Another reason why Postone is a worthwhile read!
Ehrenreich took this up, albeit somewhat opaquely given her intended audience, in the book, _Hearts of Men_. She gets into it directly in an essay I read a few years ago, in a volume on socialist feminism. She argues that while at first feminism's challenge to gender ideology was indeed a contradiction, it eventually became something that was, for lack of a better word, co-opted by capitalism. I'll have to remember to check that book out from interlibrary loan again. It was pretty good.
Funny enough, just the other day, I got an email about a post I'd written long ago, which explains this slightly differently:
"It is *not* just that capitalism sells us ways to wear our gender identity. It is *also* that capitalism destabilizes binary notions of gender. Capitalism both destabilizes gender identity (rips apart our binary notion of male/female) *and* it intervenes to 'fix it'.
In both cases, gender is being *created* by society.
...
(For example) (t)he 60s/70s notion of androgyny, as Barbara Ehrenreich suggested in Hearts of Men, did not emanate form from some special place where gender identity exists, free of the oppressive weight of society. The seemingly more liberating and progressive notion of an androgynous, fluid gender was *itself* being shaped by society. It was helped along by the logic of capitalist development. It was created by capitalism or, at least, taken up by capitalism in an effort to sell more stuph! Capitalism dug the grave of the very binary gender identity system it had once built. It broke down an older patriarchal ideal that once served capitalism, but didn't any longer certainly not in the same way it once had with the ideal of True Womanhood, etc.
Since capitalism isn't a monolith, people form political ideologies and alliances, there are contradictions, too. Some people resist that change. Some people see rapid-fire changes all around them and say: Halt! stop the change! Or, they say, Halt! Stop the change and let's go backward. This going forward is the problem. We must stop it and go backward.
Thus, we have the culture wars.
There is no gender identity out there or "in here" inside our special snowflake selves that is innocent, untouched by society.
The problem with claims about capitalism only ever creating oppressive gender roles is that such views typically refuse to also see that capitalism has also been part of the process of destabilizing gender and making it our understandings of what it is and how to do and have gender more fluid.
... http://blog.pulpculture.org/2006/08/
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws