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Patriarchy Impact Link

Social institutions influence behavior patterns, so their specific conceptualization matters—their dialectical method reinforces division of labor

Hartmann 76 (Heidi, feminist economist and founder and president of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research with a PhD in economics, “Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Job Segregation by Sex” Signs, Vol. 1, No. 3, https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3173001.pdf)//meb

Conclusion The present status of women in the labor market and the current arrangement of sex-segregated jobs is the result of a long process of interaction between patriarchy and capitalism. I have emphasized the actions of male workers throughout this process because I believe that emphasis to be correct. Men will have to be forced to give up their favored positions in the division of labor-in the labor market and at home-both if women's subordination is to end and if men are to begin to escape class oppression and exploitation.99 Capitalists have indeed used women as unskilled, underpaid labor to undercut male workers, yet this is only a case of the chickens coming home to roost-a case of men's co-optation by and support for patriarchal society, with its hierar- chy among men, being turned back on themselves with a vengeance. Capitalism grew on top of patriarchy; patriarchal capitalism is stratified society par excellence. If non-ruling-class men are to be free they will have to recognize their co-optation by patriarchal capitalism and relin- quish their patriarchal benefits. If women are to be free, they must fight against both patriarchal power and capitalist organization of society. Because both the sexual division of labor and male domination are so long standing, it will be very difficult to eradicate them and impossible to eradicate the latter without the former. The two are now so inextrica- bly intertwined that it is necessary to eradicate the sexual division of labor itself in order to end male domination.100 Very basic changes at all levels of society and culture are required to liberate women. In this paper, I have argued that the maintenance of job segregation by sex is a key root of women's status, and I have relied on the operation of society-wide institutions to explain the maintenance of job segregation by sex. But the consequences of that division of labor go very deep, down to the level of the subconscious. The subconscious influences be- havior patterns, which form the micro underpinnings (or complements) of social institutions and are in turn reinforced by those social institu- tions. I believe we need to investigate these micro phenomena as well as the macro ones I have discussed in this paper. For example, it appears to be a very deeply ingrained behavioral rule that men cannot be subordi- nate to women of a similar social class. Manifestations of this rule have been noted in restaurants, where waitresses experience difficulty in giv- ing orders to bartenders, unless the bartender can reorganize the situa- tion to allow himself autonomy; among executives, where women execu- tives are seen to be most successful if they have little contact with others at their level and manage small staffs; and among industrial workers, where female factory inspectors cannot successfully correct the work of male production workers.101 There is also a deeply ingrained fear of being identified with the other sex. As a general rule, men and women must never do anything which is not masculine or feminine (respectively).102 Male executives, for example, often exchange hand- shakes with male secretaries, a show of respect which probably works to help preserve their masculinity. At the next deeper level, we must study the subconscious-both how these behavioral rules are internalized and how they grow out of per- sonality structure.'03 At this level, the formation of personality, there have been several attempts to study the production of gender, the socially imposed differentiation of humans based on biological sex differences.104 A materialist interpretation of reality, of course, suggests that gender production grows out of the extant division of labor between the sexes,'05 and, in a dialectical process, reinforces that very division of labor itself. In my view, because of these deep ramifications of the sexual division of labor we will not eradicate sex-ordered task division until we eradicate the socially imposed gender differences between us and, there- fore, the very sexual division of labor itself. In attacking both patriarchy and capitalism we will have to find ways to change both society-wide institutions and our most deeply ingrained habits. It will be a long, hard struggle.

Identity Politics Links

Identity politics are used by the middle class to define itself in such a way that maintains capitalist structures—social division of labor is the root of difference, thus only a feminist materialist critique will solve the structural violence

Ebert 5 (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, “Rematerializing Feminism” http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/40404228.pdf)//meb

Identity Politics vs. Historical Materialism Identity politics is the latest formation of the subject under capi- talism. It mostly provides the managerial class (as it has come to be called in bourgeois sociology) with a way of understanding itself that completely bypasses class - or if it runs into class, it understands class in a neo-Weberian sense as life-chances in relation to the market. The managerial class (which is really a class fraction) deploys identity politics to define itself in an idealist fashion that does not put pres- sure on or threaten the existing social relations of labor. Even when the question of labor cannot be avoided, for example, in discussions of feminism and anti-racist struggles - to take two prominent forms of identity politics - labor becomes mostly a question of jobs and employment, that is to say, of income (e.g., "equal pay") . But as Marxist theory has demonstrated, income, in and of itself, does not determine the relation of the subject of labor to the conflictual structures of labor. Income, to be more precise, can be from profit or from "wages." It makes a radical difference whether the income is from profit (that is to say, the result of the surplus labor of the other) or from wages (the effect of selling one's labor power). When the question of labor has been dealt with in feminism or anti-racism, it has for the most part, been reduced to how to increase the income of the subject - even the issue of domestic labor has been largely understood in terms of "unpaid labor" and income for house- work. Rarely have feminism or anti-racism struggled against the existing labor relations based on the hegemony of capital. The few exceptions to this have been those historical materialist feminists and anti-racists who have engaged the historical constructions of gender, race and sexuality through the division of labor. But this work, espe- cially in the feminism of the 1970s and 80s, was largely cut off by the hegemonic rise of poststructuralism and identity politics. In fact, identity politics is the space in which the subject acquires a place in social relations through bypassing the fundamental issues involved in labor - the issues, in short, of one's place in relation to the ownership of the means of production. "Difference" is acquired in identity politics by essentially culturalizing the social divisions of labor. The relation between race, class and gender is obviously a contested one. One arrives at radically different social theories by the way one relates these terms to each other. As a way of grasping this complex linking and interlinking, I will risk some simplification by saying there are two modes of understanding these complex relations. The poststructuralist mode grants autonomy or at least semi- autonomy to each of these categories. In this view race, gender and sexuality have their own immanent logic, which is untranslatable into any other logic. And the relation that they have with each other, to use Althusser's term, is "overdetermined." In other words, accord- ing to this view, one cannot arrive at a knowledge of sexuality through race, or understand gender through class, etc., without excessive vio- lence being done to the separate terms. Such a theory has spawned numerous books dealing with the internal logic and immanent strat- egies by which sexuality or race or gender are articulated. Another way of putting this question is that in this paradigm the main issue is how gender works, Aowrace works; this, in effect, makes the macrologie of these relations secondary - the question why gender works the way it does is usually quite marginal. The other theory, historical materialism, supercedes this theory of autonomy and argues for relating the several categories to each other, not by separate and multiple logics of race, gender and sexu- ality, etc. but through the single, inclusive logic of wage-labor and capital. Most feminists, anti-racists and queer theorists have been quick to dismiss materialist theory by saying that the logic of labor cannot explain desire in sexuality, oppression in racism and inequality in gender relations. However, gender, sexuality, and race become social differences only when they become part of the social division of labor, and each has a long and differentiated history as part of the social division of labor and thus as a significant social difference. Racism, contrary to Foucauldian theory, is not simply a matter of asymmetrical power relations; nor is gender, or sexuality. Homo- phobia is not simply oppression - the exercise of power by hetero- sexuals over homosexuals. Gay bashing is the articulation of a violence, that is to say, the effect of power, but it cannot be under- stood in terms of power without inquiring into the genealogy of power. Contrary to poststructuralist theory, power is not the effect of discourse nor is it simply the immanent condition of all relations. Power is the social and political manifestation of the ownership of the means of production. In other words, power is always generated at the point of production, and its effects should also be examined in relation to the relations of production. Racism, in other words, is not simply oppression (the exercise of power by whites over blacks); sexism is not simply oppression (the exercise of power by men over women) . It is true that racism, sexism, and homophobia are experienced by the subject (e.g., African-American, woman, lesbian) as effects of oppression and power. If we limit our inquiry to this experiential level, we will end up simply with ethnographies of power, which I think would be of very limited use. If, however, we go beyond regarding racism, sexism and homophobia as simply effects of power to understand how power is derived from ownership of the means of production, then we will be able to theorize relations of class, gender, race and sexual- ity in a more historical and materialist way. In this view, sexism, rac- ism and homophobia are not so much instances of oppression but cases of exploitation. This is another way of saying that a poststruc- turalist theory of the social as the site of multi-oppression practices will not lead to a productive understanding of relations among class, gender, race and sexuality. The more productive way is to place labor relations and their consequences - property relations - at the cen- ter of this complex network and understand gender, sexuality, and race as produced by the existing division of labor: that is, as contra- dictions produced by the fundamental antagonism under capitalism - the antagonism of wage-labor and capital.