a reader in class, difference, and women's lives
Rosemary Hennessy, Chrys Ingraham
During the 1980s, capitalism triumphantly secured its global reach, anti-communist ideologies hammered home socialism's inherent failure, the New Left increasingly moved into the professional middle class--and many of feminism's earlier priorities were marginalized. "Identity politics", often formulated in terms of social reconstructionism or multiculturalism, has increasingly suppressed materialist feminism's systematic perspective, replacing it with discourse analysis or cultural politics.Materialist Feminism: A Readerargues against the retreat to multiculturalism for keeping invisible the material links among the explosion of meaning-making practices in highly industrialized social sectors, the exploitation of women's labor, and the appropriation of women's bodies that continues to undergird the scramble for profits and state power in multinational capitalism. In making twenty years of materialist feminist thought more accessible, theReaderwill contribute tothe development of feminism's Third Wave.Contributors include: Charlotte Bunch, Catherine MacKinnon, Ann Ferguson, Gayle Rubin, and Dorothy Smith.
