the anger of the oppressed.”
Charlotte Bunch, in her 1975 text “Not for Lesbians Only,” originally delivered as a speech at a socialist feminist conference, takes the women's movement and particularly socialist feminism to task for not engaging with lesbian‐feminist politics in other than superficial and tokenistic ways. She criticizes heterosexual feminists for not understanding that heterosexuality operates as ideology and institution, core to the sexual division of labor under patriarchy. Conversely, she analyzes how her experience as a lesbian taught her about class in a way the Left never had, by disrupting her “middle‐class assumptions” and background that had “crippled” her as a woman, as she became “an outlaw, a woman alone” (Bunch 1997, p. 57). Moreover – again, in sharp distinction to the assimilationism of present‐day middle‐class campaigns such as that for same‐sex marriage – Bunch wrote that “the last thing we should be aiming to do” is to make “being queer okay” in patriarchy. “Nothing in capitalist patriarchal America works to our benefit and I do not want to see us working in any way to integrate ourselves into that order” (Bunch 1997, p. 58).
The second Archive explores the period from the mid‐1980s to mid‐1990s, with a focus on the interactions of race, class, and sexuality in women's (and some men's) lives on a transnational scale. Again, this Archive is heterogeneous: Hennessy and Ingraham appeared to wish to be as inclusive as possible. The only real common denominator in this section – namely, a critique of transnational capitalism – is more evident, and more evidently feminist, and more evidently materialist feminist, in some texts than in others. Otherwise, the section covers a political spectrum from the radical feminism of Maria Mies (“Colonization and Housewifization”, Ch. 3 of her celebrated 1986 book Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale), to the explicitly socialist feminism of Chinese‐American activist Nellie Wong (Wong 1997). There is even an early “Transgender Liberation” text, originally published as a pamphlet in 1992 (Feinberg 1997), which documents histories of transgender oppression, including some links with capitalism and colonialism (unlike many subsequent transgender writings), but does not engage specifically with a feminist analysis of any sort, let alone a materialist feminist one. In the same section, African‐American lesbian Barbara Smith, in her essay “Where's the Revolution?”, first published in 1993, trenchantly criticizes queer politics (with which transgender politics had already become imbricated). She writes that “unlike the early lesbian and gay movement, which had both ideological and practical links to the left, black activism, and feminism, today's ‘queer’ politicos seem to operate in a historical and ideological vacuum” (Smith 1997, p. 249), and identifies “gay white men's racial, gender, and class privileges” as driving the movement's increased positioning “within the mainstream political arena” (Smith 1997, p. 250).
The third Archive brings together texts from the 1990s that engage with poststructuralist and postmodern cultural critiques as well as new feminist preoccupations such as reproductive engineering and ecology. The anthology closes, no doubt fittingly for the time at which it was published, on Carol A. Stabile's critique of postmodernism, originally published in 1994 as “Feminism without Guarantees: The Misalliances and Missed Alliances of Postmodernist Social Theory” in the journal Rethinking Marxism, and reworked for the 1997 anthology under the title “Feminism and the Ends of Postmodernism” (Stabile 1994, 1997). Stabile defines “postmodern social theory” as “those critical theories that rely upon an uncritical and idealist focus on the discursive constitution of the ‘real,’ a postivisitic approach to the notion of ‘difference’ (one that does not consider the divisiveness of such differences), and a marked lack of critical attention to the context of capitalism and academics' locations within capitalist processes of production and reproduction” (Stabile 1997, p. 396).
Stabile provides an illuminating analysis both of the institutional framing of ideas within academe (and the class divisions among academics as universities increasingly rely on a precariat2 of sessional labor), and of the unfortunate translocation of postmodernism from France to the US. During that translocation, the “historical and material conditions” that produced the European debates around Marxism, postmodernism, and feminism were obscured. The result was “a kind of phantom‐limb syndrome,” in which “a backlash against economic analyses was appropriated by a society whose history of class struggle has been consistently repressed” (Stabile 1997, p. 397). She goes on to critique Laclau and Mouffe's then (and still) influential idea of “radical democracy” (1990) – which dismisses Marxian class analysis as “essentialist” and shifts the terrain of political struggle into the intellectual and the discursive – as reformist and elitist. Stabile sees the feminist expression of this postmodern “idealist turn” (recalling, although not citing, Delphy's earlier critique of “idealism”) as having “dissolved the political category of women (and however problematic this category was, it was at least a political one) into a ‘discursive’ construct” (Stabile 1997, p. 399). Judith Butler's work (notably a 1992 article critiquing critiques of postmodernism) exemplifies for Stabile this discursive, “anti‐essentialist” turn in feminist theory, in which “a belief that discourse precedes, structures and limits subject formation” is promoted (Butler 1992; Stabile 1997, p. 400).
Most damningly, Stabile argues that the ideology of postmodernism converges with dominant ideologies in the US of the last decade of the twentieth century, across four sites: “(1) anti‐empiricist tendencies within the humanities; (2) the logic of consumerism and consumer capitalism; (3) postmodernism and the legacy of anti‐communism; and (4) anti‐organizational bias and individualization” (Stabile 1997, p. 405). She sees this convergence as leading to depoliticization among academics and providing alibis for their disengagement.
Stabile's analysis, far from being isolated, was part of a growing chorus of Marxian and (particularly radical) feminist critiques of postmodernism in the 1990s: Jamieson (1991), Callinicos (1991), and Eagleton (1996) being examples of the former and Frye (1990), Brodribb (1992), and indeed Delphy (1995) being examples of the latter. Delphy's critique focused on the peculiar transatlantic construction of a mythical “French feminism” that was deemed to be synonymous with postmodernism and the very psychonanalysis of which Delphy herself had been so critical in the 1970s (see also Moses 1996; Winter 1997).
Hennessy and Ingraham's choice of Stabile's article to close an anthology that is characterized as much by its heterogeneity as by any consensual political understanding of “materialist feminism” seems to reflect a political and theoretical stance taken by the editors – and even more so when considered as a closing bookend of the “Archive” to complement Benston's “political economy of women's liberation” on which it opened. The context of publication of the anthology was indeed the “postmodern logic of late capitalism,” to paraphrase the title of Jamieson's well‐known critique, and it seemed at that time that feminism in the academy was becoming further and further removed from the actual lived experience of women, in both its analysis and its increasingly hermetic forms of expression. Hennessy and Ingraham's anthology, then, can be seen as an attempt both to engage with the postmodern air du temps (fashion) and with black, Third World, and lesbian critiques of early second‐wave Western feminism, and to push back against the discursive deconstruction (to use postmodern scholarship's own vocabulary) of any analysis of the material realities of social relations. Core to that push‐back was a need to recenter the discussion around the socieconomic situation of women, however located in terms of class, race, sexuality, and geopolitics, under a capitalist order that was very far from being in its “late” stages. On the contrary, it had managed not only to renew and strengthen itself in a world that it had “globalized,” but indeed to find new intellectual, cultural, and ideological justifications that were attractive to a certain liberal middle‐class intelligentsia.
Two decades on, the debates Hennessy and Ingraham reopened remain acutely current, whether we are talking about differences among women and ensuing challenges for collective struggle, or the sorts of “idealism” (in a Marxian sense), intellectual elitism, assimilationism and individualistic identity‐difference politics that Delphy, Bunch, Smith,
