Bryson, Valerie, Professor

By Stine Adrian on 28 Aug | 0 comments

Valerie Bryson is Professor of Politics at University of Huddersfield, UK.

GEXCEL PROJECT AUTUMN 2007
From Making Tools to Making Love: Marx, Materialism and Feminist Thought

My paper is premised on a number of linked assumptions: that unequal power relationships between women and men are real, important and unjust; that the goal of feminist theory should be to expose and understand oppressive gender relationships in order to contest them; that a woman-centred application of Marx’s thought can be an important aid to feminist understanding and political practice; and that such an application logically displaces ‘production’ as the sole or central category of analysis.

Focussing initially on Anna Jonasdottir’s development of Marx’s method and her claim that the material basis of men’s power and women’s oppression involves sexuality/love power as well as work/political economy, the paper agrees that male power is not based solely in economic relations and that sexuality, based on unequal exchanges of care and pleasure, constitutes a key site of women’s oppression in contemporary Western societies. It further argues that the material basis of society encompasses wider relationships of caring and nurturing that cannot be reduced to either production or sexuality, and suggests that we should see sexuality either as a sub-section of a wider concept of (re)production or as part of a tripartite material basis of production, (re)production and sexuality.

The paper also argues that, whatever the theoretical distinctions, the constantly shifting boundaries and complex causal interconnections between productive, (re)productive and sexual processes and relationships necessitate a multi-dimensional approach to the understanding of women’s oppression and the pursuit of sex equality.  Within this framework, as late capitalist societies are characterised by the increasingly pervasive and overt commodification of sex and the sexualisation of consumption, sexuality is likely to become an increasingly important site of resistance as well as power and oppression.