the necessity for organized so- cial and political revolution to overthrow dominant power rela- tions. All we need to do, according to ludic postmodernists, is recognize and validate the multiplicity of local points of resistance power itself already generates. As a result, it is increasingly com- mon to call our age "postpolitical." The new postmodern culture studies taking hold in the United States, Britain, and a number of Commonwealth coun- tries, notably Canada and Australia, subscribes, in large part, to these ludic assumptions and in the name of the political it be- comes, in effect, "postpolitical." Increasingly it substitutes valida- tion for critique and affirmation for opposition. John Fiske, for instance, argues for a "cultural theory that can both account for and validate popular social difference."4 In other words, the af- firmation of already existing differences (rather than explaining why and how these have become differences) is largely seen as in itself an effective mode of social resistance to the hegemonic. Obviously this position has widespread appeal for many feminist critics-especially for those who regard the affirmation of wom- en's experience, in and of itself, as the political basis for femi- nism-but we need to ask difficult and by now quite unpopular questions: What is the effect of such validation? Does it affirm "what is" rather than critique how these differences have been produced out of regimes of exploitation-and perhaps support these regimes and even be "necessary" to their continued exis- tence and domination? Can we afford to dispense with critique if we are to transform these regimes and the differences they pro- duce? Is critique necessary to social struggle and to a transforma- tive cultural studies? Instead of an interventionist critique, (ludic) postmodern cultural studies tends to focus on pleasure-pleasure in/of textu- ality, the local, the popular, and, above all, the body (jouissance)-as in and of itself-a form of resistance. This is a "new generation" of intellectuals, according to Andrew Ross, who "appeal to the liberatory body, and the creativity of consumption" (11). Thus, postmodern feminist cultural critics like Constance Penley in- creasingly engage not in critique but in affirmative descriptions of local sites of pleasure. For instance, in Penley's popular studies of a genre of Star Trek fan magazines (called "slash zines" because they eroticize and sexualize the relationship between Kirk and Spock and are designated by a code with a slash, "K/S") her "aim" is to "show" the "range and diversity of identifications and object relations" in these texts because "once shown, it will then be pos- sible to give a fuller and more complex account of what women do with popular culture, how it gives them pleasure, and how it can be consciously and unconsciously reworked to give them more pleasure" ("Feminism" 488). Ludic feminist cultural studies, in other words, seeks to "show" or "give . . . account," that is, to describe but not to explain through conceptualization, for any at- tempt to "conceptualize" experience or pleasure is seen by ludic critics as a violent erasure of the unique, local, specific, and con- crete individual: to conceptualize is to totalize and to totalize is seen, at all levels, as totalitarian. But such a validating, affirmative, and pleasure-ful culture studies-concerned primarily with the liberation of (individual) desire and the body as zone of sensuousness-is to my mind a very class-specific inquiry. Pleasure and desire can be the over- riding concern only for the classes of people (middle and upper) who are already "free" from economic want and have the means to pursue or, more specifically in commodity cultures, to consume the means for pleasure. It is also these classes who have the rel- ative luxury of displacing the body as means of labor onto the body as pleasure zone. This fetishization of pleasure validates the priorities and privileges of the middle class-in spite of its atten- tion to the "pleasures" of others-for it produces a cultural stud- ies that largely erases the needs, conditions, and exploitation of the working poor and the impoverished underclass in this country and globally: an underclass that is denied basic economic and human rights, an underclass that is overwhelmingly not "white."5 This ludic valorization of "pleasure" as liberation, the affir- mation of existing social differences, and the fetishization of the "local" and specific raise serious problems for feminist and oppo- sitional culture critique. It will not take us far in understanding or explaining the socioeconomic conditions and desperation under- lying the uprising in Los Angeles or causing women in India to sell their kidneys and women in the United States to rent out their uteruses in order to feed their children; nor will it help us much to intervene in and change these conditions. The verdict in the Rodney King trial-for many of us-was not a local, contingent, arbitrary, and aleatory play of power; rather, it was part of the systematic exercise of inequality, injustice, and oppression against African Americans in this country. It urgently impresses on us the need not simply to "account for and validate social differences" but to critique them in order to explain the underlying social re- lations of exploitation and to transform them. Perhaps I need to clarify here what I mean by critique. First, I do not regard "critique" as an end in itself. Critique is a practice through which the subject develops historical knowledge of the social totality: she or he acquires, in other words, an understand- ing of how the existing social institutions ("motherhood," "child care," "love," "paternity," "taxation," "family," etc.) have in fact come about and how they can be changed. Critique, in other words, is that knowledge-practice that historically situates the con- ditions of possibility of what empirically exists under patriarchal- capitalist labor relations and, more importantly, points to what is suppressed by the empirically existing: what could be (instead of what actually is). Critique indicates, in other words, that what "is" is not necessarily the real/true but rather only the existing actu- ality which is transformable. The role of critique in resistance postmodern feminism is exactly this: the production of historical knowledges that mark the transformability of existing social ar- rangements and the possibility of a different social organization- an organization free from exploitation. Quite simply then, cri- tique is a mode of knowing that inquires into what is not said, into the silences and the suppressed or missing, in order to uncover the concealed operations of power and underlying socioeconomic relations connecting the myriad details and seemingly disparate events and representations of our lives. It shows how seemingly disconnected zones of culture are in fact linked through the highly differentiated and dispersed operation of a systematic logic of exploitation informing all practices of society. In sum, critique disrupts that which represents itself as what is, as natural, as in- evitable, as the way things are and exposes the way "what is" is historically and socially produced out of social contradictions and how it supports inequality. Critique enables us to explain how gender, race, sexual, and class oppression operate so we can change it. A number of contemporary feminists, from Haraway and Penley to Jane Gallop and Judith Butler, have embraced the ludic mode of postmodern cultural studies and argued for its liberatory potential. But I believe if feminists are to engage in postmodern cultural studies without jeopardizing feminism's political effec- tiveness, we need to rigorously critique postmodernism's funda- mental presuppositions and, above all, to write a materialist pol- itics back into postmodernism. My essay is a contribution to this effort. Thus it insists on a transformative emancipatory politics in postmodernism and on the necessity of critique for an opposi- tional culture studies. In other words, I contend that the ludic postmodern erasure of the political in the name of discursive dif- ference is only one way of constructing postmodern difference. In contrast, I want to argue for feminism to radically retheorize post- modern difference itself and to articulate what I call a resistance postmodernism that will be the basis for postmodern materialist feminist culture critique.