ok. *sigh* seriously. the issue is that we need to consider that what we are after wrt theories of how oppression and exploitation work and their relationship to structures and identity practices. in other words, the important part of my post to carrol was wrt conceptualizing women's oppression _as_ women. now, the problem in feminist theory was that it had often been theorized from the standpoint of white, het middle class women as to what it meant to be oppressed _as_ a woman.
as i pointed out a couple of years ago, shulamith firestone and mary daly went so far as to claim that women's oppression _as_ women was primordial and was the foundation upon which racism was built. having conceptualized racist oppression as secondary to sexist oppression, their political practice was to disavow the need to ask question that might get out how women of color, lesbians, working class women, etc might experience that oppression differently.
e.g., if white women claimed that it really sucked to have the door held open for you and that men expected you to get their coffee while doing your secretarial duties and that you couldn't break into physics, etc. then women of color/working class women's experience was clearly not be represented in terms of the task of mapping the structure of sexist oppression. when white feminists proclaimed that liberation was being free from the patriarchy of the hetnuke family or that liberation would be found at work or in the political forum, then black women and working class wanted to point out that they'd been working for quite some time and it wasn't at all clear to them that work was where it was at. and it surely wasn't clear to them that the family was the source of their oppression. indeed, for some of these women writers, their families and communities were where they found camaraderie and sustenance and the men in their lives were allies in a struggle against a more common enemy: the boss and/or whitey.
and so, the next phase has been about delineating the nature of sexist oppression, asking how it works in relation to other systems of oppression.
this is why i told carrol that i thought that he was reinventing the wheel and that we'd be better off looking at these rich literatures and an abundant, lively debate.
kelley