p. 212; see also Ingraham 1999). This critique is fascinating to reread over two decades later, in a context in which same‐sex marriage has become the dominant political, cultural, and indeed, ideological frame through which lesbian and gay lives and rights are represented in contemporary discourse. Perhaps one needs to apply, like Ingraham, Althusser's “symptomatic reading” of the same‐sex marriage sociocultural “text” for both what it does and does not say, within the contemporary “homonormative imaginary” (with a nod to Lisa Duggan [2002], who coined the term “homonormativity”).
Perhaps somewhat ironically, given Hennessy's and Ingraham's emphasis on the need to pay attention to the discursive, geohistorical and ideological context in which theories are produced, their analyses are informed by the intellectual context in the US of the time: the love affair of Marxian scholarship with French poststructuralism and psychoanalysis (as refashioned for a US intellectual market); the emergence of queer theory; and the growing body of “postcolonial” or “Third‐World” (as it was called then) feminist writing (produced largely, however, by women employed at US universities). This last criticized Western feminism for ignoring geopolitical and raced relations of power and privilege, and for positing a unitary category or subjectivity of women, Mohanty (1984) and Spivak (1988) being among the most celebrated academic texts of the time. Mohanty argued that Western feminists negated differences among women, notably of race and geographical context. Moreover, non‐Western feminists, she suggested, did not necessarily always prioritize gender in their political struggles and Western feminists needed to acknowledge these differences. Similarly, Spivak, in asking “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, posited a hierarchical relationship between Western and “subaltern” non‐Western women, and argued that Western feminists silenced critical voices from outside the West. These critiques were important, particularly in the US context of the time where the liberal version of feminism favored by white middle‐class women appeared dominant, and where class and race divisions were so entrenched. Mohanty and Spivak, both of whom were born in India, themselves drew inspiration from a body of critical women‐of‐color writing published in the US in the early 1980s (most famously: Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981; Hull et al. 1982; Smith 1983). At the same time, the extent to which political divisions neatly aligned Western and non‐Western (or white and non‐white) feminists on opposite sides of a race and geographical divide remains debatable. Just as Western feminists do not all speak with one voice, neither do non‐Western ones. Moreover, the critiques made by Mohanty and Spivak appear to consider US liberal feminism as synonymous with “Western” feminism – again, a function of the context in which they were working. Finally, it is debatable whether materialist feminists, of whatever strand or nationality, really did ignore race and class considerations – they certainly considered class – but the race critique nonetheless demanded engagement, not only within the polarized US context, but also more broadly, as non‐Western feminist writing started to become more accessible to Western audiences (including, among other things, through translation into English).
Hennessy and Ingraham's 1997 Anthology
In 1997, Hennessy and Ingraham published an influential anthology of materialist feminist writing, grouping texts first published in France, the UK, and North America since 1970 (Hennessy and Ingraham 1997a). The anthology's subtitle is A Reader in Class, Difference and Women's Lives, the word “difference” being precisely a reference to those debates in the US about georacial divides, as well as over sexuality and lesbian feminist analysis. The editors intended their anthology as a means of “reclaiming anticapitalist feminism” (the title of their Introduction), a time when “capitalism triumphantly secures its global reach, anticommunist ideologies hammer home socialism's inherent failure and the Left increasingly moves into the middle class” (Hennessy and Ingraham 1997b, p. 1). For them, this late twentieth century context was one in which feminism had become fragmented and “various forms of cultural politics that take as their starting point gender, race, class, sexuality, or coalitions among them have increasingly displaced a systemic perspective that links the battle against women's oppression to a fight against capitalism” (Hennessy and Ingraham 1997b, p. 1). Their anthology was thus explicitly intended as “a reminder that despite this trend feminists have continued to find in historical materialism a powerful theoretical and political resource” (Hennessy and Ingraham 1997b, p. 1). In making these statements, they align themselves more with the British than the French school of materialist feminism.
The anthology is structured as a chronologically organized repository of (broadly defined) materialist feminist writing, with each of its three sections being titled “Archive.” The three sections are, in order (and in diminishing order of length): “Women Under Capitalism: Theorizing Patriarchy, Labor, Meaning” (16 texts); “Thinking Difference Globally: Race, Class, Sexuality” (10 texts); and “Ongoing Work” (7 texts, all first published in the 1990s). Each section is internally diverse, juxtaposing work whose authors would not necessarily recognize themselves within the same current of materialist thought as each other. For example, Delphy's 1975 text “Pour un féminisme matérialiste” appears in Archive I, along with a 1980 text by her arch‐critic Michèle Barrett on “Ideology and the Cultural Production of Gender.” Closer to Delphy's work is the foundational text “The Political Economy of Women's Liberation” by Canadian Margaret Benston 1997 [1969], chronologically the first in the anthology, and one of the first feminist texts to use historical materialism as a method of analysis, although unlike Delphy, Benston stops short of characterizing women's labor within the family as a discrete “mode of production.”
Although the semantic slippage between “materialist feminist” and “socialist feminist” in the Anglo world is evident in many of the Archive I texts, the inclusion of Iris Marion Young's 1980 critique of dual systems theory provides an important distinction (Young 1980 [1997]). Young's text explicitly draws on both Marxian and radical feminist analysis to argue for a feminist historical materialism as a “total social theory,” at the core of which stand “the concrete social relations of gender and the relations in which these stand to other types of interaction and domination” (Young 1980 [1997], p. 104 and 105). In order to accommodate and acknowledge differences across time and place, Young argues for a “set of basic categories that can be applied to differing social circumstances in such a way that their specificity remains and yet comparison is possible,” and a theoretical method that will enable these comparisons (Young 1980 [1997], p. 105). She follows Delphy's analysis in considering “phenomena of ‘consciousness’ – e.g. intellectual production, broad social attitudes and beliefs, cultural myths, symbols, images, etc. – as rooted in real social relationships” (Young 1980 [1997], p. 105).
Also in the first “Archive” are challenges to dominant white‐heterosexual framings of feminism. Hazel V. Carby, writing within the British context in 1982 (the year after the so‐called “race riots” that occurred in working class areas in the country's industrial cities), provides a detailed critique of white feminist analyses of the family and their inability to understand the interaction of sex, race, and class in Black women's experience. In making her arguments, Carby draws on a number of significant African‐American feminist texts. Toward the beginning of her article she cites the Combahee River Collective's famous 1983 text in which the collective names the impacts of class, race, and “sexual politics under patriarchy” as inseparable in the experience of Black women (Combahee River Collective 1983; Carby 1997, p. 111), and she closes on an extract from Audré Lorde's open letter to Mary Daly (Lorde 1983 [1979]; Carby 1997, p. 128).1 Although she does not use the concept of (historical) materialism in her article, Carby consistently references the lived experience of Black women in Britain, both historically and at present. Carby thus underlines the “theoretical effects of the anger of the oppressed,” to borrow a phrase from Guillaumin 1992 [1981]. That is, as both Guillaumin and Delphy – and indeed Lorde – had pointed out, the lived experience of the oppressed necessarily generates new theoretical perspectives. For Carby as for self‐identified materialist feminists, the lived experience of women – in this case Black women – must therefore be the starting point for any feminist theory worth the name. Guillaumin, in her own essay, discussed at some length the
