Gender oppression and sexuality
Prerequisite: Comment to the Privilege Walk.
Comments on the Privilege Walk. Intersectionality
WOMEN'S MOVEMENTS FIGHTING FOR GENDER AND SEXUAL LIBERATION
I. A Marxist analysis of women's oppression
What are we learning from our classics? Marx and Engels "Origin of the family, private property and the State" - Dialectical and not cultural or psychological
material analysis of gender difference - sexual division of labour - importance of reproduction - an intuition on the family
Concepts that will be taken up and updated by femsoc in the 1970s and by the current TRS
Origin of the oppression of women
Societies analysed in written history, all patriarchal, of different forms in combination with the mode of production
Examining other pre-historic societies: discussion among anthropologists and archaeologists on the interpretation of resources
Consensus on the existence of nomadic communities, gatherers and harvesters, more egalitarian, before the Neolithic and the existence of private property
Analysis of pre-colonial societies gives us clues, not certainty
Conclusion. Gender relations are not a fixed and eternal fact but vary according to history, environment and production methods
II. Sex, gender, family, violence
1. Gender identity is socially constructed
2. The family
The family changes in time and space -> we can imagine another Role of the family in capitalism:
- economic : daily and generational reproduction of the labour force, consumption of goods
- social : refuge, damping of tensions caused by exploitation and alienation
- but contradictory - ideological and psychological :
gender, discipline, status quo certification ---→ to obtain this : gender violence against women and dissenting sexual identities
III. New feminist movement and its antecedents
Women have always struggled in popular movements
We speak of feminism when they struggle with a gender consciousness
We speak of a wave when the mass of women is concerned and a large part is mobilized with strong effects in society
1. First wave - in Europe - in the colonized countries struggles for legal equality, suffrage, access to education and employment
2. Second wave - the staff is political - role of psychoanalysis - sexual liberation of women and LGBTQ subjects - symbol construction and androcentrism
3. Today Third wave - departs from the peripheral countries
- independently of other social opposition movements (not in the wake of...)
- in a context of multiple crises: economic and financial, social, environmental, reproductive,... where women, having conquered rights and freedoms in the 20th century have the most to lose
Feminization of social movements - relationship between the two
- Characteristics of the 3rd wave:
new generation, political movement, intersectional, importance of LGBTQI issues, centrality of the issue of macho violence, structural.
theoretical reference to the TRS and constructivist eco-feminism.
appropriation and transformation of the traditional workers' movement's tools of struggle: the feminist strike, the spaces of mutual aid and new mutualism, social reproduction as an issue of class struggle.
- Adrienne Rich Criticism of heterosexuality
Adrienne Rich (1929-2012) - poet and radical feminist
Her first book on feminist issues was: Of Women born; Motherhood as Experience and Institution(1976)
This text is an extract from the essay Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence published as an essay in 1980
and republished in her book Blood, Bread and Poetry (1986).