Verbatim Mac

Impacts

Patriarchy

Ludic politics’ fear of both attacking patriarchy directly and using the concept of totality guarantees the subordination and exploitation that enacts violence onto the female body

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

I would like to elaborate more specifically here on the two radically different notions of politics in postmodernism I have been discussing. Ludic politics seeks open access to the free play of signification (through parody, irony, and experimentation) in or- der to dissemble the dominant cultural policy (the totality) that tries to restrict and stabilize meaning. Resistance or materialist postmodern politics insists on politics as the practice aimed at "equal" access for all to social, cultural, and economic resources and also as an end to the exploitative exercise of power. The first is a politics aimed at the liberation of the individual, particularly the individ- ual libido-the celebration of pleasure, excess jouissance. It advo- cates cultural equality through semiotic activism. The second seeks the emancipation of the collectivity of subjects from exploi- tation-specifically from a capitalist, racist patriarchy: its aim is primarily economic equality through social struggle. In short, the rewriting of difference as difference in relation raises anew the issue of totality. To transform people's access to socioeconomic resources and to end exploitation will require a notion of totality in order to critique the systematicity and global relations of oppression. But the first mode of politics-"ludic pol- itics"-does not merely disrupt specific totalities, it rejects any inquiry into the concept of totality as itself an instance of totali- tarianism and occludes any critique of power as a system of un- equal relations involving the powerful and powerless.9 As I have already indicated, ludic politics relies on an immanent notion of power and instead of systems of power such as capitalism or pa- triarchy, it proposes localities (like prisons or clinics) in which power is not merely repressive but positively enabling since it produces its own "resistance." Power in ludic politics is aleatory and asystematic; it is never "necessary" or "determinate" but al- ways subject to the unpredictable slippage of the sign. Thus for many postmodernists, especially cultural critics, the main agenda of ludic politics follows Lyotard's battle cry to "wage war on to- tality." This ludic war on totality with its local, micropolitics and aleatory notion of power has become the primary site for feminist engagement with the postmodern largely because ludic discourses and practices are seen as synonymous with postmodernism. In short, feminists, by and large, have failed to see that postmodern- ism is itself divided by a radical difference. As a result, feminists as diverse as Butler, de Lauretis, Donna Haraway, Nancy Fraser, and Linda Nicholson are articulating a politically very counter- productive form of postmodern feminist cultural studies in their celebration of a local pluralism and their "war" on other feminists as totalizing. An exemplar of this ludic postmodern feminism is, of course, Haraway's "A Manifesto for Cyborgs," in which she attempts to rewrite a socialist, materialist feminism as an "ar- gument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries," as a local network of differences among women and a rejection of any no- tion of system and totality as an "erasure of polyvocal, unassimi- lable . . . difference" (150-59). Haraway's notion of socialism is influenced more by the post-Marxist idea of politics as discourse and the ludic notion of libidinal liberation than by the concept of politics as social struggle over economic equality. In fact, in Har- away's "socialism"-as indeed in the work of many contemporary feminists who regard(ed) themselves as socialist-concepts of "labor," "class", "history" (notions that underwrite socialism and differentiate it from radical democracy or liberal politics) are con- spicuously missing. This is a socialism which is, by and large, utopian, idealist, and metaphoric: it is grounded on metaphors of labor, class, struggle, economics (if it uses them at all) rather than on actual historical, materialist practices.10 At the core of Haraway's essay is her attack on Catherine MacKinnon's radical feminism as "a caricature of the appropriat- ing, incorporating, totalizing tendencies of Western theories of identity grounding action" (200). In fact, MacKinnon has become the straw woman for attacks on feminist theories of totality: one critic has even called her both Lenin and Hitler (Mullarkey 720). Such attacks on committed feminists like MacKinnon, who have long been on the front lines of critique and intervention in the systematic exploitation of women's sexuality and labor, should be a serious warning to us to rethink the political consequences of feminist involvement in ludic postmodernism." Much recent feminist theory under pressure of ludic postmodernism is not only denying the insights of radical feminism but is also abandon- ing the sustained critique of patriarchy as an ongoing system of exploitation based on gender-so much so, that patriarchy, which the socialist-feminist Maria Mies has called the necessary "struggle concept" of feminism (Patriarchy and Accumulation 36), has now become the taboo word of recent feminist theory: it cannot be said without the speaker taking the risk of being labeled a reductive totalizer, Lenin or even Stalin. "Patriarchy" has become a taboo concept because, from a ludic perspective, it is not only totalizing but it also essentializes "men," "women," and "oppression." From an orthodox Marxist perspective, patriarchy cannot be deployed because it is seen as reifying gender issues while erasing class and economics. How- ever, the concept of patriarchy is vital to the struggle against women's oppression. Thus, I want to put forth a materialist concept of patriarchy as a regime of exploitation that produces gender difference in order to construct asymmetrical, unequal divisions of labor, accumulation, and access to social, economic, and cultural resources, guaranteeing not only the privilege of one gender (male) over the other (female) but, more important, the subjugation and exploitation of the "other" gender as the very grounds of wealth and accumulation. In other words, patriarchy is a historically diverse, ongoing, and unequal system of gender differences and exploitation: one that is "necessary" to the very existence and prosperity of the majority of socioeconomic systems in the world and is fundamental to the global expansion and colonization of capitalism. I am quite aware that most ludic feminists will dismiss this position as itself reductive and repressive. But the local pluralism they advocate, which also informs (ludic) postmodern cultural studies, is far from being a new, nonrepressive inclusivity. In- stead, it involves a very insidious exclusion of any politics of change: it excludes and occludes global or structural relations of power, as I have already indicated, by simply dismissing them as "ideological" and "totalizing" effects of discourse itself. It ex- cludes, in effect, the systematicity of regimes of exploitation on the basis of what Jameson has called "that silliest of all puns, the confusion of'totality' with 'totalitarianism'" (60). In contrast, resistance postmodernism, as I am articulating it here, enables feminists to retheorize totality and to insist on sys tem and patriarchy as necessary struggle concepts for cultural critique and social transformation. Instead of considering totality to be an organic, homogeneous, unified whole (a Hegelian ex- pressive unity) we can reconceptualize totality as both a system of relations and an overdetermined structure of difference, a system which is historical and thus articulates social contradictions: it is thus materialistically (not discursively) always self-divided, differ- ent from itself and multiple. It is traversed by differences within, by differance, and, at the same time, produces a logic of connection that operates through this self-division. We can thus reunderstand patriarchy as a "system of differ- ences," but not one that is either a homogenous undifferentiated "totality" or fragmented, dispersed, free-floating, and uncon- nected sites of power. Instead, the ongoing exploitative organiza- tion and production of gender differences, especially in relation to the division of labor, and the ideological effort to represent them as natural and inevitable, provide a logic of connection through all the diverse historical formations of patriarchy. Yet the specific articulations of these differences are not fixed and stable but historically traversed by contradictions and continually con- tested and struggled over by the other, that is, by differences excluded, suppressed, and exploited. Patriarchy is thus a totality in process, a self-divided, multiple arena of social struggle. But it is able to represent itself as a seeming unity that is coherent, invio- lable, and always the same, in other words, continuous, but this is an ideological effect. Patriarchy thus seems transhistorical and syn- onymous with human nature and society. But this seeming his- torical "continuity" is not so much the continuity of the same but rather different reconfigurations of an ongoing socioeconomic structure of gendered oppression. Patriarchy, then, is continuous on the level of the structure or organization of oppression and discontinuous, that is, heterogeneous, in its historically specific and conjunctural practices. In short, patriarchy is a differentiated, contradictory struc- ture that historically produces identical effects differently. For instance, the specific configuration of the political economy of differences in postmodern or late capitalist patriarchy in the United States is quite distinct from the configuration of differences in contemporary fundamentalist Iran, and both of these vary from those found in feudal Europe. Yet for all their differences in relation to each other, they share the same dominant organization of differences according to the gender opposition of male/female.13 All these various patriarchal arrangements, in short, produce the same effects: the oppression and exclusion of woman as other, the division of labor according to gen- der-specifically, the exploitation of women's labor (whether in the public or private sphere)-and the denial of women's full access to social resources. Women thus occupy the "same" position within patriarchy differently, divided by the conjunctions of race, class, nationality, (post)colonialism, and so on. Their "identity" is not identical; they are not the "same" as each other, yet they are all subjects of the same structures of oppression. By understanding women's subjectivities as the effects of difference- in-relation, I believe, we can rearticulate a collective subject for feminism. A move toward an emancipatory politics for feminism needs to be based on a materialist cultural critique. But in order to be effective, cultural critique must intervene in the system of patri- archal oppression at both the macropolitical level of the structural organization of domination (a transformative politics of labor re- lations) and the micropolitical level of different and contradictory manifestations of oppression (cultural politics). Ludic postmod- ern cultural studies and much recent feminist theory all tend to confine their analysis to the micropolitics of oppression and the local level of differences. In doing so, they inhibit any effective intervention in the structures of totalities like patriarchy. I believe resistance postmodern cultural studies and postmodern material- ist feminism, with their dialectical critiques of both the structures of difference-in-relation and the specific enunciations of these differences, will develop a transformative theory and practice that can contribute to the end of patriarchal exploitation. For it is through the unrelenting critique of the socioeconomic relations of differences, particularly the division of labor, and the way they construct and restrict the meanings and subjectivities they require that feminist cultural studies can help bring about the nonexploit- ative future.

Patriarchy and capitalism are deeply interlocked—devaluation of women is rooted in the sex-ordered division of labor inherent in capitalist systems

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

The division of labor by sex appears to have been universal throughout human history. In our society the sexual division of labor is hierarchical, with men on top and women on the bottom. Anthropology and history suggest, however, that this division was not always a hierarchical one. The development and importance of a sex-ordered division of labor is the subject of this paper. It is my contention that the roots of women's present social status lie in this sex-ordered division of labor. It is my belief that not only must the hierarchical nature of the division of labor between the sexes be eliminated, but the very division of labor between the sexes itself must be eliminated if women are to attain equal social status with men and if women and men are to attain the full develop- ment of their human potentials. The primary questions for investigation would seem to be, then, first, how a more sexually egalitarian division became a less egalitarian one, and second, how this hierarchical divison of labor became extended to wage labor in the modern period. Many anthropological studies sug- gest that the first process, sexual stratification, occurred together with the increasing productiveness, specialization, and complexity of society; for example, through the establishment of settled agriculture, private property, or the state. It occurred as human society emerged from the primitive and became "civilized." In this perspective capitalism is a rela- tive latecomer, whereas patriarchy,1 the hierarchical relation between men and women in which men are dominant and women are subordi- nate, was an early arrival. I want to argue that, before capitalism, a patriarchal system was established in which men controlled the labor of women and children in the family, and that in so doing men learned the techniques of hierarchi- cal organization and control. With the advent of public-private separa- tions such as those created by the emergence of state apparatus and economic systems based on wider exchange and larger production units, the problem for men became one of maintaining their control over the labor power of women. In other words, a direct personal system of control was translated into an indirect, impersonal system of control, mediated by society-wide institutions. The mechanisms available to men were (1) the traditional division of labor between the sexes, and (2) techniques of hierarchical organization and control. These mechanisms were crucial in the second process, the extension of a sex-ordered divi- sion of labor to the wage-labor system, during the period of the emergence of capitalism in Western Europe and the United States. The emergence of capitalism in the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries threatened patriarchal control based on institutional authority as it de- stroyed many old institutions and created new ones, such as a "free" market in labor. It threatened to bring all women and children into the labor force and hence to destroy the family and the basis of the power of men over women (i.e., the control over their labor power in the family).2 If the theoretical tendency of pure capitalism would have been to eradi- cate all arbitrary differences of status among laborers, to make all labor- ers equal in the marketplace, why are women still in an inferior position to men in the labor market? The possible answers are legion; they range from neoclassical views that the process is not complete or is hampered by market imperfections to the radical view that production requires hierarchy even if the market nominally requires "equality."3 All of these explanations, it seems to me, ignore the role of men-ordinary men, men as men, men as workers-in maintaining women's inferiority in the labor market. The radical view, in particular, emphasizes the role of men as capitalists in creating hierarchies in the production process in order to maintain their power. Capitalists do this by segmenting the labor market (along race, sex, and ethnic lines among others) and playing workers off against each other. In this paper I argue that male workers have played and continue to play a crucial role in maintaining sexual divisions in the labor process. Job segregation by sex, I will argue, is the primary mechanism in capitalist society that maintains the superiority of men over women, because it enforces lower wages for women in the labor market. Low wages keep women dependent on men because they encourage women to marry. Married women must perform domestic chores for their hus- bands. Men benefit, then, from both higher wages and the domestic division of labor. This domestic division of labor, in turn, acts to weaken women's position in the labor market. Thus, the hierarchical domestic division of labor is perpetuated by the labor market, and vice versa. This process is the present outcome of the continuing interaction of two interlocking systems, capitalism and patriarchy. Patriarchy, far from being vanquished by capitalism, is still very virile; it shapes the form modern capitalism takes, just as the development of capitalism has trans- formed patriarchal institutions. The resulting mutual accommodation between patriarchy and capitalism has created a vicious circle for women.

Capitalism and patriarchy are very closely intertwined—capitalism exacerbates the effects of patriarchal structures

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

The Emergence of Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution in England and the United States The key process in the emergence of capitalism was primitive ac- cumulation, the prior accumulation that was necessary for capitalism to establish itself.28 Primitive accumulation was a twofold process which set the preconditons for the expansion of the scale of production: first, free laborers had to be accumulated; second, large amounts of capital had to be accumulated. The first was achieved through enclosures and the re- moval of people from the land, their subsistence base, so that they were forced to work for wages. The second was achieved through both the growth of smaller capitals in farms and shops amassed through banking facilities, and vast increases in merchant capital, the profits from the slave trade, and colonial exploitation. The creation of a wage-labor force and the increase in the scale of production that occurred with the emergence of capitalism had in some ways a more severe impact on women than on men. To understand this impact let us look at the work of women before this transition occurred and the changes which took place as it occurred.29 In the 1500s and 1600s, agriculture, woolen textiles (carried on as a by-industry of ag- riculture), and the various crafts and trades in the towns were the major sources of livelihood for the English population. In the rural areas men worked in the fields on small farms they owned or rented and women tended the household plots, small gardens and orchards, animals, and dairies. The women also spun and wove. A portion of these products were sold in small markets to supply the villages, towns, and cities, and in this way women supplied a considerable proportion of their families' cash income, as well as their subsistence in kind. In addition to the tenants and farmers, there was a small wage-earning class of men and women who worked on the larger farms. Occasionally tenants and their wives worked for wages as well, the men more often than the women.30 As small farmers and cottagers were displaced by larger farmers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their wives lost their main sources of support, while the men were able to continue as wage laborers to some extent. Thus women, deprived of these essential household plots, suf- fered relatively greater unemployment, and the families as a whole were deprived of a large part of their subsistence.3' In the 1700s, the demand for cotton textiles grew, and English merchants found they could utilize the labor of the English agricultural population, who were already familiar with the arts of spinning and weaving. The merchants distributed materials to be spun and woven, creating a domestic industrial system which occupied many displaced farm families. This putting-out system, however, proved inadequate. The complexities of distribution and collection and, perhaps more im- portant, the control the workers had over the production process (they could take time off, work intermittently, steal materials) prevented an increase in the supply of textiles sufficient to meet the merchants' needs. To solve these problems first spinning, in the late 1700s, and then weav- ing, in the early 1800s, were organized into factories. The textile fac- tories were located in the rural areas, at first, in order both to take advantage of the labor of children and women, by escaping the restric- tions of the guilds in the cities, and to utilize waterpower. When spinning was industrialized, women spinners at home suffered greater unem- ployment, while the demand for male handloom weavers increased. When weaving was mechanized, the need for handloom weavers fell off as well.32 In this way, domestic industry, created by emerging capitalism, was later superseded and destroyed by the progress of capitalist industriali- zation. In the process, women, children, and men in the rural areas all suffered dislocation and disruption, but they experienced this in differ- ent ways. Women, forced into unemployment by the capitalization of agriculture more frequently than men, were more available to labor, both in the domestic putting-out system and in the early factories. It is often argued both that men resisted going into the factories because they did not want to lose their independence and that women and children were more docile and malleable. If this was in fact the case, it would appear that these "character traits" of women and men were already established before the advent of the capitalistic organization of industry, and that they would have grown out of the authority structure prevailing in the previous period of small-scale, family agriculture. Many historians suggest that within the family men were the heads of households, and women, even though they contributed a large part of their families' subsistence, were subordinate.33 We may never know the facts of the authority structure within the preindustrial family, since much of what we know is from prescriptive literature or otherwise class biased, and little is known about the point of view of the people themselves. Nevertheless, the evidence on family life and on relative wages and levels of living suggests that women were subordinate within the family. This conclusion is consonant with the anthropological literature, reviewed in Part I above, which describes the emergence of patriarchial social relations along with early societal stratification. Moreover, the history of the early factories suggests that capitalists took advantage of this authority structure, finding women and children more vulnerable, both because of familial relations and because they were simply more desperate economically due to the changes in agriculture which left them unemployed.34 The transition to capitalism in the cities and towns was experienced somewhat differently than in the rural areas, but it tends to substantiate the line of argument just set out: men and women had different places in the familial authority structure, and capitalism proceeded in a way that built on that authority structure. In the towns and cities before the transition to capitalism a system of family industry prevailed: a family of artisans worked together at home to produce goods for exchange. Adults were organized in guilds, which had social and religious functions as well as industrial ones. Within trades carried on as family industries women and men generally performed different tasks: in general, the men worked at what were considered more skilled tasks, the women at processing the raw materials or finishing the end product. Men, usually the heads of the production units, had the status of master artisans. For though women usually belonged to their husbands' guilds, they did so as appendages; girls were rarely apprenticed to a trade and thus rarely become journeymen or masters. Married women participated in the production process and probably acquired important skills, but they usually controlled the production process only if they were widowed, when guilds often gave them the right to hire apprentices and jour- neymen. Young men may have married within their guilds (i.e., the daughters of artisans in the same trade). In fact, young women and girls had a unique and very important role as extra or casual laborers in a system where the guilds prohibited hiring additional workers from out- side the family, and undoubtedly they learned skills which were useful when they married.35 Nevertheless, girls appear not to have been trained as carefully as boys were and, as adults, not to have attained the same status in the guilds. Although in most trades men were the central workers and women the assistants, other trades were so identified by sex that family industry did not prevail.36 Carpentry and millinery were two such trades. Male carpenters and female milliners both hired apprentices and assistants and attained the status of master craftspersons. According to Clark, although some women's trades, such as millinery, were highly skilled and organized in guilds, many women's trades were apparently difficult to organize in strong guilds, because most women's skills could not be easily monopolized. All women, as part of their home duties, knew the arts of textile manufacturing, sewing, food processing, and to some ex- tent, trading. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the family industry system and the guilds began to break down in the face of the demand for larger output. Capitalists began to organize production on a larger scale, and production became separated from the home as the size of estab- lishments grew. Women were excluded from participation in the indus- tries in which they had assisted men as they no longer took place at home, where married women apparently tended to remain to carry on their domestic work. Yet many women out of necessity sought work in capitalistically organized industry as wage laborers. When women en- tered wage labor they appear to have been at a disadvantage relative to men. First, as in agriculture, there was already a tradition of lower wages for women (in the previously limited area of wage work). Second, women appear to have been less well trained than men and obtained less desirable jobs. And third, they appear to have been less well organized than men. Because I think the ability of men to organize themselves played a crucial role in limiting women's participation in the wage-labor market, I want to offer, first, some evidence to support the assertion that men were better organized and, second, some plausible reasons for their superiority in this area. I am not arguing that men had greater organiza- tional abilities at all times and all places, or in all areas or types of organization, but am arguing here that it is plausible that they did in England during this period, particularly in the area of economic produc- tion. As evidence of their superiority, we have the guilds themselves, which were better organized among men's trades than women's, and in which, in joint trades, men had superior positions-women were seldom admitted to the hierarchical ladder of progression. Second, we have the evidence of the rise of male professions and the elimination of female ones during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The medical pro- fession, male from its inception, established itself through hierarchical organization, the monopolization of new, "scientific" skills, and the assis- tance of the state. Midwifery was virtually wiped out by the men. Brew- ing provides another example. Male brewers organized a fellowship, petitioned the king for monopoly rights (in exchange for a tax on every quart they brewed), and succeeded in forcing the numerous small-scale brewsters to buy from them.37 Third, throughout the formative period of industrial capitalism, men appear to have been better able to organize themselves as wage workers. And as we shall see below, as factory pro- duction became established men used their labor organizations to limit women's place in the labor market. As to why men might have had superior organizational ability dur- ing this transitional period, I think we must consider the development of patriarchal social relations in the nuclear family, as reinforced by the state and religion, a process briefly described above for Anglo-Saxon En- gland. Since men's superior position was reinforced by the state, and men acted in the political arena as heads of households and in the households as heads of production units, it seems likely that men would develop more organizational structures beyond their households. Women, in an inferior position at home and without the support of the state, would be less likely to be able to do this. Men's organizational knowledge, then, grew out of their position in the family and in the division of labor. Clearly, further investigation of organizations before and during the transition period is necessary to establish the mechanisms by which men came to control this public sphere. Thus, the capitalistic organization of industry, in removing work from the home, served to increase the subordination of women, since it served to increase the relative importance of the area of men's domina- tion. But it is important to remember that men's domination was already established and that it clearly influenced the direction and shape that capitalist development took. As Clark has argued, with the separation of work from the home men became less dependent on women for indus- trial production, while women became more dependent on men economically. From a position much like that of the African women discussed in Part I above, English married women, who had supported themselves and their children, became the domestic servants of their husbands. Men increased their control over technology, production, and marketing, as they excluded women from industry, education, and polit- ical organization.38 When women participated in the wage-labor market, they did so in a position as clearly limited by patriarchy as it was by capitalism. Men's control over women's labor was altered by the wage-labor system, but it was not eliminated. In the labor market the dominant position of men was maintained by sex-ordered job segregation. Women's jobs were lower paid, considered less skilled, and often involved less exercise of authority or control.39 Men acted to enforce job segregation in the labor market; they utilized trade-union associations and strengthened the domestic division of labor, which required women to do housework, child care, and related chores. Women's subordinate position in the labor market reinforced their subordinate position in the family, and that in turn reinforced their labor-market position.