Materialist Feminisms

Abstract

This chapter explores the historical and to some extent parallel and even conflictual development of three main understandings of materialist feminism. The first is that developed by Christine Delphy and subsequently others in France in the 1970s (“French materialist feminism”), the second is that developed during the same period in the UK (“British materialist feminism”), and the third is that developed by Rosemary Hennessy, Chrys Ingraham, and some others in the United States in the 1990s (“US materialist feminism”). Although all three positioned themselves quite explicitly in relation to Marxism, and adapted Marx's historical materialism to explain male domination as grounded in material relations, they differed from both Marxist feminism and each other in their analysis. Common to all strands, however, was the premise that gender is not natural or presocial but socially constructed through history as a material power relation. Gender, and the relationship of male domination that underpins it, are historically constructed and grounded in social relations, and are thus not fixed, but open to interrogation and change. All three differ, however, from postmodernism or Butlerian social-constructivism (which also interrogate gender as open to change) in that they foreground the material (including economic), structural, and ideological rather than (only) discursive or cultural underpinnings of these social relations.

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