Women's movements fighting for gender and sexual liberation

Outline

- A Marxist-feminist analysis of women’s oppression and exploitation

- Gender, sexuality, intersectionality: the question of oppression in a broader framework

- Women's liberation struggles

Readings: Excerpts from Friedrich Engels, Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State (in Preface to the first edition, 1884) World Congress resolution 1979 “Socialist revolution and the struggle for women's liberation” read Fragments [IC Resolution 2021 New Rise of the Women's Movement] [Remarks on Gender (Cinzia Arruzza)]

Further readings Adrienne Rich Criticism of heterosexuality Extract from the essay Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence (1980) a Extracts: Tithi Bhattacharya, "Introduction: Mapping SRT" in Social Reproduction Theory & "How not to skip class: social reproduction of labor and the global working class". What is ecofeminism? Interview with Yayo Herrero Extract from: Kumari Jayawardena: 'Feminism and nationalism in the third world', chapter 4: Women's struggles and "emancipation from above" in Iran

Quotations: Fourth International Resolution: On Lesbian/Gay Liberation 2003: Heterosexism is rooted in the heterosexual, patriarchal family institution characteristic of capitalism. The family is the ‘primary socioeconomic institution for perpetuating the class divisions of society from one generation to the next’, in the words of the 1979 resolution on women’s liberation. In the form it has developed under capitalism, it ‘provides the most inexpensive and ideologically acceptable mechanism for reproducing human labour’ - by using unpaid, largely female labour to care for the young and old as well as working-age adults - and ‘reproduces within itself the hierarchical, authoritarian relationships necessary to the maintenance of class society as a whole’. This family form is particularly oppressive to women and children.

Cinzia Arruzza, Remarks on Gender 2014 To say that within capitalist society women’s oppression and power relations are a necessary consequence of capitalism, and that these phenomena do not have their own independent and proper logic, is not to support the absurd argument that holds that gender oppression originates with capitalism. What is being defended here is a different argument, tied to the particular characteristics of capitalism. Societies in which capitalism has supplanted the preceding mode of production are characterized by a profound and radical transformation of the family.

Simone De Beauvoir The Second Sex (1949)

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. ... Biology does not determine what makes a woman a woman—a woman learns her role from man and others in society. Woman is not born passive, secondary, and nonessential, but all the forces in the external world have conspired to make her so.