The lived experience of real abstraction: race, gender and class in contemporary feminist paradigms
In the past twenty years, two concepts from the heyday of the women's movement - social reproduction and intersectionality have found their way back into the centre of feminist debates. Undoubtedly the most popular of these two concepts, 'intersectionality' has not only been hailed as 'the most important theoretical contribution that women's studies, in conjunction with related fields, has made so far,1 it has become the formal identity of gender studies as a discipline, no longer defining itself in terms of gender alone but rather in terms of the inequalities of race, class, gender, sexuality and other categories.2 Though the concept of social reproduction has by no means had the same broad impact, Marxist-feminist frameworks explaining gendered oppression with reference to women's role in reproducing labourpower have indeed undergone a revival with the general renewed interest in Marxism following the financial crisis of 2008-09. We see this resurgent interest in the increase in publications around care and the 'crisis of care', a reinvocation of Marxistfeminism's most infamous proposal, the abolition of the family, and in the development of the social reproduction perspective into a theory and a methodology, with followers referring to themselves as 'social reproduction theorists' and to their theoretical endeavour with the acronym 'SRT'.3
Though oftentimes opposed to one another as 'Marxist' and 'non-Marxist' respectively, the two theoretical frameworks to which these concepts have recently given rise, social reproduction theory and intersectionality theory, have a number of things in common. In so far as they define their object of study not as gender relations or the situation of women but as the interrelations of gender, race, class, ethnicity, sexuality and other categories, both frameworks are symptomatic of a dissolution of 'women' (women as such, women in general, all women) as a unified feminist subject. The initial critical gesture of intersectionality as an intervention in the women's movement of the I960s and i970s was to point out that women do not have shared interests and experiences simply by virtue of being women. In a contemporary context, intersectionality is paradoxically both a paradigm for feminist studies and an immanent critique of gender studies as a discipline. By downplaying gender, 'the identifying focus of the field', in favour of other categories, intersectionality identifies 'the discipline of gender studies by dis-identifying it', as Tuija Pullkinen puts it.4 In contrast to intersectionality, social reproduction theory is not so much an intervention in feminist studies as it is an intervention in Marxist theory. However, similarly to intersectionality, recent social reproduction theory downplays gender, or rather the specifically gendered aspect of reproductive labour - the unpaid labour of the housewife, the specifically gendered subject that was at the centre of I970s' debates around social reproduction - to emphasize multiple sites of social reproduction and a multiplicity of subjects of social reproduction. As Susan Ferguson explains, Lise Vogel's approach in Marxism and the Oppression of Women (1983), which laid the ground for contemporary SRT, 'allows for an expanded and diverse array of potential class subjects: all those who work to (re)produce the lives of workers - whether their labour is paid or unpaid, whether they do so within households, in state institutions, or as community organizers' rather than 'calling unpaid housewives the revolutionary feminist subject'.5
Second, although both intersectionality and social reproduction are transdisciplinary concepts, they have first and foremost been defined and engaged with by sociologists. In their contemporary articulations, intersectionality and social reproduction are primarily methodologies for sociological investigations. While intersectionality investigates 'how intersecting power relations influence social relations across diverse societies as well as individual experiences in everyday life',6 social reproduction theory is defined as 'a methodology to explore labor and labor power under capitalism.7
Third, in contrast to the 'post-structuralist' suspicion towards experience that has marked some areas of feminism in the wake of Joan Scott's I99I essay 'The Evidence of Experience', these frameworks have each in their own way emphasized the need to bring 'lived experience' back into the centre of feminist thought. While intersectionality scholars often emphasize the importance of seeing 'lived experiences as philosophically relevant8 or of including narrative and experience 'as valid sources for claim making,'9 social reproduction scholars call for a re-theorization of 'class as a lived experience, beginning with the acknowledgement that class never exists outside of the other fundamental relations of lived reality (i.e. race, gender, age, ability, etc.).10
In intersectionality theory, the reliance on 'lived experience' appears to be bound up with a commitment to a specific version of standpoint epistemology that sees knowledge as situated and derived from experience. Patricia Hill Collins explains this epistemic orientation in the following way: 'Individuals and groups differently placed within intersecting systems of power have different points of view on their own and others' experiences with complex social inequalities, typically advancing knowledge projects that reflect their social locations within power relations.11 This epistemic orientation seemingly has more in common with Donna Haraway's theory of 'situated knowledges' than it has with Marxist and Marxist-feminist traditions of standpoint epistemology. Whereas theories of standpoint epistemology like those of, for instance, Georg Lukács and Nancy Hartsock were predicated upon the idea of a basic antagonism between oppressor and oppressed that organizes society, the oppressed pole inhabiting an epistemic advantage, the initial critical gesture of intersectionality was to challenge the idea of one basic antagonism and a unified revolutionary subject by emphasizing how women of colour, especially, fall between the cracks of these antagonisms.12 Adding a multiplicity of categories to those of race, class and gender, contemporary intersectionality theory, which is mostly no longer about women of colour specifically, operates with a multiplicity of standpoints, all of which are capable of achieving and producing specific types of knowledge through 'lived experience'.
In social reproduction theory, on the other hand, the invocation of experience as 'lived' appears bound up with a desire to overcome a hyphenated structuralism-functionalism that has, according to critics from within its own ranks, shaped significant work in the tradition of Marxist-feminism. In an effort to overcome a tendency towards reducing subjectivity and experience to mere functions of capitalism's overriding drive to create value, some contemporary scholars stress the need to conceptualize the economy not as a 'thing' or a structure but as a living set of social relations and to turn towards labour, seen as a sensuous, embodied, lived, creative experience.13
In both intersectionality and social reproduction theory 'lived experience' is not so much a concept as it is a floating signifier invoked to underline the viscerality and non-vicariousness of experience; a 'lived experience' is an experience that cannot be communicated but needs to have been lived to be understood. The aspiration towards a theory capable of encapsulating the full complexity of 'lived experience', however, seems to be in tension with a crypto-structuralist tendency in both theoretical strains: while intersectionality theory, on the one hand, seems to rely on a 'subject of lived experience', it simultaneously seems to imply the idea of a subject that is 'an effect' of vectors of oppression, and despite its declared aversion towards an 'Althusserian structuralism-functionalism', social reproduction theorists ground their analysis in the Althusserian theoretical framework developed by Lise Vogel in Marxism and the Oppression of Women. And, despite their craving for a concrete object, manifested in the emphatic insistence on experience as 'lived', as methodologies these two frameworks remain abstract.
The main aim of this essay is to unfold this seeming contradiction. I shall depart from the hypothesis that the signifier 'lived experience' as a point of reference in intersectionality theory is symptomatic of the same anti-abstracting desire that Marina Vishmidt has identified in feminist discourses on the vulnerable body. Just as with the discourse of 'bodies', the discourse of lived experience 'presents us with the possibility of a pseudo-concreteness that often accompanies theoretical projects intolerant of the (real)abstraction that organizes contemporary social life.14 And, just like the vulnerable body, lived experience is an abstraction in thought: it does not consider experience as a concrete unity of many determinations but instead abstracts it from the totality within which it is constituted. With reference to Marx's methodological reflections in the 1857 introduction to the Grundrisse, I shall make an attempt to explain how intersectionality as methodology, by parting from the 'real and concrete', ends up with a chaotic conception of the whole, or in other words becomes abstract. Thereupon, I shall argue that although social reproduction theory provides what intersectionality lacks in explanatory power, the theoretical framework elaborated by Lise Vogel is not capable of providing the concreteness of thought for which contemporary social reproduction theorists seem to be longing. Finally, I briefly sketch an alternative method for understanding the reproduction of gender under capitalism that in moving from the abstract to the concrete seeks to trace the unfolding of gender as a real abstraction.
The pseudo-concreteness of contemporary intersectionality
Almost two decades after the twentieth anniversary of Kimberlé Crenshaw's coinage of the term 'intersectionality', an anniversary that gave rise to a range of special issues, conferences and general discussions around the concept, critical engagements with intersectionality are probably even more numerous than embracings of the concept. In that context, it can sometimes seem as though intersectionality has become a placeholder for a variety of contradictory demands and qualifications. Intersectionality is criticized both for being too general and for being too particularist; for being overtheorized and for being theoretically underdeveloped; for putting too much focus on experience and for dismissing experience.
Social reproduction scholars have reproached intersectionality for being too focused on 'social location' or 'place',15 for residing on the 'micro-level'16 and for a 'downplaying of theory' and a 'resort to experience as the source of knowledge.17 According to these critiques, intersectionality lacks explanatory power when it comes to linking specific oppressions to their macro-level conditions of possibility, to understand them as constituting parts of the social whole. According to a specific subset of feminist critiques, intersectionality is, on the contrary, so overtheorized, general and abstract that it has become incapable of paying attention to the particular. Feminist scholars within science and technology studies, inspired by posthumanism and/or Deleuzian thought, have argued that intersectionality's commitment to a 'gridlock model of subjectivity' is incapable of capturing the liminality of bodily matter.18 According to Dorthe Staunæs, intersectionality is a useful concept when it comes to covering the interconnections of categories such as gender, ethnicity, race, age, sexuality and class, but it does not 'include a consideration of how these categories work and intersect in the lived experiences of concrete subjects.19 Inspired by Wittgenstein, Toril Moi has argued that intersectionality is the epitome of a 'craving for generality' characteristic of contemporary feminist theory: in its very aspiration towards grasping the 'infinite differences among women in all their particularity' intersectionality produces 'a general theory (of difference, identity, language, power, and so on)' which reproduces a 'distance to actual human experience', 'a contempt for the particular case.20
Perhaps these two lines of critique are simply directed towards different aspects of the 'intersectional tradition'. Intersectionality is indeed theoretically eclectic. From a different perspective, however, the two lines of critique can be seen as two sides of the same coin. What is being reproached from different theoretical perspectives is the abstract character of intersectionality theory. To unfold this argument, let us first recall Marx's methodological reflections in the 1857 introduction to the Grundrisse. Here, Marx states that though methodologically 'it seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete, with the real precondition', with the living population, this method on closer examination proves false.21 The population remains an abstraction if we leave out the elements of which it is composed and the presuppositions for these elements. The method of departing from the actually concrete can only produce abstractions in thought:
[I]f I were to begin with the population, this would be a chaotic conception [Vorstellung] of the whole, and I would then, by means of further determination, move analytically towards ever more simple concepts [Begriff], from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest determinations. From there the journey would have to be retraced until I had finally arrived at the population again, but this time not as the chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations.22
According to Marx, the scientifically correct method would instead be to ascend from 'the simple relations, such as labour, division of labour, need, exchange value, to the level of the state, exchange between nations and the world market'. Thus, Marx outlines two methods: the method followed by economics at the time of its origin in which the full conception is 'evaporated to yield an abstract determination', and the scientifically correct method in which 'the abstract determinations lead towards a reproduction of the concrete by way of thought'. In the second method, the concrete understood as the concentration of many determinations and relations appears in the process of thinking as a 'process of concentration' not 'as a point of departure', 'even though it is the point of departure in reality and hence also the point of departure for observation [Anschauung] and conception'. Thus, the process of concentration by which 'thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the mind', is 'by no means the process by which the concrete itself comes into being'. The existence of an economic category such as exchange value does indeed presuppose the existence of a living population producing in specific relations, but it is by moving from abstract categories such as exchange value that we can achieve a conception of the population not as an abstraction but as 'a concentration of many determinations, as unity of the diverse.23
These methodological reflections can perhaps help us understand how intersectionality can be reproached for being both too general to understand the particular case and too focused on the particular to grasp the social whole. When criticizing intersectionality, I think that it is essential to distinguish between an early version of intersectionality as a contextually specific critique and a response to a problem and a contemporary version of intersectionality as a methodology and as a theory of social identity. I thus want to make it clear that this critique is not directed towards Kimberlé Crenshaw or any of the black feminist interventions that are often referred to as 'proto-intersectional' but towards a specific contemporary version of intersectionality as a sociological methodology. The problem for intersectional methodology, appears to be that because it departs from an imagined concrete provided by the concept of lived experience it has only been able to move towards ever thinner abstractions. For instance, some critics from within intersectionality's own ranks have suggested that 'woman of color' has become an abstraction in contemporary intersectionality theory. Jennifer Nash writes that black women have become a 'symbol' within the field of US women's studies 'even if the field retains little interest in the materiality of black women's bodies'24 and Jasbir Puar emphatically refers to 'woman of color' with the acronym 'WOC' to 'underscore the overdetermined emptiness of its gratiousness.25 Another example of such an abstraction within intersectionality theory is the very central, yet highly underdetermined, notion of a 'category of oppression' and the adjacent discussions over the number of categories and metaphors. In that context, intersectionality scholars have suggested that Crenshaw's traffic metaphor should be revised or made more nuanced by adding more roads to the intersection or 'a roundabout' in its centre,26 to talk about lines, axes or vectors rather that roads, to see these as 'interacting' or 'interlocking', 'interwoven', 'intermeshed' or 'enmeshed' rather that 'intersecting'. These discussions are not only predicated upon a misreading of Crenshaw's metaphor, which was never employed to illustrate the constitution of social identity in general but only to visualize a contextually specific problem, but also have no real theoretical or political stakes.27
Despite the immense amount of ink spilled in discussions over the correct metaphor, it remains unclear what intersectionality scholars actually speak about when they speak about race, class and gender. As Martha E. Gimenez points out, though there are many competing theories of race, gender and class, intersectionality theorists often do not invoke a specific theory to define how they use these categories and to identify how they are related to the rest of the social system.28 Instead they often insist on the irreducibility, interrelatedness and simultaneity of 'oppressions' but without specifying what exactly it is that is irreducible, simultaneous and interrelated.29 Are we here dealing with the experience of sexist, racial or class-based oppression, or with their ontological basis - what intersectionality scholars often refer to as 'systems of oppression'? Or are we dealing with race, class and gender as analytical categories? Intersectionality theorists sometimes seem to assume that these different levels - phenomenological, ontological and analytical - are isomorphic so that the fact that we operate with discrete categories necessarily means that these categories refer to actually discrete systems of oppression.
In her critical engagement with the idea of intersectionality, Susan Ferguson argues that intersectionality scholars, in insisting that race, class and gender are 'enmeshed' but yet expressive of discrete and irreducible systems 'without postulating or exploring an internal relation between these parts and the social totality', fail to 'return these conceptual categories to the messy-yet-unified experimental realm'. By treating what is analytically discrete as actually discrete, intersectionality theory, Ferguson argues, produces 'a one-sided and abstract accounting of reality'.30 In other words, the intersectional method does not take 'the journey back' to experience in order to determine it, not as an abstraction, but as a concentration of many determinations and relations. As Martha E. Gimenez points out, '[e]xperience in itself' is 'suspect because dialectically, it is a unity of opposites; it is unique, personal, insightful and revealing, and, at the same time, thoroughly social, partial, mystifying, itself the product of historical forces about which individuals may know little or nothing about'. Therefore, to be fully understood in its broader social and political implications, experience cannot be abstracted from but needs to 'be situated in the context of the capitalist forces and relations that produce it.31 Instead of taking the journey back to experience, intersectionality reproduces a 'chaotic conception of the whole' in which oppressions intersect and inhabit each other in an apparently random way without any necessary logic, to paraphrase Ferguson, or a 'social Newtonianism', as David McNally has argued, that is a conception of the social that sees axes and vectors of difference as ontologically separate and autonomous 'bits' that enter into external relations with other 'bits'.32
Lise Vogel's theoretical detour
Social reproduction theory does indeed offer a macro-level theoretical perspective explaining both gendered and racialized oppression with reference to differential positions in the processes necessary to reproduce labour-power. I thus agree with Gimenez and Ferguson that social reproduction theory can offer what intersectionality lacks in explanatory power: an explanation of the sources of inequality and their reproduction over time. Like intersectionality, however, social reproduction theory suffers from abstractness, but in a slightly different way.
Marxist-feminism has often been criticized for being functionalist; for granting agency to structures and systems while reducing subjects to mere functional constituents of the capitalist totality. According to Ferguson, anti-racist sociologist Himani Bannerji delivered a 'fatal blow' to social reproduction feminism in her 1995 critique by pointing to its 'systemic blindness to the experiential and to experiences of race and racism in particular.33 According to Bannerji, Marxist feminists have sought to diffuse 'two irreducibly different epistemological positions': a feminist analysis based on 'feeling/experience' and a Marxist analysis based on 'scientific and objective economic analysis' without properly theorizing their mediation, thus creating 'an unbridgeable gap between self, culture and experience, and the world in which they arise.34 Committed to Bannerji's critique, scholars who are part of the recent wave of social reproduction theory such as Ferguson and Cinzia Arruzza, call for centring 'labour' over 'structures' or 'systems' for a theory of reproductive subjects as embodied, conscious agents rather than functions of socio-economic structures. Functionalism is, they argue, not a product of the concept of social reproduction as such but rather of a certain Althusserian-structuralist bias that has influenced significant work in the tradition. In the same breath, however, these scholars nominate Lise Vogel's Marxism and the Oppression of Women, a book that is explicitly and admittedly Althusserian in its reading of Marx and conception of theory, to be the seminal text within the field setting a new non-functionalist direction for Marxist feminism.35
Ferguson and Arruzza consider Vogel's account to be nonfunctionalist because it does not seek to localize an ultimate source or origin of women's oppression but instead uncovers a systemic logic on the level of social reproduction that sets the conditions for the subordination of women in capitalist society. To reveal this systemic logic, Vogel's analysis starts at an extreme level of abstraction with a series of reflections on what is necessary to replenish labour-power in any society. It then moves on to analyse what is necessary to reproduce labour-power in class societies, to finally analyse the reproduction of labour-power in the specific type of class society that is capitalism. Her main argument is that in class societies there is a potential contradiction from the point of view of the ruling class 'between its immediate need to appropriate surplus-labour and its long-term requirement for a class to perform it.36 In so far as pregnancy and lactation involve several months of somewhat reduced capacity to work as well as a need to be maintained by others, it involves an increase in necessary labour at the expense of surplus-labour. In the long term, however, childbearing is necessary for labour-power, and thus surplus-labour in favour of the ruling class, to be reproduced. In capitalist society this contradiction is expressed in the contradictory role occupied by 'domestic labour', which is, from the point of view of the capitalist class, 'simultaneously indispensable and an obstacle to accumulation.37 The capitalist class will often, Vogel argues, attempt to reduce domestic labour by 'socializing' its tasks, for example by moving them to the profit-making sector or making them the responsibility of the state, but there is, she insists, a limit to this socialization for economic, ideological, political and biological reasons. Vogel makes it clear that this is a contradiction at a theoretical and thus abstract level that in reality can be solved in a variety of ways. This contradiction shapes women's situation in capitalist society but does not determine it.38
In the context of unfolding this argument, Vogel defines her social reproduction perspective as a distinct methodological approach. In contrast to the 'dual systems perspective' that sets out from observable, visible facts, the social reproduction perspective is, she says, characterized by 'theoreticism': it begins with a theoretical assumption about the relationship between the core workings of the capitalist mode of production to explore the potential implications of an empirical phenomenon - women's capacity to have children - for the processes of surplus-labour appropriation. In 'Domestic Labour Revisited', a 2000 essay published as an appendix to the 2013 republication of Marxism and the Oppression of Women, Vogel elaborates on her theoretical approach by comparing theory to 'a sort of lens' that can be used for empirical investigation and political analysis. The lens itself cannot explain anything concrete; it is only by applying it to actual situations that knowledge about specific societies or historical situations can be produced. In adopting this conception of theory as a highly abstract enterprise, sharply different from history and severely constrained in its implications, Vogel explicitly follows Althusser's advice: 'find in it [Capital] a book of theory analysing the capitalist mode of production'. According to Althusser, the study of Capital must be abstract because the capitalist mode of production is "invisible" (to the naked eye). "Invisible", i.e. abstract'. Vogel then describes her own work on domestic labour as an example of women's liberationist theorizing within this 'intentionally abstract framework' with the aim of contributing 'to the construction of a more satisfactory theoretical lens with which to analyse women's subordination.39
In so far as it is motivated by a desire to revive Marxist/ socialist feminism at a moment where it seems to have run its course, by providing a more sufficient theoretical foundation for the analysis of the reproduction of labour-power based on Marx's Capital, Marxism and the Oppression of Women can thus be compared to an Althusserian-style theoretical detour. Arguing that the development of Marxist/socialist feminism has 'been constrained by its practitioners' insufficient grasp of Marxist theory,40 Vogel calls for a return to Marx and a more rigorous reading of Capital. In their introduction to the 2013 republication of Marxism and the Oppression of Women, Ferguson and McNally note that they find it 'unfortunate' that Vogel 'later adopted "Althusser's hyper-abstracted notion of "Theory" uncontaminated by the empirical'.41 This, the authors concede, does indeed commit the mistake of the 'unbridgeable gap' that Bannerji described.42 However, this theoreticism is, as I hope to have demonstrated, not something that Vogel later adds on, as McNally and Ferguson seem to insinuate. Rather, theoreticism is the very condition of possibility for her main argument. In the original introduction to the book, Vogel explains that the abstractness of her analysis is exactly 'as it should be': 'Only in an analysis of an actual situation will abstraction spring to life, for it is history that puts flesh on the bare bones of theory.43
As a result of this sociological Althusserianism, Vogel seems to ultimately reduce the concrete to the empirical. The concrete is something that can be reached through empirical observation; only 'the abstract' is an object of theory. In other words, Vogel does not take the journey back to the concrete in order to determine it as a unity of many determinations. Though many social reproduction scholars draw on other theoretical sources - including Hegelian Marxism, as we have seen in McNally and Ferguson's critique of intersectionality - this reduction of the concrete to the empirical still seems to mark the field. For example, when Tithi Bhattacharya, in her introduction to the text collection Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression, suggests that at the heart of social reproduction theory is the 'thorny problem of reality itself': 'What is the logic of the relationship between us (subjects) and empirically apprehended facts (objects)?44
In addition to this, I suggest that the particular form of theoreticism at stake in Vogel's methodological approach represents a regression with regard to her predecessors from the era of the domestic labour debates, at two points in particular. The first point concerns Vogel's understanding of the relationship between theory and practice, especially regarding the question of the family and its potential abolition. Vogel argues that feminists should not call for the abolition of the family and domestic labour because in the transition to socialism both will 'wither away' and with them 'patriarchal family-relations and the oppression of women.45 This subsumption of explicitly feminist demands to the workers' struggle represents exactly what feminists on the New Left, especially the black feminists later characterized as 'proto-intersectional', first reacted against: the idea that when the revolution arrives, women's oppression will magically disappear.
The second point, closely related to the first, concerns Vogel's conception of gender. At the basis of both the demand to abolish the family and the demand for Wages for Housework, there is a different articulation of the same demand: to denaturalize gender, to reveal the constructed nature of gender under capitalism as an anchoring of specific individuals in a specific sphere of social activities. The Wages for Housework analysis is based on the idea that for capitalism to be profitable, some of the work involved in reproducing labour-power must be performed for free, and to secure this it must be naturalized. As Silvia Federici puts it:
Housework was transformed into a natural attribute, rather than being recognized as work, because it was destined to be unwaged. Capital had to convince us that it is a natural, unavoidable, and even fulfilling activity to make us accept working without a wage.46
Thus, according to this analysis, women do not perform housework because they are women; they become 'women' because they perform housework. Such a problematization of the category 'woman' is, however, absent in Marxism and the Oppression of Women, with women being defined simply as 'the 5I percent of human beings who have the capacity to bear children.47 By thus 'treating the collective subject "woman" as transparently obvious', to borrow Holly Lewis's astute formulation, Vogel has left us 'with a subject whose ontological boundaries are universal and ahistorical: women undergo changes, but who is and who isn't a woman is eternal'.48 This taking for granted of the category 'woman' not only risks collapsing into exclusive gender essentialism; methodologically it also seems to assume what is to be explained.
Gender as real abstraction
In light of this, it would be interesting to reflect on what an intersectional method that moves from the abstract to the concrete could look like. This would be an approach that does not part from gendered, raced and classed individuals and their lived experience of oppression but rather moves from the abstract categories of 'gender', 'race' and 'class' to the concrete individuals constituted through these categories. The 2014 article 'The Logic of Gender' by Endnotes outlines such an approach, but only when it comes to the category of gender. As in Vogel's Marxism and the Oppression of Women, this article is committed to unitary theory, and just like Vogel the authors start at an extreme level of abstraction. Yet, in contrast to Vogel, the article does not part from a transhistorical conception of woman and a set of reflections on the reproduction of labour-power in any society. Instead, the authors are concerned with a form of gender 'which is specific to capitalism' and they assume from the outset 'that one can talk about gender without any reference to biology and prehistory.49
Methodologically the argument moves from the most abstract categories to the most concrete: from defining gender as a separation between spheres to specifying the individuals assigned to those spheres. Endnotes begins from the presupposition that capitalism as a mode of production is structurally dependent on the relegation of some of the activities involved in turning means of subsistence into 'a functioning labour-power' - that is, a worker that shows up at the gates of the factory - to a sphere that is not directly mediated by the value-form. This indirectly market-mediated sphere (IMM) is not defined by the concrete activities that take place in it but rather by the relationship of these activities to exchange, the market and the accumulation of capital. Therefore the same concrete activity, cooking, cleaning, looking after children, and so on, can be either value-producing or non-value-producing according to whether it takes place in this sphere or in the directly market-mediated sphere (DMM).50
It is by examining the point where the separation between the IMM-sphere and the DMM-sphere intersect with the separation between the 'private sphere' (understood not just as the household but as 'the totality of activities inside and outside of the home') and the 'public sphere' (defined as 'an abstraction from society in the form of the state'51) that the authors seek to understand 'why humanity is still powerfully inscribed with one or the other gender'.52 These spheres, Endnotes explains, work in concert: the state as the sphere of the political and the juridical is 'the real abstraction of Right separated from the actual divisions and differences constituting civil society' that must exist to render 'citizens' formally equal so that they can appear as equal on the market, though they are anything but in 'real life'.53 It is the anchoring of individuals in either the IMM or the DMM sphere secured by the public/private separation that defines them as belonging to one of two distinct genders demarcated 'by whether those individuals defined by the state directly exchange the labour-power commodity they bear within their person as their own property, or - if that exchange is mediated indirectly through those with formal equality.54
Now ascending to the concrete, the analysis moves on to consider which individuals have been assigned to each sphere. Historically the free worker as legal entity has been ascribed to those gendered male while those gendered female, being under the legal domain of their male partners, have not been granted the 'double freedom' to sell their labour power as their own. Therefore they have historically been anchored in the IMM sphere, carrying out the work of unwaged social reproduction. This anchoring of those gendered women in the indirectly market-mediated sphere has lasted long after differential freedom was juridically abolished in so far as 'the mechanism that reinforced this inequality in the "private sphere" of the economic - of the labour-market - was already so well established that it could appear as the enactment of some mysterious natural law.55
In other words, the separation of spheres and the anchoring of individuals in one or the other, which marks them as belonging to one or the other of the two distinct genders, is an abstraction that has taken on a life of its own, making its basis in law superfluous. Gender differentiation is paradoxically maintained and reproduced through the 'sex-blind market'. Because women are coded as 'those who have children' and that this is constituted as a handicap, an activity that steals time away from labour, women are defined as 'those who come to the labour-market with a potential disadvantage'.56 This conception does not entail that women are the 51 per cent of the population that have children. This would be, the authors explain, to conflate the fact of having a biological organ, a uterus, the fact of actually going through a pregnancy and the fact of having a specific relation to the result of this pregnancy.57 Rather, it means that anyone who passes as someone who could potentially go through a pregnancy is, due to 'the market-determined risk identified as childbearing "potential", less competitive on the labour market. This abstract differentiation hence 'keeps those who embody the signifier "woman" anchored to the IMM sphere'.58 Applying this analysis to the concrete configurations of gender in their historical moment - a moment of austerity following the financial crisis - Endnotes derives the concept of the abject defined as activities that were once organized by the state but have now become a mere cost and therefore lapsed into the sphere of unwaged indirect marketmediation. In other words, the abject designates an activity that has been denaturalized but recently renaturalized. This process of denaturalization-renaturalization means that gender as the anchoring in the sphere of IMM activities for those who have to deal with it is no longer experienced as 'some unfortunate natural fate', as it was in the past, but seen as it is: 'a powerful constraint'.59
This conception of gender as the anchoring of individuals in a specific sphere of social activities does not, I suggest, provide an exhaustive explanation of what gender is, how gendered domination works under capitalism and what gender liberation might look like. Nevertheless, its methodological approach tracing gender as a real abstraction can perhaps designate a way to substantiate the intersectional methodology in a way that can make it less abstract. Could this methodological approach be used to account for other categories of difference as 'real abstractions' in order to not collapse into the same 'race blind' feminism of which intersectionality was initially a critique? If departing from class, race and gender as lived experiences has left intersectionality with ever thinner abstractions, could an intersectional methodology tracing the unfolding of class, race and gender as real abstractions lead us to a more concrete conception of experience?
An intersectional methodology that moves from the abstract to the concrete to understand 'categories of oppression' as real abstractions would substantiate what is often presented as the core claim of intersectionality but mostly left underdeveloped or simply unexplained by intersectionality scholars: the idea that 'experience' is influenced, shaped or structured by 'interrelating power structures' or 'vectors' or 'axes' or 'systems' or 'categories' of oppression, gender, race, class and so on - that is, by abstractions. Thus, it brings to light a tension between two different philosophical conceptions of subjectivity opaquely at stake in discourses on intersectionality: a constitutive subject of 'lived experience' and a constituted subject that is an 'effect' of structures of oppression and inequality.60 Many Marxist-feminist critiques of intersectionality affirm that the idea is good but that the methodology is flawed. I agree; but if we consider intersectionality as a way of responding to problems rather than a methodology, intersectionality and social reproduction theory become supplementary critical perspectives rather than competing theories and methodologies. I suggest that, rather than rejecting intersectionality on the basis of it being theoretically underdeveloped, a more constructive path would be to develop what remains underdeveloped in intersectionality. This is an interesting project to pursue not simply in order to 'improve' intersectional methodology - perhaps it should rather be an occasion to call into question the idea of intersectionality as methodology - but because it could be a gateway into pursuing the project that Peter Osborne sketches out in his article 'The Reproach of Abstraction': a 'thinking of the idea of "actual abstractions" as the medium of social experience in capitalist modernities,61 allowing for a rethinking of the relationship between abstraction, subjectivity and emancipation.
In the context of intersectionality, the stake of such a project is twofold: on the one hand it points to a politicalphilosophical problem for intersectionality; on the other to a political-intersectional problem for philosophy. The politicalphilosophical problem for intersectionality concerns the conception of individuation and relationship at stake in discourses on intersectionality. How can we think the relationsip between the 'specific' and the 'general' or the 'universal' through the lens of intersectionality? Drawing on the three-term typology offered by Peter Hallward in his article 'The Singular and the Specific', we could ask: is intersectionality a theory of the specified, the singular or the specific? Whereas, a 'specific individual', Hallward explains, 'is one which exists as part of a relationship between an environment and other individuals', a singular individual 'is fundamentally self-individuating, beyond relationality'.62 A specified way of thinking about individuals, on the other hand, is to 'think of them as individuated by certain intrinsic, invariant and thus characteristic properties, innate or acquired'.63 In principle and depending on the specific theoretical orientation it follows, intersectionality could be a theory of any of these three general modes of individuation. As I have suggested, the use of the signifier 'lived experience' seems to be symptomatic of a singularizing tendency in intersectional frameworks, of the 'anti-abstracting desire' or 'abstraction phobia' that Vishmidt describes in relation to the vulnerable body: 'the positing of something basic and fundamental as a substratum to all further thought, something which produces but is itself not produced, which conditions but is itself unconditioned'.64 In so far as intersectionality replaces the triad of 'race, gender and class' with a list of categories concluding with an 'exasperated etc.', as Judith Butler puts it,65 there appears to be a process of potentially endless differentiation and thus a singular orientation at stake in intersectionality. The challenge for intersectionality thus seems to be to conceive of forms of social mediation within a framework that relies on a potentially infinite differentiation between subject positions. For intersectionality as a theoretical framework to be able to conceive of subjects as co-constituting parts of a totality rather than self-constituting singularities, a theory of the specific rather than the singular, I suggest that a conception of abstraction is needed.66
The political-intersectional problem for philosophy concerns the status and limitations of the notion of the subject in the canon of modern European philosophy. If the initial critical gesture of intersectionality was to reveal how the use of an abstract notion of 'woman' as the subject of feminism functions as a placeholder for a specific type of woman, then intersectionality would equally problematize how the use of an abstract notion of the subject in philosophy functions as a placeholder for a specific type of subject. While a philosophical critique reveals a tension between different ideas of subjectivity at stake in discourses on intersectionality, a specific version of intersectionality could work as a critique of a particular idea of the subject in philosophy masquerading as universal.
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Endnotes
Footnotes
1. Leslie McCall, 'The Complexity of Intersectionality', Signs, 30(3), 2005, p. 1. ↩
2. See Tuija Pulkkinen, 'Identity and Intervention: Disciplinarity as Transdisciplinarity in Gender Studies', Transdisciplinary Problematics, Theory, Culture \& Society, 32(5-6), 2015, pp. 183-205. ↩
3. See among many others: The Care Collective, The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence, Verso, London, 2020; Kathi Weeks, 'Abolitions of the Family: The Most Infamous Feminist Proposal', Feminist Theory o(o)1-21 (2021); M.E. O'Brien, Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care, Pluto Press, London, 2023; Sophie Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against the Family, Verso, London and New York, 2019; Susan Ferguson, Women and Work: Feminism, Labour and Social Reproduction, Pluto Press, London, 2020; Tithi Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression, Pluto Press, London, 2017; Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory, Haymarket Books, Chicago IL, 2013. ↩
4. Pulkkinen, 'Identity and Intervention', p. 188. ↩
5. Ferguson, Women and Work, p. 111. ↩
6. Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge, Intersectionality, 2nd edn, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2020, p. 1. ↩
7. Tithi Bhattacharya, 'Introduction: Mapping Social Reproduction Theory', in Social Reproduction Theory, p. 31. ↩
8. Vivian M. May, Pursuing Intersectionality: Unsettling Dominant Imaginaries, Routledge, New York, 2015, p. 33. ↩
9. Ange-Marie Hancock, Intersectionality: An Intellectual History, Oxford University Press, New York, 2016, p. 128. ↩
10. Susan Ferguson, 'Building on the Strengths of the Socialist Feminist Tradition', Critical Sociology, 25(1), 1999, p. 8. ↩
11. Patricia Hill Collins, 'Intersectionality's Definitional Dilemmas', Annual Review of Sociology 41, 2015, p. 14; https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-073014-112142. ↩
12. See Ashley J. Bohrer's discussion of standpoint epistemology in the Marxist and intersectional tradition. Ashley J. Bohrer, Marxism and Intersectionality: Race, Gender, Class and Sexuality under Contemporary Capitalism, [Transcript], Bielefeld, 2019, pp. 64-8. ↩
13. See Cinzia Arruzza, 'Functionalist, Determinist, Reductionist: Social Reproduction Feminism and Its Critics', Science \& Society, 80(1), 2016, pp. 9-30; Ferguson, 'Building on the Strengths of the Socialist Feminist Tradition'; Susan Ferguson, 'Canadian Contributions to Social Reproduction Feminism, Race and Embodied Labor', Race, Gender \& Class, 15(1/2), 2008, pp. 42-57. ↩
14. Marina Vishmidt, 'Bodies in Space: On the Ends of Vulnerability', Radical Philosophy 208, 2020, p. 34. ↩
15. Johanna Brenner, Women and the Politics of Class, Monthly Review Press, New York, 200, p. 293. ↩
16. Susan Ferguson, 'Intersectionality and Social-Reproduction Feminisms: Toward an Integrative Ontology', Historical Materialism, 24(2), 2016, p. 44, https://doi. org/10.1163/1569206X-12341471. ↩
17. Martha E. Gimenez, Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays, Brill, Leiden and Boston MA, 2018, p. 90. ↩
18. See Jasbir Puar, "I Would Rather Be a Cyborg than a Goddess": BecomingIntersectional in Assemblage Theory', Interventions, 2012, p. 5. ↩
19. Dorthe Staunæs, 'Where Have All the Subjects Gone? Bringing Together the Concepts of Intersectionality and Subjectification', Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, 11(2), n.d., p. 1. ↩
20. Toril Moi, 'Thinking Through Examples: What Ordinary Language Philosophy Can Do for Feminist Theory', New Literary History, 46(2), n.d., p. 196. ↩
21. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Econonmy, Penguin, London, 1993. ↩
22. Ibid., p. 164 . ↩
23. Ibid., p. 165 . ↩
24. Jennifer Nash, Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality, Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2019, p. 4. ↩
25. Puar, "I Would Rather Be a Cyborg than a Goddess", p. 3. ↩
26. Ann Garry, 'Intersectionality, Metaphors, and the Multiplicity of Gender', Hypatia 26(4), 2011, p. 831. ↩
27. Kimberlé Crenshaw originally coined the term 'intersectionality' to point to the problem of the illegibility of multiple oppressions in American anti-discrimination law and used the metaphor of a traffic intersection to illustrate this problem. Kimberlé Crenshaw, 'Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminsit Theory and Antiracist Politics', University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1), p. 149. Two years later Crenshaw pointed out that intersectionality was never offered as 'some new totalizing theory of identity'. Kimberlé Crenshaw, 'Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence against Women of Color', Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1991, p. 1244, https://doi.org/141.241.26.232. ↩
28. Gimenez, Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction, p. 90. ↩
29. See for instance Anna Carasthathis's account characterizing intersectionality by what she refers to as the analytical benefits of 'irreducibility' and 'simultaneity'. Anna Carastathis, Intersectionality: Origins, Contestations, Horizons, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln NE and London, 2016, pp. 54-8. ↩
30. Ferguson, 'Intersectionality and Social-Reproduction Feminisms', pp. 44-5. ↩
31. Gimenez, Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction, pp. 90-91. ↩
32. Ferguson, 'Intersectionality and Social-Reproduction Feminisms', 48; David McNally, 'Intersections and Dialectics: Critical Reconstructions in Social Reproduction Theory', in Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression, Pluto Press, London, 2017, p. 274. ↩
33. Ferguson, 'Canadian Contributions to Social Reproduction Feminism, Race and Embodied Labor', p. 45. ↩
34. Himani Bannerji, 'But Who Speaks for Us? Experience and Agency in Conventional Feminist Paradigms', in Thinking Through: Essays on Feminism, Marxism, and Anti-Racism, Women's Press of Canada, Toronto, 1995, p. 80. ↩
35. Arruzza, 'Functionalist, Determinist, Reductionist', p. 11; Ferguson, Women and Work, p. 31. ↩
36. Vogel, Marxism and The Oppression of Women, p. 151. ↩
37. Ibid., p. 163. ↩
38. Ibid., pp. 161-3. ↩
39. Ibid., p. 187 . ↩
40. Ibid., p. 34 . ↩
41. Susan Ferguson and David McNally, 'Capital, Labour-Power, and Gender-Relations: Introduction to the Historical Materialism Edition of Marxism and the Oppression of Women', in Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory, Haymarket Books, Chicago IL, 2016, pp. xvii-xi, n. 36. ↩
42. Ibid., n. 49 . ↩
43. Vogel, Marxism and The Oppression of Women, p. 9. ↩
44. Bhattacharya, 'Introduction: Mapping Social Reproduction Theory', p. 59. ↩
45. Vogel, Marxism and The Oppression of Women, pp. 181-2. ↩
46. Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle, PM Press, Oakland CA, 2020, p. 59. ↩
47. Vogel, Marxism and The Oppression of Women, p. 173. ↩
48. Holly Lewis, The Politics of Everybody: Feminism, Queer Theory and Marxism at the Intersection, Zed Books, London, 2016, p. 125. ↩
49. Endnotes, 'The Logic of Gender: On the Separation of Spheres and the Process of Abjection', Endnotes, September 2013, p. 3. ↩
50. Ibid., pp. 5-7. ↩
51. Ibid., p. 12. ↩
52. Ibid., p. 3. ↩
53. Ibid., p. 12 . ↩
54. Ibid., p. 13 . ↩
55. Ibid., p. 15 . ↩
56. Endnotes, p. 15 . ↩
57. Endnotes, p. 16, addendum 2. ↩
58. Endnotes,p. 15 . ↩
59. Endnotes, p. 25. ↩
60. Although this opposition is of course rather schematic, it can be seen as an opposition between what Étienne Balibar has described as a structuralist destitution of the subject; a 'deconstruction of the subject as arche (cause, principle, origin) and reconstruction of subjectivity as an effect ... a passage from constitutive to constituted subjectivity' (p. 10) and the 'generative equation' - challenged by this conception - 'in which the humanity of man' - understood in for instance 'an existentialist way as the construction of experience' - 'is identified with the subject (or subjectivity' (p. 9). Étienne Balibar, 'Structuralism: A Destitution of the Subject?', Differences, 14(1), May 2003, pp. 1-21. ↩
61. Peter Osborne, 'The Reproach of Abstraction', Radical Philosophy 127, September/ October 2004, pp. 21-8, p. 21. ↩
62. Peter Hallward, 'The Singular and the Specific', Radical Philosophy 99, January/ Februrary 2000, p. 8. ↩
63. Ibid. ↩
64. Vishmidt, 'Bodies in Space', p. 34. ↩
65. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London and New York, Routledge, 1989, 432. ↩
66. In suggesting that abstraction is necessary to escape singularity, I am partly inspired by an argument that Jamilla M.H. Mascat puts forward in relation to Gayatri Spivak's figure of the subaltern. In 'Subalternity Reloaded: Singularity, Collectivity and the Politics of Abstraction', Mascat traces two trajectories in Spivak's work: a trajectory that aims to interrupt all-too easy theoretico-political generalizations by emphasizing the 'ungeneralizable singularity' (p. 1) of the subaltern and a pedagogico-political trajectory that 'pushes singularity beyond its limits in order to weave the collective "fabric" of multiplicity' (p. 2). The second trajectory concerns the possibility of a de-singularization of the subaltern through abstraction understood as 'the prerequisite for any comparative effort' (p.11) on the one hand - and hence the basis for fostering political solidarity and common interests among individuals - and as a process of self-synechdochization which allows the subaltern to become part of a bigger whole, on the other (p. 12). Here, Mascat (through Spivak) thus confirms Osborne's point that abstractions are not forms of domination qua their abstractness; rather they are the pre-requisite for any form of connectivity. I do not want to suggest that Spivak is a thinker of intersectionality or that the gendered subaltern is a figure of intersectionality - perhaps the woman as subaltern is exactly what contemporary intersectionality cannot grasp due to its abstract notion of a 'woman of colour' - but rather that the argument that Mascat makes in relation to Spivak could be partly applicable to intersectionality. The crucial point is that intersectionality needs abstraction in order to escape the burdens of singularity. Jamilla M.H. Mascat, 'Subalternity Reloaded: Singularity, Collectivity and the Politics of Abstraction', Cultural Studies, 30(5), 2016. ↩
Cite this article
Katrine Høghøj. The lived experience of real abstraction: race, gender and class in contemporary feminist paradigms. Conjunctions: humanatures reproduction disjunctions, 2025. CRMEP Books, London, UK.