defined” (Kuhn and Wolpe 2013b). They termed this elitist approach to theory production, and to authoritative knowledge claims, “theoreticism,” and contrasted it with the location of feminist theory production in the need to address the oppression of women. They argued for more of that feminist theory production, which arises “quite simply from the very urgent and specific need for constructing an analytical and effectual understanding of women's situation” (Kuhn and Wolpe 2013b). The particular theoretical contribution they argue for is materialism.
However, their starting point for understanding materialism, which draws on Engels' definition, is framed a little differently from Delphy's. For them, “the materialist problematic is based on a conceptualization of human society as defined specifically by its productivity: primarily of the means of subsistence and of value by the transformation of nature through work.” Even if they seem to begin at quite a similar starting point to Delphy – that of analyzing the position of women in terms of relations of production and reproduction as constituted through history – they quickly resituate their materialism within a socialist‐feminist dual systems framework of sexual division of labor in the private sphere and social relations between capital and waged labor in the public sphere. Although trenchantly critical of Marxism's failure to either theorize or address the subordination of women, Kuhn and Wolpe nonetheless explicitly situate their materialist analysis as, at least to some extent, “an attempt to transform Marxism.” The question is thus begged of the difference between this British materialist feminism and socialist feminism. Indeed, Kuhn and Wolpe appear to reinforce a “dual systems” conceptualization in stating that:
a materialist approach to the question of women's situation constantly comes up against the problem of the apparently transhistorical character of women's oppression, which immediately problematizes the relationship between such oppression and mode of production. Any attempt to deal with this fundamental issue necessitates a consideration of the relationship between patriarchy, however formulated, and history; or more particularly, mode of production. In this context two interrelated issues are raised – the family and the sexual division of labour – whose crucial importance to the theorization of the situation of women is constantly claimed but still remains to be analysed.
(Kuhn and Wolpe 2013b)
Kuhn and Wolpe thus remain within a Marxian conceptualization of “mode of production” as being exclusively tied to the development of capitalism, and appear either to not be aware of radical and French materialist analyses of the family and sexual division of labor, or to consider such analyses unimportant. The rest of the contributions to the anthology remain within the “dual systems” framework: the family/patriarchy and the capitalist state, but without positing the family mode of production as distinctive.
By the end of the 1980s, then, two fundamentally different conceptualizations of materialist feminism had emerged on different sides of the English Channel: the French, which is politically and theoretically closer to the radical feminism of the Anglo world, although it gives a greater importance to materialism as method, and the British, which would appear to be the intellectual counterpart to socialist feminism.
US Materialist Feminism
In the introduction to her 1993 book Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse, Rosemary Hennessy effaces the distinction between British and French materialist feminism, stating that “Annette Kuhn, Anne [sic] Marie Wolpe, Michele Barrett, Mary McIntosh, and Christine Delphy were among the initial promoters of ‘materialist feminism,’ favoring that term over ‘Marxist feminism’ on the basis of an argument that Marxism cannot adequately address women's exploitation and oppression unless the Marxist problematic itself is transformed so as to be able to account for the sexual division of labor” (Hennessy 1993, p. xi).
Her revisiting of the socialist/Marxist‐feminist version of materialism is in response to a body of feminist literature that emerged during the 1980s and that “questioned the adequacy of a generic ‘woman’ and a gender‐centred feminist inquiry” (Hennessy 1993, p. xii). This now familiar argument, however, is based on a misinterpretation. Materialist feminists, whether British or French, have never suggested that all women are the same, for their focus was not “woman” as an entity but on the social relations that constitute women as an oppressed class (or group, or caste, depending on the terminology one prefers). Similarly, criticizing feminist inquiry as “gender‐centred” is to suggest that the central object of such inquiry lacks political and thus theoretical validity. The very point of feminism is to challenge unequal social relations between men and women; it is difficult to do so without being “gender‐centred.” All of this said, the critiques to which Hennessy refers are legion, and many of them are demonstrably true: namely, that many Western feminists and much Western feminist theory (although, I would argue, particularly liberal feminism, rather than materialist feminism, however theorized) have overlooked or underestimated the importance of other social relations, notably race and geopolitical location. (Hennessy also refers to lesbians, although I note that Christine Delphy and indeed a number of other French materialist feminists are openly lesbian, and many of them, and the radical lesbians who drew inspiration from them – most famously [Wittig 2001] – framed the social relation of male domination as ideologically and structurally one of heterosexuality).
Hennessy was responding to the postmodern turn in feminist theory and notably its emphasis on the discursive construction of social subjects, at a time that she saw as a moment of feminism's “crisis of authority,” a term she used with reference to feminism in the academy rather than the feminist movement more broadly (Hennessy 1993, p. 137). Drawing inspiration from a range of poststructuralist, postmodern, and indeed Freudo‐Marxist theorists, Hennessy argued for a materialist feminism that would be more responsive to multiplicities of female subject positions and to the geohistorical specificities and discursive elements of their constitution. She further argued for a greater self‐awareness among materialist feminist theorists that “their mode of reading, like any revolutionary practice, is in history and so provisional, always circulating in a field of contesting discourses that challenge and redefine its horizons” (Hennessy 1993, p. 138).
The US style of materialist feminism that has been largely associated with Hennessy and Chrys Ingraham (Hennessy and Ingraham 1997a,b) thus presents some significant differences from either the British or the French. These differences emerged within the context of the postmodern turn in both feminist and Marxian scholarship more generally in the US at that time, both of which were heavily influenced by Foucauldian poststructuralist discourse analysis and Althusserian and Lacanian Freudo‐Marxism, as translocated for a US academic public. Although Hennessy and Ingraham continue to insist on the importance of the materiality of social relations, their focus shifts to encompass the positionality – indeed multiple positionalities – of the subjects constituted both through those relations and the way the latter are talked about: in short, their discursive construction, even as many, even most, of the volume's contributors remain deeply critical of the postmodern discursive turn. Hennessy in particular is concerned with the necessity of distrusting any theories, including materialist feminism, that may have “totalizing” pretentions, and argues for a materialist feminism that is more responsive to contingency and change.
Also central to the US reframing of materialist feminism is a core focus on ideology in an Althusserian sense, as “the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (cited in Ingraham 1994, p. 203), in which what is not said is as important to analyze as what is said. Moreover, “because it produces what is allowed to count as reality, ideology constitutes a material force and at the same time is shaped by other economic and political forces” (Ingraham 1994, p. 207).
Drawing inspiration from, among others, Adrienne Rich (1980) and Monique Wittig (2001 [1986]), and indeed Christine Delphy, Chrys Ingraham took feminist sociology to task for having adopted the “heterosexual imaginary” and thus having failed to cast a critical eye over heteronormativity. She focused in particular on the social, cultural, and economic institutions
