positions press

Date: July 30, 2024
Focus: Socialist Feminism in Post-Socialist China and Nancy Fraser’s Critical Framework

Core Readings Discussed

• Beverley Best: “Wages for Housework Redux: Social Reproduction and the Utopian Dialectic of the Value-Form”
  (2021).
• Nancy Fraser: “Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode: For an Expanded Conception of Capitalism” (2014).
• Nancy Fraser: “Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History” (2009).
• Nicola Spakowski: “Social Feminism in Postsocialist China” (2018).
• Angela Xiao Wu & Yige Dong: “What is Made-in-China Feminism(s)? Gender Discontent and Class Friction in
  Post-Socialist China” (2019).

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Key Scholarly Presentations

Nicola Spakowski: Socialist Feminism in
Postsocialist China (2018)

Spakowski’s analysis centers on the emergence of socialist feminism in post-socialist China since the 2010s,
examining the complex relationship between second-wave feminism and capitalism. A central insight emerges from
Song Shaopeng’s observation that “gender and neoliberalism arrived at the same time—not a coincidence.” This
temporal convergence reveals an unconscious but systematic complicity between feminist discourse and neoliberal
economic transformation.

Key Historical Context:

• Deng Xiaoping’s emphasis on family as a social institution capable of bearing eldercare responsibilities.
• Mass layoffs of female workers (女工下岗) coinciding with renewed emphasis on gender difference rather than
  equality.
• The enthusiastic embrace of “gender” (性别) studies in women’s research circles.
• The smooth translation and reception of gender concepts through discussions of women’s domestic labor and
  reproduction.

Spakowski identifies this as “unconscious complicity”—not intentional conspiracy but structural alignment between
feminist discourse and neoliberal restructuring.

Angela Xiao Wu & Yige Dong: What is Made-in-China Feminism(s)? (2019)

Dong’s intervention, initiated around 2014 before the Feminist Five incident, addresses critical backlash against
Chinese feminism as primarily urban, middle-class, and performative. Her innovative approach returns to political
economy to understand these critiques structurally rather than dismissively.

Methodological Innovation:

• Rejection of intersectionality framework due to its tendency to pit different classes against each other.
• Conceptualization of women from different classes as “two sides of one coin facing the same structural
  oppression.”
• Identification of the state as the primary perpetrator of gender-based oppression.

Contemporary Analysis: Dong identifies two key trends in contemporary Chinese feminism:

1. Women entering marriage for economic purposes while appropriating romantic discourse.
2. Women refusing marriage and childbearing entirely.

The rise of “大女主” (powerful female protagonist) culture in popular media represents a dismissal of traditional
romantic conventions in favor of career-focused narratives.

Critical Engagement with Nancy Fraser

Theoretical Limitations and Methodological Concerns

Fabio Lanza raised fundamental questions about Fraser’s Marxist credentials, arguing that her
division between economic and non-economic spheres undermines analytical coherence. The critique centers not on
Fraser’s self-identification as Marxist, but on whether her analytical framework sustains Marxist insights about
capitalism as a totality of social relations.

Tani Barlow highlighted Fraser’s problematic universalization of “Second Wave” feminism,
questioning whose second wave Fraser references and challenging the assumption that this periodization applies
globally. Barlow’s intervention exposes Fraser’s “First World” centrism and her reproduction of the very
hierarchies she claims to critique.

Rebecca Karl emphasized that while Fraser’s Marxist identity matters less than her analytical
claims, the adequacy of her theoretical framework remains questionable, particularly her reliance on
“financialized capitalism” as a periodizing concept without sufficient historical development.

Historical and Geographical Specificity

Zou Yun noted Fraser’s frequent invocation of “financialized capitalism” without adequate
definition, suggesting Fraser “piggybacks on Harvey” without developing her own historical analysis.

Yige Dong identified a crucial irony: “by offering periodization while arguing for ‘struggles,’
[Fraser] actually reifies the idea that historical subjectivities can be reduced to (mislabeled) ‘modes’ of
political economy.”

The Problem of Abstraction and Concrete Analysis

Cynthia Yuan Gao provided important context about socialist feminists’ strategic alliances with
liberal feminists, noting that these were understood as intermediate rather than final positions. This nuances
Fraser’s critique of second-wave feminism’s alleged complicity with neoliberalism.

Benjamin Kindler situated Fraser within the contemporary “fetish and hype around Polanyi amongst
Anglophone soft leftists,” identifying her approach with a problematic return to culture as “authenticity and
belonging”—what Kindler and Lanza recognized as potentially fascistic.

Innovative Theoretical Interventions

Beyond Fraser: Alternative Frameworks

Beverley Best’s Contribution: The discussion highlighted Best’s superior analysis of abstraction
in labor relations and the transformation of labor stripped of cultural content. Best’s focus on
subsumption rather than Fraser’s embedding offers a more historically grounded
approach to understanding capitalism’s relationship to social reproduction.

Gabriel Solis noted that Best’s “boundary struggle” might be better understood as “class
struggle,” with financialization representing Marx’s “rising organic composition of capital” rather than requiring
new theoretical formulations.

Dialectical vs. Binary Thinking

Critical Innovation: The group identified capitalism itself as a “binary machine” (Barlow), with
important implications for understanding Fraser’s framework.

Zou Yun and Fabio Lanza distinguished dialectics from binary opposition, noting
that dialectics represents the overcoming of binary thinking rather than its reinforcement. This connects to
Mao’s methodological approach, which uses binary constructions strategically but ultimately
displaces them through dialectical analysis.

Subsumption and Historical Mediation

Rebecca Karl clarified subsumption as concerning “historical forms of mediation: of economic and
social and cultural forms,” not merely labor relations.

Angie Baecker and Tani Barlow expanded this to understand subsumption as the
process through which capitalism takes root in specific places, breaking down the artificial separation between
“culture” and “economics.”

Chinese Context and Revolutionary Practice

Historical Specificities

Benjamin Kindler introduced crucial analysis of Yan’an period practices, particularly the
problem of 变工 (seasonal cooperative labor) within New Democratic rather than socialist
frameworks. This raises questions about refunctioning pre-existing cooperative forms for revolutionary
transformation.

The discussion of 柳青’s novel 种谷记 illustrates tensions between familial and cooperative labor
organization during revolutionary transition periods.

Contemporary Challenges

Language and Concept Translation: The group addressed why Chinese discourse emphasizes
男女平等 (male-female equality) rather than 性别公正 (gender justice), noting that
地位 (status/position) proves more effective in revolutionary discourse for elevating women’s
position.

Living vs. Theoretical Feminism: A crucial distinction emerged between “理念中的女性主义” (feminism in
theory) and “生活中的女性主义” (feminism in lived practice), emphasizing the need to return to concrete social conditions
of the 1950s and their utopian imagination of new society.

Critical Reflection

Question: If Fraser’s abstraction cannot be applied to Chinese contexts, why does her
work generate such enthusiasm and application, paralleling earlier reception of “gender” concepts?

Proposed Explanations:

1. Fraser addresses the relationship between feminism and transnational capitalist feminism.
2. Methodological appeal for reconstructing political-economic-cultural analysis.
3. Need for more adequate historical contextualization of theoretical frameworks.

Jieming Zhu observed that contemporary Chinese “use” of Fraser may have little connection to
Fraser’s textual details, suggesting a productive disjuncture between theoretical reception and local application.

Date: August 13, 2024
Focus: Marx, Engels, and Contemporary Feminist Theory

Core Readings Discussed

Classical Marxist Texts:

• Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884): Preface & Ch. II/Part 4 “The Monogamian Family”.
• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848): “Bourgeois and Proletarians” & “Proletarians and Communists”.

Contemporary Critical Interventions:

• Holly Lewis, The Politics of Everybody: Feminism, Queer Theory, and Marxism at the Intersection (2022).
• M. E. O’Brien, Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care (2023).
• Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (2013).

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Key Scholarly Interventions and Arguments

The Problem of Prostitution as Metaphor

Gabriel Solis raised questions about Marx and Engels’ use of prostitution as the primary metaphor for women’s oppression, noting the “problematic” nature of certain “intellectual inheritances” while maintaining hope that “all wage labor ends in communism.” This observation sparked broader discussion about whether such metaphorical frameworks remain analytically useful or require fundamental revision.

Jieming Zhu concurred, arguing that the agenda should focus on “ending wage labor” broadly rather than singling out prostitution, suggesting a more universalist approach to labor critique that doesn’t exceptionally categorize sex work.

Translation and Interpretive Frameworks

Benjamin Kindler introduced insights about translation politics, particularly regarding the Chinese term 资产阶级法权 (bourgeois legal rights), which gets “retranslated as 资产阶级权利,” highlighting how interpretive shifts occur through linguistic mediation. This observation extends beyond mere translation to encompass how theoretical concepts transform across cultural and historical contexts.

Tani Barlow offered an analogy to American constitutional interpretation: “I always try to make analogies and the one I go to is Originalism in the US Constitution. As the actual situations change in national politics the ways in which the ‘constitution’ is configured also change. Most citizens here have never read the Constitution — they know private property and guns.” This framework suggests that Marxist texts function similarly to constitutional documents, with their practical interpretation shifting according to contemporary political exigencies.

Methodological Innovation: Beyond Developmental Narratives

Harlan Chambers emphasized the importance of understanding “the weaknesses of ‘development in time’ arguments,” advocating for analytical approaches that don’t rely on linear historical progression. This methodological critique challenges traditional Marxist historical materialism’s teleological assumptions.

Tani Barlow supported this position, noting that archaeological evidence reveals “relatively little division of labor” in so-called primitive societies, contradicting Engels’ developmental schema. She emphasized that such work constitutes “civilizational anthropology” rather than history proper, suggesting fundamental categorical distinctions in how we approach these materials.

The Question of the Lumpenproletariat

Gabriel Solis inquired about alternative assessments of the lumpenproletariat, noting that most encounters involve “very negative assessments; as the part of the negation of the negation that is going to betray you in an alley somewhere.” This question opens space for reconsidering Marx’s class analysis beyond traditional productive/unproductive labor distinctions.

Contemporary Feminist Theoretical Interventions

The discussion of Vogel, Lewis, and O’Brien revealed several theoretical developments:

On Reproductive Labor and Material Base:

• Engels’ claim that working-class men’s oppression of women lacks material foundation was challenged through attention to women’s reproductive labor as men’s “private property.”
• The connection between O’Brien’s analysis of social reproduction crisis and Fraser’s “crisis of care” framework was identified as particularly generative.

On Subject Formation: Holly Lewis’s intervention was noted for its emphasis on historical subject creation: “Subjects are created historically and the people who can create the subjects are us,” pointing toward a more active, constructive approach to revolutionary subjectivity that incorporates queer theoretical insights about binary abolition.

Chinese Revolutionary Context

Several participants drew on Chinese revolutionary experience to complicate theoretical abstractions:

• Discussion of 二流子改造 (reform of social parasites) including opium addiction and sex work with 女二流子 (women social parasites).
• References to the Cultural Revolution’s end and subsequent “scar literature” as examples of both revolutionary and counter-revolutionary possibilities in social reproduction transformation.
• The Taiping Rebellion and 1940s border city refugee experiences as historical precedents for alternative family forms.

Innovative Theoretical Syntheses

Benjamin Kindler highlighted the significance of Russian commune (Mir) discussions in opening possibilities for “revolutions in underdeveloped countries,” connecting agrarian communalism to broader revolutionary strategy. This historical insight suggests alternative developmental pathways beyond Western industrial models.

The group’s engagement with Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy (referenced via Verso Books link) indicates interest in contemporary aesthetic and temporal critiques of capitalism that might inform family abolition strategies.

Points of Theoretical Novelty

1. Translation as Theoretical Practice: The recognition that conceptual transformation occurs through linguistic mediation, requiring attention to how terms like 资产阶级法权 (bourgeois legal rights) carry different analytical possibilities across languages and contexts.

2. Constitutional Analogy for Marxist Interpretation: Barlow’s framework suggesting that Marxist texts function like constitutional documents, with their practical meaning shifting according to contemporary political requirements rather than fixed textual meaning.

3. Archaeological Critique of Developmental Schema: The use of contemporary archaeological evidence to challenge Engels’ assumptions about primitive social organization, suggesting more fundamental methodological problems with developmental approaches.

4. Reproductive Labor as Property Relation: The reframing of gender oppression not merely as ideological superstructure but as fundamental property relation involving women’s reproductive capacity.

5. Queer Marxist Subject Formation: Lewis’s emphasis on active historical construction of revolutionary subjects through binary abolition, moving beyond traditional class-based identity categories.

Date: August 26, 2024
Focus: Kollontai, O’Brien, and the Question of Women’s Labor Under Socialism

Core Readings Discussed

• Alexandra Kollontai: “Love of Worker Bees” (1923).
• Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai: Translated with an introduction and commentaries by Alix Holt (Lawrence Hill and Company, Westport, Connecticut) (1977).
• Michael Hardt: “Red Love” (2017).
• M.E. O’Brien: Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care (2023).
• “Make Way for Winged Arrows” & “Three Generations” + Michael Hardt’s introduction.

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Part I: Kollontai and the Question of Women’s Labor Under Socialism

The Value Problem in Social Reproduction

The discussion opened with an examination of Kollontai’s thesis on communist morality and its eugenic implications—a concern that extends to figures like Margaret Sanger and reflects broader early 20th-century anxieties about reproduction and social value. The central question emerged: How is value constituted under socialism?

Kollontai’s historical argument: The group identified a tension in Kollontai’s work regarding whether family labor produces value. As one participant noted, Kollontai argues that “women’s [labor] is becoming unproductive for the community” and “the family is ceasing to be necessary either to its members or to the nation as a whole” (253, 255). However, her reliance on European feudalism as a historical reference point was critiqued as potentially fantastical—”We do not know. Was feudalism like that? Was women’s labor ever productive?”

Innovative Theoretical Interventions

The wage-value distinction: An insight emerged regarding Kollontai’s market-based understanding of value production. The discussion revealed that for Kollontai, reproductive labor becomes value-producing when it enters wage relations. As summarized by participants: “If you get a wage for participating in the circle of reproduction then you are producing value.” This applies even to domestic labor when performed by care workers under capitalism.

Jieming Zhu’s contribution: “Kollontai argued that housework was ‘unproductive’ under capitalism” but becomes productive when commodified—leading to the equation “Full Restaurant Now = Communist Canteens.”

Critical Limitations and Contemporary Relevance

The group identified several problems with Kollontai’s framework:

1. Subsumption Theory Gaps: Kollontai assumes capitalism has already “undercut the productive capacity of the family,” but historical evidence suggests domestic production for markets remained common in both rural and urban contexts.

2. The Pleasure Factor: A theoretical insight emerged around what cannot be commodified. The discussion highlighted that “there is pleasure in hospitality and in being pregnant or even beautification of the home. The pleasure factor is important.” This suggests that even within value systems, we don’t completely abandon domestic sphere pleasures.

3. Beyond Capitalist Value Logic: The group questioned whether thinking in terms of value/non-value categories means “we are still thinking as capitalists.” The challenge is developing new analytical tools beyond capitalism’s critique for speculating about post-capitalist futures.

M.E. O’Brien’s Feminist Critique

O’Brien’s intervention moved beyond strict value/non-productive distinctions by theorizing the family form in movement time, reconstruction time, various kinds of in-motion temporalities. The critique addresses how solving economic problems doesn’t resolve alienation—Kollontai’s professionalized parenthood vision fails to account for “the pleasure that all parents feel in raising their own children, not just children in the abstract.”

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Part II: Literary Analysis – “Three Generations” and the Evolution of Love

Narrative Structure and Generational Politics

The discussion of Kollontai’s fiction engaged with form and content. The epistolary structure and shift in narrative perspectives “illustrates the broadening of the perspective” beyond individual experience.

The Three Generations Story

• First generation: Divorce/romantic love.
• Second generation: Polyamory.
• Third generation: Freedom from romantic love.

Theoretical Innovation: Decathected Love

An insight emerged around the delinking of romance from sex and from specific persons. As the discussion noted: “The issue is that she has sex as sex but not romanticized sex. In both assigned stories the issue is that ‘love’ is no longer cathected to a person. It has been decathected and broadened out into social relationships.”

Ben Kindler’s contribution: Drew connections to Ding Ling’s trope of the 知己 (zhiji, intimate friend/soulmate) as “a non-kinship model of intimate relationality,” expanding the theoretical framework beyond Western paradigms.

The Lenin Problem: Communist Mourning and Desire

The group grappled with the ending where Lenin becomes an object of love and desire. As Harlan Chambers noted: “the Lenin point…is both deeply political and loving as a coming-into-politics [with] the narrative text itself culminating with Lenin as an articulation of love.”

This raises unresolved questions about communist mourning practices and their desiring dimensions—a theoretical gap requiring further investigation.

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Part III: Contemporary Implications and Future Directions

Beyond the Heterosexual Matrix

Despite the visions presented, the group observed that “nothing has destabilized the heterosexual matrix. All of the issues that Kollontai raises have come to pass but it has not broken the back of heteronormativity.”

Alternative Social Forms

Tani Barlow’s historical examples: The discussion expanded to consider existing non-household bases for social reproduction, from refugee communities in Houston to prison accommodations for female inmates and female factory dormitories as narrative topoi.

Yige Dong’s cultural reference: Mentioned 自梳女 (zishu nü, self-combing women)—a historical Chinese practice of women who chose not to marry, creating alternative kinship networks.

Untheorized Forms of Love

A theoretical gap was identified regarding multiple forms of love beyond romantic coupling: “Team love, class love, homosocial love, comradeship. These all require our attention, because we can describe them.” The group emphasized that friendship involving love has been insufficiently theorized, despite its potential for creating alternative social bonds.

Insight: “Moving and erotic and friendship relations which DL [Ding Ling] describes, intimacy beyond and which can be recalled in fiction years after the intense experience itself.”

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Methodological Innovations and Theoretical Contributions

Beyond Value Theory

The group reached a consensus that the labor theory of value, as a critique of capitalism, cannot provide sufficient conceptual tools for speculating about post-capitalist futures. The challenge is developing “more accurate” analytical tools beyond capitalism’s logic.

Affective Labor and Recognition

Jieming Zhu introduced the concept of “affective labor” to describe the pleasure elements in reproductive work, while questioning: “What might be the mechanism of communist ‘recognition’?”

Ben Kindler’s response: “You can’t have any mechanism of recognition that interpellates the individual as an individual labourer. They have to be a cog in a vast mass.”

Historicizing Romantic Love

Yige Dong’s contribution: Appreciated feminist sociologists’ work (e.g., Stephanie Coontz) that historicizes romantic love under capitalism. It makes this seemingly absolute ethos of late 20th century so relative—showing that it’s just a fleeting moment in history.

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Conclusions and Ongoing Questions

The reading group identified several areas requiring further theoretical development:

1. Post-Capitalist Social Forms: How to theorize beyond value relations while accounting for pleasure, subject-making, and aesthetic experiences.

2. Alternative Kinship Models: Learning from historical and contemporary examples of non-nuclear family arrangements.

3. The Loveification of Social Relations: Moving beyond individual frameworks toward collective forms of care and intimacy.

4. Crisis and State Projects: How emergency conditions shape labor productivity theories and social experimentation.

As the group concluded, “Social relations require rigorous conceptual work! This is also ‘politics.’ Post-capitalist utopias are fantasies and also perhaps dangerous.” The challenge remains developing theoretical frameworks adequate to both critique existing conditions and imagine genuinely transformative alternatives.

Date: September 29, 2024
Focus: Gayle Rubin, Monique Wittig, John D’Emilio (“Powers of Desire”)

Core Readings Discussed

• John D’Emilio: “Capitalism and Gay Identity” (1983).
• Karla Jay and Allen Young (eds.): Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation (1972).
• Gayle Rubin: “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex” (1975).
• Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries materials.
• Monique Wittig: The Straight Mind: And Other Essays (1992).

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I. Gayle Rubin: The Traffic in Women and Sex/Gender Systems

Theoretical Contributions

The discussion opened with Mindy Smith’s observation that Rubin’s foundational essay continues to generate new insights decades after publication, particularly in its synthesis of Marxist and psychoanalytic frameworks. The central unresolved question—why women rather than men become objects of exchange in kinship systems—remains a generative theoretical problem.

Jieming Zhu positioned Rubin’s intervention as an ambitious attempt to theorize the oppression of both women and sexual minorities simultaneously, arguing that gendered divisions of labor depend on the production of specifically gendered and sexed persons. Notably, Rubin’s vision extends beyond traditional socialist feminism (Engels, Kollontai) toward a “genderless and classless society.”

The Question of Marxist Feminism

A debate emerged regarding Rubin’s relationship to Marxism. Tani Barlow argued that Rubin’s most liberating insight lies in conceptualizing sex/gender as a system where “bodies themselves do not matter”—sex does not inhere in individual bodies but operates through the reproduction of modes of subjectivity that vary across societies and histories. This analysis effectively “lifts sex away from the body.”

Fabio Lanza defended Rubin’s Marxist credentials, noting her deployment of Marx and Engels and her parallel critique to Marx’s analysis of classical political economy. However, Su Laoshi distinguished Rubin’s approach from conventional political economy, emphasizing her focus on the exchange of women and structural analysis of kinship relations rather than traditional economic categories.

The Body Problem

The discussion revealed ongoing tensions around materiality and embodiment. Mindy Smith repeatedly pressed the question: “but the body is still there—how do we account for materiality whilst also holding onto the inscription of the body?” This generated a complex exchange:

• Zou Yun questioned whether natural dimensions (testosterone) should be given significance.
• Ben Kindler noted that while Rubin theoretically acknowledges pre-social sexuality, “there’s a sense in which it doesn’t matter, not least because it cannot be known.”
• Tani Barlow argued that Rubin’s intervention in Morgan/Engels debates, invoking Althusserian interpellation, shows how boundary-making emerges historically (citing foot-binding in classical China as example).

Scientific and Materialist Dimensions

Jieming Zhu observed that this generation of feminists, including Rubin, fails to adequately address biological questions—a gap filled only later by feminist science studies (Haraway). Mindy Smith noted the paradox that even modern molecular biology renders traditional concepts of sex “untenable,” yet socially “we are attached to the notion of the body even after the interventions of feminism science scholars.”

Su Laoshi highlighted Rubin’s distinctive contribution to Marxist feminism: while traditional Marxist feminism focuses solely on social dimensions, Rubin introduces “the bodily dimension (physical-psychoanalytical).”

II. Monique Wittig: Materialism, Language, and the Lesbian Subject

The Question of Subjectivity

Tani Barlow contextualized Wittig’s 1978 MLA intervention, noting her accessibility through English publication and dialogue with Adrienne Rich. Wittig’s central provocation—that Marxism has denied oppressed classes “the attribute of being a subject”—connects to broader questions of praxis and queer politics.

The famous declaration “a lesbian is not a woman” generated theoretical debate:

• Feifan interpreted this as showing how “the system of language perpetuates the system of violence against lesbian and gay people,” with lesbians falling outside the category of “alarm and defence” that defines women.
• Mindy Smith countered that “lesbians cannot but be women because they cannot emerge outside of the catachresis that is woman.”
• Tani Barlow framed these texts as interventions around “the eventality of women”—where the expansion, interrogation, or closure of the category “woman” becomes a matter of politics.

Language, Materiality, and Violence

Jieming Zhu highlighted Wittig’s insight about ideology and materialism: the term “ideology” risks reducing power operations to mere ideas, obscuring the role of violence. For Wittig, “ideology has a material existence.”

Angie Baecker pressed questions of causation: if discourse produces oppression through misrecognition or discursive violence, what broader system generates this violence? Does gender exist independently or function within capitalism?

Contemporary Resonances

Zou Yun introduced the contemporary 6B4T movement (originating in South Korea, spreading to China), asking whether women who refuse sexual/romantic relationships with men should be considered “women.” This connected to:

• Mindy Smith’s discussion of “not-yet moments of utopian imagination.”
• Jieming Zhu’s location of Wittig within a lineage including Adrienne Rich’s “lesbian continuum,” though noting political lesbians’ stronger attachment to the category “women” compared to Wittig’s more radical catachresis.
• Pei’er’s analysis of 6B4T as an organizing tool, questioning whose interests invocations of difference serve.

III. John D’Emilio: Capitalism and Sexual Freedom

Marxist Approaches to Sexuality

Jieming Zhu positioned D’Emilio’s work as an early Marxist approach to queer sexualities within queer studies, emphasizing sexualities as products of modernity. Unlike Foucault’s focus on sexual science, Marxist analysis locates sexuality within family and wage-labor structures.

Tani Barlow noted D’Emilio’s interest in social terrains beyond the family, questioning whether capitalist forces shape entire social fields rather than focusing solely on familial structures.

The Capitalism-Freedom Dialectic

Feifan observed D’Emilio’s explanation of gay identity’s origins in capitalism, raising questions about capitalism’s ability to account for broader epistemic shifts.

Jieming Zhu highlighted D’Emilio’s analysis of social spaces enabled by capitalism existing outside heterosexual family structures, examining “the limited, contradictory forms of freedom that capitalism produces.”

Critical tensions emerged around this analysis:

• Pei’er questioned freedom’s distribution under capitalism, noting capitalism’s reliance on family structures even as families lose productive roles.
• Zou Yun resisted totalizing explanations: “not everything is about capitalism.”
• Pei’er responded that beginning from capitalism reflects our dominant social form.

Jieming Zhu warned that theorizing capitalism’s liberatory potential risks ignoring capitalist oppression, particularly noting how arguments about wage-labor opening sexual freedom primarily benefit “waged white men” while ignoring “queer black subjects.”

IV. Methodological and Theoretical Innovations

Interdisciplinary Synthesis

The discussion revealed synthetic approaches across the texts:

1. Rubin’s Integration: Combining Marxist political economy with psychoanalytic and anthropological insights.
2. Wittig’s Linguistic Materialism: Theorizing language and semiotics as material forces rather than mere ideological representations.
3. D’Emilio’s Historical Materialism: Applying Marxist analysis to sexuality and identity formation.

Temporal and Historical Questions

Jieming Zhu noted temporal distinctions in Rubin’s work: psycho-sexual cultures endure over different temporalities than those addressed by Social Reproduction Theory (SRT), requiring attention to women’s oppression before capitalism.

Tani Barlow emphasized how Rubin’s deployment of Althusserian interpellation addresses the historical conditions under which different forms of subject formation emerge.

The Form/Content Problem

Ben Kindler raised questions about writing forms—creative, manifesto, “écriture féminine”—arguing that “the category/event of women is not prior to the process of writing about it/her.”

V. Unresolved Theoretical Tensions

The Materiality Question

Despite discussion, the relationship between materiality, biology, and social construction remains contentious. Tani Barlow’s reference to contemporary biological research showing sex determination as “down to the molecular level of DNA and RNA and even there it is not determinative because sex hormones and DNA act in concert, in a kind of dance together” complicates simple nature/culture distinctions.

Political Implications

Tani Barlow noted that “the people who make the most radical thesis arguments may not turn out to be those with the greatest body of evidence to support those arguments. But interventions of this kind can also open up new horizons of thinking.”

This observation captures the tension between theoretical rigor and political imagination that runs throughout all three texts and their contemporary reception.

VI. Chat Discussion Highlights

The synchronous chat revealed additional scholarly context:

• Linda Zerilli’s research on Wittig’s disillusionment with écriture féminine and difference feminism.
• Firestone’s contrasting position that women’s oppression IS rooted in biology, requiring the “remaking of biology/nature.”
• Contemporary biological research deconstructing sex categories at molecular levels.
• Recommendations for Stone Butch Blues as “beautiful trans-Marxist memoir” connecting to theoretical discussions. Zou Yun added that “Stone Butch Blues is a beautiful trans-Marxist memoir.”

Date: November 10, 2024
Focus: Federici, Dalla Costa, and Weeks on Domestic Labor and Capitalist Reproduction

Core Readings Discussed

• Mariarosa Dalla Costa: “Women and the Subversion of the Community” (2019).
• Silvia Federici: Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (2012).
• Selma James: Sex, Race, and Class: The Perspective of Winning (2012).
• Kathi Weeks: The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics (2011).

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Concepts and Themes

Wages for Housework Movement

The discussion opened with recognition of Federici and Dalla Costa’s approach to housework as a site of class struggle. Dong highlighted two dimensions: first, the positioning of housewives as central figures in capitalist analysis, and second, the articulation of class projects through gender integration. This represents a departure from traditional Marxist analysis that relegated domestic labor to the margins of economic theory.

Zhu identified tensions within the framework, noting the relationship between factory labor and domestic work, and how contemporary women must navigate both productive and reproductive labor. This observation points to the intensification of women’s labor under late capitalism, where the boundaries between waged and unwaged work become increasingly blurred.

Revolutionary Demands and Strategic Provocations

A discussed aspect was the movement’s strategic demand for housework wages rather than against housework itself. Angie emphasized this as “a very unique gesture to open conversations,” recognizing how this rhetorical move reframes the debate around domestic labor’s value and visibility.

Tani situated this within the context of symbolic practices and linguistic interventions, arguing that the importance lies not merely in economic demands but in the work of “making feminism a case” through sloganeering and discursive strategies.

Zou connected this to subject formation, noting how making such demands becomes “a way to empower people and to build a subject” through “powerful education.” This insight reveals the pedagogical dimensions of political organizing, where demands function as consciousness-raising tools rather than merely economic negotiations.

Intersectionality and Multiple Oppressions

Radical Roots of Intersectional Analysis

Feifan noted the insight that “homosexuality and heterosexuality are working conditions,” showing how the theorists understood sexuality not as personal identity but as structurally determined by capitalist relations of production.

Yige provided historical context, noting that 1970s intersectionality had “very radical roots, not like today’s liberal wash.” The scholar emphasized how gender, class, and race were understood as articulating oppressions together in ways that were “functional to capitalism” rather than as separate systems of oppression.

Expanding the Working Class

Yihui highlighted how these theorists expanded “the line of the working class to solve the problem in the labor movement” by incorporating housewives and other unwaged laborers. This challenged orthodox Marxist definitions of the proletariat and opened new possibilities for organizing.

Jimmy pushed this analysis further by noting how the concept of housewives included “the elderly, disabled, and all other kinds of so-called unproductive labor,” raising questions about how we categorize different forms of care work, including sexuality and childbearing.

Critical Tensions and Debates

Conservative Implications

Zhu questioned why the movement remained “sticking to the family struggle” rather than proposing alternatives to domestic arrangements. Zhu further argued that “the demand somehow is conservative” in its implicit acceptance of existing family structures.

Tani contextualized this concern historically, noting that “Marxism has no place for that kind of woman during the period of the Cold War” and that the naturalization of housewives was “historically determined.” This highlights how theoretical innovations must be understood within their specific historical moments.

State, Market, and Alternative Arrangements

Chang identified a dilemma regarding who would provide domestic labor if not housewives, asking whether solutions lay in “state provision or commodification.” This question reveals tensions between different feminist strategies for addressing reproductive labor.

Angie pursued the question of free versus unfree labor within marriage, asking whether entering marriage transforms women’s status or whether marriage itself constitutes a form of unfree labor arrangement.

Zouyun introduced the dimension of love and affect, questioning “how does love become free or unfree by entering into the family” and whether these discussions remain confined within productive/unproductive frameworks.

Theoretical Interventions

Labor and Value Theory

Ping argued that “in Marxism, all labor is unfree” and that demanding wages for housework reveals the unfree nature of all labor under capitalism. This scholar emphasized how domestic labor contributes to capitalist production by understanding “society as a productive unit.”

Peier noted that the theorists didn’t adequately address “the family as an institution in capital reproduction” and raised questions about conflicts between working-class women and men with different interests.

Anti-Work and Basic Income

The discussion of Kathi Weeks introduced dimensions around anti-work politics and basic income proposals. Zou Yun questioned how to understand basic income’s viability, while Ping characterized it as “a provocative plan, not a financial demand” that could “lead to some revolution within the family.”

Jimmy situated Weeks within “autonomous Marxism tradition” while noting her attempts to address domestic work issues. Chang highlighted basic income’s potential to “decrease the importance of marriage due to economic issues” while raising concerns about unintended consequences.

Yige framed basic income as “a point of departure to imagine something different, especially in a late capitalist environment,” comparing it to Marx’s utopian communist proposals as a “collective demand, political and promising.”

Contemporary Relevance and Critiques

Beyond Liberal Intersectionality

The scholars engaged with how these 1970s insights relate to contemporary feminist politics. Tani noted the difference between the collective work of the second wave and constructed historical narratives, emphasizing how these theorists “raise the problems of domestic work” as feminist issues.

Several participants noted tensions between the anti-family implications of the analysis and cultural attachments to family structures. Zou Yun, speaking from an Asian perspective, questioned American cultural conservatism around family while noting how “the more capitalist, the more they need family.”

Scale and Implementation

Yige raised questions about scale and subjectivity, asking “what kind of scale, and what kind of subjectivity that we imagine” when considering alternatives to current arrangements. This points to challenges in translating theoretical insights into practical political programs.

Angie highlighted evidence from Universal Basic Income pilots showing increased divorce rates and women’s ability to leave abusive relationships, demonstrating the material impacts of economic independence.

Methodological and Disciplinary Insights

Historical Materialist Feminism

The discussion showed how these theorists innovated within Marxist methodology by centering reproduction alongside production. Ping noted how they “revolutionize the concept of value” by insisting on recognizing domestic work as socially necessary labor.

Jimmy emphasized the choice to focus on “housework but not housewives,” indicating a structural rather than identitarian approach to gender analysis.

Critique of Socialist Feminism

Jimmy noted the theorists’ “critique of socialist feminism, collectivization, and the state’s centralization,” raising questions about alternatives like “public canteen and daycare in a socialist society” without finding clear answers in the texts.

Conclusions and Ongoing Questions

The discussion concluded with recognition of both the theoretical innovations and practical limitations of these works. Scholars noted how the texts opened new analytical possibilities while sometimes falling short of providing concrete alternatives to existing arrangements.

Tani and Yige emphasized the continued relevance of these works for anti-capitalist politics, particularly their insights into how capitalism requires and shapes intimate relations. The conversation highlighted tensions between critiques of family structures and the material realities that make family arrangements necessary for survival under current conditions.