> --- Catherine Driscoll
> <catherine.driscoll at arts.usyd.edu.au> wrote:
> > I think there are "free to" versions of Marxism --
> > free to have a different
> > kind of work etc.
>
> Can you tell me the sources of the "free to" kinds of
> Marxism? I dont doubt you.
> I am just wanting to know as I am thinking a lot about
> this issue at the moment.
Well no I don't really know -- not straight Marxism. I'd just be surprised if
there wasn't anything.
...
> I think some of
> > the intersections between feminist thought and
> > Marxism would be a fair place to
> > look,
>
> Yes, I am hoping you or someone else might point me to
> some of those. I suspected there might be something
> in that direction.
Well yes, though I hope any references wouldn't imply I endorsed or equated them. Pretty much anywhere feminism and Marxism get together you're going to get a discourse on the body as central to what Marxism can be. The easiest way to get a handle on that would probably be an overview kind of text, like Heidi Hartmann's. But there are some directly labelled Marxist-feminist strands that pay intense attention to the body, often as a commodity, property, etc, but by inference or argumen also as a right or a place to claim important freedoms.
IN Britain there's Kate Millet etc. and their anxious negotiation with psychoanalysis and their very different versions of the body and freedom. There are also a range of European Marxist-feminist collectives, including the French MLF who despite rejecting some versions of the body then had to assert some alternative. These Marxist feminist positions don't in fact neutralise the body, as they're often accused of doing, particularly by other kinds of feminists. In counterpoint there are writers like Irigaray -- who has some pieces on how Marxist feminism can and can't think women's embodiment. In a different vein there's Marxist feminist sociology/anthropology like Gayle Rubin, which often focuses on the body, specifically the sexualised body; and the cultural histories of people like Bordo or Brumberg which focus on the body and are shaped by Marxism as well as feminism (though I repeat I am not necessarily praising them).
Then there's Butler, of course, who is always on about marxism-feminism-body in some way, and there's a few interesting case studies in her _Feminists theorise the Political_ collection edited with Scott. Now I think about it, on the feminism, body, and freedom line, Joan Wallach Scott has a great book about the role of women and feminism in the French revolution and after... for which the body as a site of freedom is important. I've written a very little about this in _Girls_, but it wasn't at all my focus.
I'm afraid this is all a bit sketchy, just a randomly connected list. Like I said, you could hunt out an overview -- although they are a bit dated for the most part and tend to have an agenda to push which isn't quite what you're looking for.
> ... But then again when you ask if
> > "this" is the root of the
> > problem, I'm not enirely sure what problem you're
> > talking about.
>
> By "the problem" I mean the idealized telos of
> historical materialism and orthodox marxism's emphasis
> on moving toward that ideal ("build up the productive
> forces"). It seems that the body, as the site of
> desires and liberation, gets forgotten in that
> story. It, the body, is subjugated into the service
> of that ideal.
Yet is the ground of that idealism. This is one of the things Irigaray does sort of get right about Marxism. I think there may be something by Seyla Benhabib on Hegel and "the question of woman" which raises this. I can't look stuff up at present as my life is in limbo, but I'm sure you could find it.
Catherine
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