SEXUAL DIFFERENCE, GENDER AND SEXUALITY

IN SOCIAL PRACTICE:
THE POSSIBILITIES AND LIMITS OF MATERIALIST
FEMINISM

By
Ľubica Kobová

Submitted to
Central European University
Department of Gender Studies

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

in Gender Studies.

Supervisor: Erzsébet Barát

Second reader: Veronica Vasterling

Budapest, Hungary
2004
 ABSTRACT

The concept of the ‘material’ gained wide currency in feminist theorizing recently. Its

recuperations draw on different theoretical traditions and thus give rise to the competing

views of the cultural materialism of the post-structuralist paradigm and Marxist historical

materialism. The new conceptions of materialization in gender and sexuality paradigm (Judith

Butler) and materialist theory of becoming in the sexual difference paradigm (Rosi Braidotti)

are introduced as contradictory elaborations of the very basic concepts of feminist theory—

sex, gender, sexuality and sexual difference. Nonetheless, their reworking of materialism

takes place either in the resignificatory discursive practices or the symbolization of matter and

thus primarily does refrain from the appropriate theorization of the economic. The materialist

feminism of Rosemary Hennessy insists on the need of systemic analysis that accounts of

uneven and contradictory developments in late capitalism and its share in people’s lives. The

satisfaction of the human needs is supplanted by the promise of the pleasure taking shape of

commodity. Hennessy comprehends non-heteronormative sexual identities as reified and

commodified, too, and argues for historicization of sexual identities in the framework of the

developments of capitalism. The thesis juxtaposes the three mentioned approaches to the

material in order to argue for Hennessy’s rearticulation of the historical-materialist tradition.

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

1 INTRODUCTION............................................................................................................ 1
2 GENDER AND SEXUALITY PARADIGM: JUDITH BUTLER .............................. 5
2.1 SEX, GENDER AND DESIRE ........................................................................................... 5
2.2 MATERIALIZATION IN PERFORMATIVITY ..................................................................... 8
2.3 AGENCY AND TEMPORALITY ..................................................................................... 11
2.4 FEMINISM MEETS QUEER THEORY .............................................................................. 13
2.5 QUEER THEORY MEETS LEFT THEORY ........................................................................ 15
3 THE SEXUAL DIFFERENCE PARADIGM: ROSI BRAIDOTTI.......................... 19
3.1 THE MATERIALIST THEORY OF BECOMING ................................................................. 19
3.2 THE DELEUZIAN NOTION OF IMMANENCE .................................................................. 21
3.3 THE LEVELS OF SEXUAL DIFFERENCE......................................................................... 24
3.4 THE PROBLEM OF/WITH SEXUAL DIFFERENCE ............................................................ 29
4 MATERIALIST FEMINISM: ROSEMARY HENNESSY ....................................... 33
4.1 HISTORICAL MATERIALISM AND SYSTEMIC ANALYSIS ............................................... 33
4.2 THEORIZING THE SOCIAL ........................................................................................... 37
4.3 THE GENEALOGY OF HETERONORMATIVITY, COMMODITY CULTURE AND CAPITALISM
44
4.4 RADICAL SEXUAL POLITICS ....................................................................................... 49
5 CONCLUSION............................................................................................................... 53
6 BIBLIOGRAPHY .......................................................................................................... 57

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 1 INTRODUCTION

The notions of the material, materiality and materialism seem to proliferate in feminist

theory in the last decade. The emphasis on the material and matter emerged as a kind of

reaction to the post-structuralist overemphasizing of the decisive role of constructionism. An

ever increasing number of theories calling themselves ‘materialist’ or deploying the notions of

‘matter’, ‘materiality’ or ‘materialization’ as referential that are grounded in different

traditions indicates that an attempt at tracing down these sources and exploring their

(enabling) limits may contribute to grasping “the elusive quality of the material in feminist

thought” (Rahman & Witz, 2003, p. 243).

I conduct this analysis precisely for the reason mentioned above: students or young

scholars in gender studies, and in feminist theory in particular, often find themselves

desperate in the realm of ‘an always-already-constructed’ or ‘purely constructed reality’ that

runs into the counterintuitive claim “that words alone had the power to craft bodies from their

own linguistic substance” (Butler, 1993, p. x). In effect, a turn to an allegedly more stabile or

solid ‘materialism’ can be expected to remedy this contradictory situation. Although both

ends of the debate are oversimplified here, I argue that there are tensions, attractions or

desires, so to say, for further theorizing that could cut across these two ends of the trajectory

of ‘materiality’.

Rahman and Witz (2003) call for and engage in a careful examination of what they call

“the broadly materialist paradigm” (p. 245) and “the broadly post-structuralist Foucauldian

paradigm” (p. 253) in order to assess the potentiality of the concept of the material that is

stretched beyond the economic for developing a social ontology of gender and sexuality that

is supposed to be the common thread for both paradigms. In this thesis I adopt this strategy

1
and inquire into theoretical positions situated in both paradigms. In that I aim to arrive at a

kind of mapping of the material in feminist theory.

The surfacing of ‘the material’ on the feminist theoretical scene goes back to 1970s

where it emerged out of the dialogues with Marxism and its use was designated to account for

the social. This paradigm derived from Marxist historical materialism and as a social

constructionist strand opposed the naturalization of sexuality, and attempted to redefine it in

terms of the social and structural grounds of inequalities (Rahman & Witz, 2003, pp. 243-

244). Though the concept of the ‘material’ in this Marxist historical materialism originally

refers to the economic, the feminist focus on the social ontology of gender and sexuality

“stretched the concept of the material in order to capture those symbolic, experiential and

processual aspects of the social which were traditionally under-theorized in historical

materialism” (p. 244). Overviewing the three decades in the history of the broadly materialist

paradigm, Rahman and Witz (2003, p. 246) distinguish feminist materialism and materialist

feminism. The two are said to differ with respect to the adoption of the ‘components’ of

Marxist historical materialism. Unlike materialist feminism, feminist materialism works both

with the Marxist materialist method and the historical-materialist theory of political economy.

However, both tend to collapse into one another in the most recent form of ‘materialist

feminism’ developed by Rosemary Hennessy. The authors also note that it would be mistaken

to let ‘the cultural’, which in recent feminist debates is often a counterpart to the material, be

appropriated by the post-structuralist paradigm because that would reduce and limit the broad

materialist paradigm to economism, which has already been surpassed.

Although the authors distinguish in approach to the material two feminist paradigms,

they call for their mutual exchanges in conceptualizations. The leading figure of this broadly

post-structuralist materialist feminist paradigm is Judith Butler. She proposes the reworking

of ‘the matter’ in new terminologies of ‘materiality’ and a more processual form of

2
‘materialization’ (p. 254) that might viably inform sociological concepts. However, Butler’s

critics label discursive effectivity giving existence to bodies as ‘cultural materialism’ (p. 255).

Rahman and Witz extend the membership in the broadly post-structuralist paradigm to

include Susan Bordo and Iris Marion Young and stress the aspects of practicality (as distinct

to the sociality of matter) and the fleshliness of bodies.

The elaboration of materialist feminism by Rosemary Hennessy (1993, 2000) consists

partly in juxtaposing the ‘material’ histories of sex, gender and sexuality to the theoretical

stance of cultural materialism. As such cultural materialism denotes a broad range of theories

that came to the foreground in cultural theory and cultural studies in the last decade

predominantly in Anglo-American scholarship. The central concern for Hennessy’s thinking

is the redefinition of ‘sexual identity’. For that she draws upon a rather diverse body of

feminist works, namely that of Judith Butler, Diana Fuss, Teresa de Lauretis or Elizabeth

Grosz (Hennessy, 2000, pp. 28-29). As this list indicates, the umbrella term of cultural

materialism does not necessarily indicate a departure from Marxism, but engages in precisely

a struggle over “the means of [its] interpretation and communication” (Fraser, 1995, p. 44).

When staged by Butler and Fraser, this contestation of meanings is set in the public domain of

feminist academic dialogue that identifies capitalism as their shared problem. However, the

commitment to criticize late capitalist conditions does not prevent these theorists from not

being “compatible with a whole array of cultural strategies late capitalism has deployed to

sever the connection between culture and labor” (Hennessy, 2000, p. 28). In other words, it

seems inevitable that non-coherence, even contradiction must be performed within new

destabilizing frameworks in order to escape the shortcomings of cultural materialism.

Whereas Hennessy’s engagement with cultural materialism analyzes predominantly

Anglo-American theories, I assume, her list of cultural materialists can be expanded to

include a (geographically nomadic, though in her projects ‘European’) sexual difference

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theorist, Rosi Braidotti. Despite the fact that she shares certain interests and background with

Elizabeth Grosz or Teresa de Lauretis from the cultural materialist group discussed in details

by Hennessy, her ongoing debate with Judith Butler, either in the form of a ‘cyberspace’

exchange (Braidotti & Butler, 1997) or a self-reliant critique (Braidotti, 2002), exposes

considerable differences between Braidotti and Butler’s theorizing. Since Braidotti claims to

be devoted to the setting up and the development of the European Women’s Studies project,

analysis I am providing here can be said to proceed along and beyond the lines of Hennessy’s

global social analytic in that it exceeds the predominantly American orientation of Hennessy’s

thinking. Apart from that, the adoption of the view Hennessy offers may contribute to the re-

mapping of “the Trans-Atlantic disconnection” (Stanton, 1980; as cited in Braidotti, 1997, p.

23).

I call the competing views of Butler and Braidotti gender and sexuality paradigm and

sexual difference paradigm and will explain the details of their contentions. For a particular

period, to find a common ground for their conflictual views or a way out of the impasses of

their debate became a striking issue for me. Therefore I hope to offer at least a partial insight

into the commonalities of their conceptual frames in the following analyses. After I explain

the significant features of their theories respectively and in regard to the explication of

historical materialism in the first two chapters, I will point to the alleged contradictions

between their theories, which can be, nevertheless, rearticulated within Hennessy’s

framework.

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 2 GENDER AND SEXUALITY PARADIGM: JUDITH BUTLER

To be dead is like to sleep./Only you do not lay your body in bed but in the
soil./After that you have to justify in front of God why you’d better be dead than
alive./If you don’t convince him, he erases your brain and you have to start to live
your life again./Etc./Etc./Etc./Etc./Etc./Et cetera.

Aglaja Veteranyi

2.1 SEX, GENDER AND DESIRE

More than a decade has passed since Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) gave rise to

extensive discussions on the tenability of the two main categories around which feminist

theory evolved—those of sex and gender. At the same time it is already more than a decade

since Butler carried out an attempt to answer the question “What about the materiality of the

body, Judy?” (Butler, 1993, p. ix; emphasis in original) It is not my intention here to outline

the peculiarities of Butler’s account of the trouble with the allegedly progressive category of

gender, but to point to the substantial shift in conceptualizing gender as intrinsically

embedded in the particular ways one understands both sexuality and practices of

resignification.

The scandal of ‘collapsing’ the hard-won category of gender into sex stirred up

sentiments that had emerged ever since the high hopes on the critical feminist scene of the

1970s. The differentiation of sex and gender was considered to be essential and almost self-

explanatory within feminism. I presume that besides the theoretical problem of the

im/possibility to clearly distinguish between nature and culture, biological and social, the

displeasure to part with the term the genealogy of which can be traced back to Beauvoir’s

Second Sex (1949/1952), stems exactly from its being woven into the history of feminism’s

self-conception itself. The question of the possibility to leave behind or transgress one’s own

5
history will reemerge in different contexts but the question whether such a move is really

desirable has to be answered as well—a relevant line that I shall develop later.

In order to deal with her initial question of the (representational) feminist subject Butler

embarks on a Foucauldian analysis of sex and gender. It means that Butler involves in

analysis of how regulatory discursive practices institute certain coherent and naturalized

categories as their seemingly inevitable ‘effects’. Her basic premise is as follows: Provided

gender is not inherently in a causal relation to sex, then the sexed body can assume whatever

gender comes in handy. If woman is not an immutable subject, but is in her becoming, there

has to be a space for negotiations with the ‘given’ sex. But is there not something intriguing

about the fact that the genders one is expected to think of are binary, similarly to the alleged

two sexes? And that the gender one’s sexed body usually assumes and thus becomes

intelligible corresponds with this sex? Butler’s answer to the logic of gender inscribed on a

given sexed body contends that “gender must also designate the very apparatus of production

whereby the sexes themselves are established” (Butler, 1990, p. 7).

Besides drawing much on a Foucauldian framework, Butler’s inspiration in the search

for concrete tools for analyzing this apparatus goes back to Gayle Rubin’s essay Traffic in

Women (1974/1997) that was written in a time when Marxism was employed extensively but

had to be shown to have “a weak grasp of sex and gender, and (...) intrinsic limitations as a

theoretical framework for feminism” (Rubin & Butler, 1997, p. 71). Anthropologist Rubin

offered a convincing argumentation for the explanatory power of both sex and gender and

their intersection in the sex-gender system (Rubin, 1974/1997). Although Rubin’s account is

focused on the relation of sex and gender, her conceptualization explicitly relies on exploiting

the notion of sexuality as a relatively distinct category from sex. This conceptualization

purports the transformation of biological sexuality into a product of human activity in which

sexual needs are satisfied. Rubin’s innovation rested to a great extent on a shift in theorizing

6
women’s oppression from a Marxist viewpoint that focuses on the division of labor, women’s

position in the labor market, and social relations that condition reproduction, to an account

that integrates the results of Lévi-Strauss’s anthropological inquiries about kinship systems

and Freud’s psychoanalytical theories of individualization. The practice of exchange of

women in kinship systems forms solidarity bonds among men and is simultaneously

supplemented by the incest taboo, the imperative of compulsory heterosexuality, and the

restriction on women’s sexuality. Together they establish a gender asymmetry. This timeless

account of the sex-gender system still has to be complemented by the historical account of its

reproduction through deformation and transformation of originally bisexual androgynous

human individuals into girls and boys. Rubin’s vision of a society that got rid of gender

constraints is based upon the conjecture of loosening kinship structures that cause the wished

dissolution of mutually excluding and oppressing gender identities; a vision that was rather, as

she later admits, utopian and conforming to the expectations of the period of its emergence

(Rubin & Butler, 1997, p. 72). But the notion of a non-accidental conjunction of sex and

gender in a system introduced the issue of different firmness of the connection between these

two terms, and also their possible causality, and determinacy.

In Butler’s rearticulation of a discursive production of sex and gender, it is the concept

of sexuality resonating with Rubin’s “problem of trying to find some theoretical basis for

lesbianism” (Rubin & Butler, 1997, p. 72) that emerges to play an explicit role. While there is

‘the sex-gender system’ in Rubin, “the compulsory order of sex/gender/desire” (Butler, 1990,

p. 6) can be said to form a counterpart in Butler. And while Rubin’s account of the relations

between sex and gender was fashioned much in a structuralist way so that it showed both their

synchronic and diachronic organization in the unidirectional orientation of ‘how sex is made

into gender’, in Butler the additional distinction between sex, gender and desire points to the

7
mutual production of sex and gender in the patterning grid of compulsory heterosexuality.

The subjects enacted in this order have to become coherent so that their gender should denote

a unity of experience, of sex, gender, and desire, [and this occurs] only when sex can
be understood in some sense to necessitate gender—where gender is a psychic and/or
cultural designation of the self—and desire—where desire is heterosexual and
therefore differentiates itself through an oppositional relation to that other gender it
desires (Butler, 1990, p. 22; emphasis in original).

This consequential connection of sex and gender through the ideological investment and

cultivation of (heterosexual) desire is inserted both in the scientific register of a naturalistic

paradigm and an authentic-expressive paradigm and reinforced by their legitimizing power.

On analyzing the telling example of Foucault’s hero/in Herculine Barbin Butler shows

how the gendered experience of this hermaphrodite is uneasily grasped in terms of a

substantive gender core which is expected to be expressed, to come true in the bodily

appearance and desires. The discontinuous happenings of sex, gender and desire of Herculine

Barbin, the hermaphrodite, is interpreted to be a site of “the disconcerting convergence of

heterosexuality and homosexuality” (Butler, 1990, p. 23) and as such unidentifiable in the

binary genders. It is this understanding that stimulates Butler’s attempt to disrupt the working

of the metaphysics of substance by exposing the allegedly immutable ground of one’s

identity, i.e. the sexed body as consisting in performative doing (pp. 23-25).

2.2 MATERIALIZATION IN PERFORMATIVITY

What precisely is the domain of performativity and what does its working consist in?

The interpretations of this concept might be misguided because of Butler’s definition of

‘identity’. In her view identity is constituted through acts, gestures and enactments as

“fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive

means” (Butler, 1990, p. 136; emphasis in original). When Butler attempts to consider gender

identity in terms of “a corporeal style (...), which is both intentional and performative, where

8
‘performative’ suggests a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning” (p. 139;

emphasis in original), she runs into the problems of the contingency of performativity vs. the

intentionality of the self-fashioning embodied subject. She makes an attempt to overcome this

tension in Bodies That Matter (1993) by the introduction of the notion of materialization.

Though, as it will be shown in the analysis of her notion of temporality, Butler addresses this

problem only indirectly and insufficiently. Nevertheless, already in Gender Trouble (1990)

she says that “the action of gender requires a performance that is repeated” (p. 140; emphasis

in original). However the nature of that repetition construed as “at once a reenactment and

reexperiencing of a set of meanings already socially established” (p. 140) is explained in more

details only in her subsequent work.

In Bodies That Matter (1993) Butler innovatively answers the question of “what

language is left for understanding this corporeal enactment, gender” (Butler, 1990, p. 139).

Here she displaces the language of constructivism (of totalizing interpretations of which, such

as linguistic monism, she was accused) with “a return to the notion of matter (...) as a process

of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and

surface we call matter” (Butler, 1993, p. 9; emphasis in original). That is, materialization

refers to the process in which the subject comes into being by means of reiterated citation of

the law or the norms, thus citing what is already acknowledged as having the authority or

power for being cited and at the same time through the act of citing reproducing that

authority. Butler comprehends norms in terms of a Foucauldian regulatory ideal, which is

never achieved or assumed completely but rather regulates the process of materialization. The

materialization of the sexed body has to take place through repeated citings of the law of the

sex, by means of which genders are defined only by meeting the standards of heterosexual

desire. The imposition of norms means that the subject can be neither a voluntaristic

constructor of itself on the one hand, nor totally subjugated to them, on the other. Because no

9
body can be said to embody the whole array of norms in their completion, it is precisely

through this incompleteness and their working as a regulative ideal that their repetition is

required.

In Butler’s terms, a body that matters has to fulfill the condition of adherence

(consisting of citation) to the law of sex, which is the heterosexual matrix. Not meeting this

very basic requirement implies the exclusion from (legitimated) intelligibility. In other words,

though we might name the bodies of those who fail to conform to the law of sex still as

bodies, they are nevertheless “abjected or delegitimated bodies [that] fail to count as ‘bodies’”

(Butler, 1993, p. 15), i.e. they are not bodies that matter. In fact they do form the “boundaries

of bodily life” (p. 15) and as such, in terms of Butler’s account, which says that “’to matter’

means at once ‘to materialize’ and ‘to mean’” (p. 32), neither are they materialized, nor do

they seem to ‘make sense’ in the heterosexual matrix.

But would it be possible for such bodies to matter? Since the norms are “the

temporalized regulation of signification, and not (...) a quasi-permanent structure ” (p. 22) that

effect sedimentation, they might allow for modification. The mere fact of the citation of the

law of sex in different moment (and in different context) makes this citation non-identical

with another citation, while at the same time in order to be citations they have to be

“identifiable as conforming with an iterable model”, i.e. the norm (Derrida; as cited in Butler,

1993, p. 13) So although the naturalized sex seems to be allegedly already there, in the bodies

intelligible in the framework of either femininity or masculinity, the naturalization is a

“sedimented effect of a reiterative or ritual practice” (p. 10). That what escapes the work of

norm in reiterations can however form a ‘basis’ for its destabilization and that precisely

because it is not an absolute outside, but “a constitutive ‘outside’(...) which can only be

thought—when it can—in relation to that discourse” (p. 8), meaning to the norm. This

reasoning implies that although this ‘outside’ is yet unintelligible, it is not a domain of a sort

10
of radical unintelligibility; by assuming the form of reiterative practices it can come into

being at some point and thereby change also the detectable boundary of the matter.

2.3 AGENCY AND TEMPORALITY

I find it very difficult, if not impossible, to account of the change of the heteronormative

order which would redeploy the abject in the sphere of the intelligible in exclusively Butlerian

terms. By underscoring “the effect of sedimentation that the temporality of construction

implies” (Butler, 1993, p. 245, note 8) Butler aims to emphasize the duration of the past,

which means that past does not consist of successive and distinct moments, but of a nexus

articulated to coherent discourse, one in which the elements are not distinguishable anymore.

The past however cannot be equated merely with the sedimentation of previous reiterations.

Since the reiterative acts rest on the exclusion of the abject, there is still that which is

repressed or forgotten. In my opinion by this move Butler prepares the ground for the

psychoanalytic model of the subject’s constitution. In Butler’s understanding an act does not

have a self-contained status, but “is itself a repetition, a sedimentation, and congealment of

the past which is precisely foreclosed in its act-like status” (p. 244, note 7). Nevertheless, this

explanation of the semblance of an act does not seem to provide us with an account of

intentional agency from which Butler does not want to refrain. Here it is important to

remember again that when Butler theorizes the abject, it is not a sphere of ultimate

unintelligibility, but a domain of embodied beings that (paradoxically) do not (yet) matter. So

her theory of performative agency surely has its interests in providing these abjects with an

account of agency capable of subverting the law of sex.

Butler grounds her theory of performative agency in “the inherent indeterminacy within

meaning systems” (McNay, 2003, p. 142) and it is the Derridean „différance which erodes

and contests any and all claims to discrete identity“ (Butler, 1993, p. 245, note 8) and thereby

11
enables the iterability. According to McNay, Butler’s theory is not “a theory of agency at all,

but, rather, a general account of the conditions of possibility of agency (....) a necessary but

not sufficient condition” (McNay, 2003, p. 142). For such a theory, contends McNay, in

addition to the recognition of an “illimitable process of signification” (Butler, 1990, p. 143)

and the emphasis on the retrospective dimension of temporality in terms of the sedimentation

of reiterative acts we still need an active dimension of agency. Butler herself makes a hint at

such an account, when in the last sentence of a rather extensive endnote discussion of

temporality she advises to consult Bourdieu’s understanding of the temporality of social

construction, but she herself does not pursue this line (Butler, 1993, p. 246, note 8).

The account McNay offers redirects the discussion of temporality towards Bourdieu’s

temporalized, or rather historicized, notion of habitus. Here habitus is thematized as the

construction of the human body within cultural norms and instead of a connection to the

subject it refers to social agents (McNay, 2003, p. 143). Bourdieu precludes the discussion of

the future in terms of merely conscious projects (that would require a conscious agent whom

Butler would also question) by pointing to the scholasticity of this idea and arguing for a need

of “the substitution of a reflexive vision for the practical vision”1 (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 207).

Bourdieu’s embodied social agent is the one who temporalizes its own existence in terms of

(a past oriented) retention and (a future oriented) protention (McNay, 2003, p. 143).

Protention is “a prereflexive aiming at a forth-coming which offers itself as quasi-present in

the visible” (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 207) and whose aim does not lie in a contingent future. So

when the agency of habitus is concerned, it cannot be said to exceed the immanent tendencies

of a social field, but it rather “encompasses the practical anticipations and retrospections that

are inscribed as objective potentialities or traces in the immediate given” (Bourdieu, 2000, p.

210).

1
Butler is the target of Bourdieu’s criticism of the scholastic reason in both Masculine Domination
(2001) and together with Donna Haraway implicitly also in Pascalian Meditations (2000).

12
 McNay concludes that this approach forestalls the opposition between freedom and

constraint, the opposition so pertinent to the liberal conception of subject, which is still

haunting Butler’s conception of agency. According to McNay, “the idea of resignification is

far from adequate in capturing the complex dynamics of social change (....) it has the effect of

an absolutization of change where the act of resignification becomes valorized in itself”

(McNay, 2003, p. 144; emphasis in original). Contrary to Butler’s emphasis on the

indeterminacy of resignification (as opposed to the determinacy of signification), Bourdieu

accounts of action as “a kind of necessary coincidence (...) between a habitus and a field”

(Bourdieu, 2000, p. 143), in which change comes to be more dialectical, than radical.

2.4 FEMINISM MEETS QUEER THEORY

In addition to my previous proposition that the dissent of a body of feminist theory with

Butler concerning the question of both the explanatory force and normative power of the

notion of gender came from the history of feminism’s self-conception, again it has to be

emphasized that these feminist theories “restricted the meaning of gender to received notions

of masculinity and femininity” (Butler, 1999, p. vii)—a move motivated by the purpose of the

representational politics of feminism. On the other hand, Butler’s theorizing of agency in the

form of resignification practices is explicitly applied only to the abject, unintelligible and in

her account ‘drag’ subjects (Butler, 1990, pp. 136-139; Butler, 1993, pp. 230-234). This way

it is the drag identity that comes to be the embodiment of the subversion of gender norms in

her theory.

I assume Butler’s attempt to criticize the heterosexual matrix underlying feminist

theorizing which consolidated feminism at the expenses of exclusions of lesbians, bisexual

and transgender women to be a political intervention into what Butler calls the symbolic.

Reifications of the symbolic might be conceptualized as partly temporary sedimentations.

13
However, the fact “that the work [Gender Trouble] was taken as a queer departure from

feminism signaled to me [Butler] how deeply identified feminism is with those very

heterosexist assumptions” (Butler, 1997, p. 2). Ironically then, it seems to me that the horizon

of intelligibility of feminist theory did not modify, but rather confirmed the abjection of the

constitutive ‘outside’ as Butler would have wanted to achieve by concentrating the

conceptualizations of non-heterosexual desires into the newly emerged field of queer theory.

But does queer theory or particular currents within queer theory stand the test which the

exclusionary politics and theory of feminism had to pass, though unsuccessfully? Butler’s

message for all interested in queering says: “you do not have to be gay, you do not have to be

lesbian, you do not have to be anything, it’s not a question of being, it’s not a question of

identity” (Butler; in Butler, 2001a, p. 18; emphasis in original). The queer movement was

meant to be open to affiliations with heterosexuals sympathizing with gay and lesbian politics

but they did not have to pass the test of the ‘proper’ sexual orientation and also “queer was

supposed to be something that would cover the bisexuality essential to straight people”

(Dimova; in Butler, 2001b, p. 60). Similarly to the way in which Butler formulated the task

for feminist theory as producing “a feminist genealogy of the category of women,” which

qualified as the juridical subject of feminism (Butler, 1990, p. 5; emphasis in original), queer

theory also has to interrogate and contest the notion of queer that is “still alive and well”

(Butler; in Butler, 2001b, p. 61). Such a genealogy will most likely have to contain an entry

on today’s dissatisfaction with the category: ‘queer’ already seems to have become a closed

‘club’ where distinction is made between ‘queer’ and ‘non-queer’ and queer theory as such

resigns itself thereby to the strategy of dis-identity politics (Mizielinska and Butler; in Butler,

2001a, pp. 18-20). However, Butler insists that “both feminist and queer studies need to move

beyond and against those methodological demands which force separations in the interests of

canonization and provisional institutional legitimation” (Butler, 1997, p. 24). Instead of

14
building an autonomous and discrete discipline, queer theory should resist domestication and

exclusionary institutional consolidation.

2.5 QUEER THEORY MEETS LEFT THEORY

Moreover, Butler’s queering of feminism affected also her debate in another ‘club’,

namely that of left academia2. In her exchange with Nancy Fraser (Butler, 1998b; Fraser,

1997; Fraser, 1998) she addresses the issue of the character of gay and lesbian activism as it is

defined in the scope of the new social movements that range from struggles for redistribution

to struggles for recognition. Though contradictions concerning class and race and ensuing

class and race struggles are considered to be economic and feminist struggles both economic

and cultural, that is, they fight the injustice stemming from maldistribution as well as

misrecognition, Fraser takes the gay and lesbian struggles as squeezed to perform the role of

an ideal-typical cultural struggle. In response to Butler’s criticism of the latter Fraser admits

that the oppression of “virtually all real-world oppressed collectivities” (Fraser, 1998, p. 145,

footnote 3) has components of both class and social status whereby these collectives “suffer

both maldistribution and misrecognition in forms where neither of these injustices is a mere

indirect effect of the other, but where each has some independent weight” (Fraser, 1998, p.

145, footnote 3; emphasis in original).

Fraser defends her Weberian approach that relies on the delimitation of the ideal types

of collectivities fitting into either the redistributive or the recognition model of justice as an

issue discussed hypothetically “in the mode of a thought experiment” (Fraser, 1998, p. 144,

footnote 3).3 Though her heuristics is valuable, one of the problems is, as she herself also

2 For a broader discussion, see Brown, 1998; Butler, 1998a; Buttegieg, 1998; Connery, 1998a;
Connery, 1998b.
3 Though one can question this alleged separation of analysis and normativity, it is important to note
that later in the debate one Fraser’s consequential differentiation is omitted. Fraser namely sets the criteria for

15
acknowledges, that this approach “tends to reinforce the fallacy that individuals occupy only

one group” (Hennessy, 2000, p. 223). Furthermore her argument also perpetuates the

separation of culture from political economy, despite her efforts to overcome it. Another

problem Hennessy points out is that Fraser deals with sexual identities “as an ontological

given” (Hennessy, 2000, p. 223), even though their emergence a historical effect.

Both Butler and Hennessy argue that despite the acknowledgement of heterosexism in

late capitalist societies, Fraser’s heuristics, her distinction between redistributive exclusion

over ‘merely’ recognition based ones, is premised on the binary distinction between hetero-

and homosexuality. Consequently, Fraser’s approach brackets off a number of questions—

including “how sexual identity historically has been ‘interimbricated’ in the (gendered)

division of labor, in the accumulation of surplus value, and in the advancing processes of

commodification” (Hennessy, 2000, p. 223). The way Fraser theorizes the hidden gender

subtext of late capitalist societies (Fraser, 1995; Fraser, 1998) implies a more or less

heterosexist account of political economy. To put it differently, in order to distinguish

between Fraser’s acknowledged heterosexism and its (probably unintended) perpetuating,

Fraser conceptualizes gender separately from sexuality. In that she thinks of the production of

gender-economic (workers and consumers) and gender-politic subjects (citizens) to be

overseen by “the feminine childrearer” (Fraser, 1995, p. 36) who ensures the appropriate

reproduction of the feminine and masculine gendered subjects, Fraser narrows the whole

domain of gender matrix to its elaboration in terms of family and most of all in terms of the

adherence to one of the ends of the spectrum in terms of consideration of what are the ultimate aims of doing the
injustices—in case of the collectivities which are in recognition deficits it is elimination, expulsion, or even
extermination and in case of the groups suffering from maldistribution the preferred way of the group treatment
is exploitation (Fraser, 1997, pp. 35-36, note 19). This distinction will prove decisive for displaying Butler’s
argument against the ‘merely’ cultural character of oppression based on homophobia and heterosexism, as
insufficient.

16
role of the feminine childrearer (adding her to the company of Habermasian already

mentioned late-capitalist roles).

Butler’s addition to the feminine childrearer role consists of the claim that it is not only

the labor of the feminine childrearer but also that of the heteronormative gender matrix that

ensures the (re-)production of human beings. Nevertheless, Butler’s attempt to rearticulate the

production of gender in the family as “part of the production of human beings themselves”

(Butler, 1998b, p. 40) and (by using Rubin’s concept of sex-gender system) to show “how

kinship operated to reproduce persons in social forms that served the interest of capital” (p.

40) suffers from ahistoricism. Though one can agree (Fraser included) that the social

reproduction of persons depends on the reproduction of the heterosexual family which is

involved in the reproduction of the heterosexualized persons and that “the sexual division of

labor could not be understood apart from the reproduction of gendered persons” (p. 40),

Butler’s claim that “the regulation of sexuality was systematically tied to the mode of

production proper to the functioning of the political economy” (p. 40; emphasis in original)

needs to be specified in terms of the particular historical moments of that regulation.

In her criticism of both Butler and Fraser, Hennessy agrees with Butler that rules

regulating relations of property and economic entitlement are very much grounded in such

kind of production and exchange which tends to maintain the stability of gender, the

heterosexuality of desire, and the naturalization of the family. However, argues Hennessy,

Butler does not offer an explanation of “how sexuality mediates relations of labor or has

anything at all to do with exploitation” (2000, pp. 58-59). Such an explanation would suffice

to ground the injustice against gay and lesbians in the political economy. Furthermore, it

would also show that gay and lesbian social movements are not ‘merely’ cultural. Instead, she

conflates the economic and the cultural in a turn to anthropology (Butler, 1998b, p. 43-44)

and this allows Butler to substitute kinship relations for relations of production. Such an

17
expansion of the economic sphere to the inclusion of the social reproduction of persons in fact

means “overwriting political economy with sexuality” (Hennessy, 2000, p. 58) and though

this social reproduction of persons is not ‘merely’, “then [is] finally, [always-already]

cultural” (p. 59).

18
 3 THE SEXUAL DIFFERENCE PARADIGM: ROSI BRAIDOTTI

Acknowledging one’s participation in and sharing of locations of power is the

starting-point for the cartographic method, also known in feminism as the politics of
location.

Rosi Braidotti

3.1 THE MATERIALIST THEORY OF BECOMING

As it was mentioned above, Braidotti’s “materialist theory of becoming” (Braidotti,

2002) falls outside the focus of both Hennessy’s (2000) and Rahman and Witz’s (2003)

critical inquiry, although it might contribute to the elaboration of some strong points credited

to Butler, i.e. the processuality of the material. In order to sketch the field of materialisms

applied as a countermove to what I would (loosely) formulate ‘the menace of exaggerated

constructionism’ I consider an inquiry into Braidotti’s current of materialism desirable. For its

explication I will mainly focus on “Materialism: Embodiment and Immanence” (pp. 16-22)

and “Bodily Materiality and Sexual Difference” (pp. 22-58) in Braidotti’s recent

Metamorphoses (2002). The very associative character of Braidotti’s writing which she

herself acknowledges, sets limits to an explicit demarcation of her concepts. The diction of

the work purports to lead the reader through its outline by approximation so that no definite

meaning is given to concepts in explanation; the explanandum, if you wish, is truly being

dispersed on the plane of the whole text. And as Braidotti insists, she does not want to take an

authoritative stance with regard to conceptualizations. Instead, with the intention of re-

conceptualizing the public sphere, Braidotti “joins forces” (Braidotti, 2002, p. 6) with another

‘materialist’ Nancy Fraser (sic!) and invites the reader to enter into “a collective discussion

and confrontation” (p. 6) while asking cartographical questions: “Do you agree with the

account of late post-industrial culture I will provide here? Do we live in the same world? in

[sic] the same time-zones? How do you account for the kind of world you are living in?” (p.

19
6; emphasis in original) In my view, if there is anything ‘explicitly’ concerned with the

material in its most determinate sense, then it is precisely these questions that spell out

Braidotti’s rather vague (Wuthnow, 2002) advocacy of the politics of location.

Materialism is to be found in various collocations in Braidotti’s work and it seems to

encompass a diverse body of theories. She distinguishes gender materialism, historic

materialism, neo-materialism, and radical materialism (Braidotti, 2002, p. 34). With her

“enfleshed or embodied materialism” Braidotti avows herself to be continuing in the tradition

of what she calls “the ’materialism of the flesh’ school” (p. 5). The merits of this French

tradition going back to the 18th century and more recently represented by Bachelard,

Canguilhem, Foucault, Lacan, Irigaray and Deleuze consist of giving priority “to issues of

sexuality, desire and the erotic imaginary” that she connects to “the corporeal feminism of

sexual difference” (p. 5). Materialism in Braidotti’s account is strongly connected to the issue

of embodiment and finding out about new ways of representing the body. The body is to

become the primary medium through which she wants to think (p. 5) in order not to make it

an object dissolving itself in obvious redundancy while ‘doing philosophy.’

Instead of commenting on this very general reference to a particular notion of

materialism I find it more productive to engage with the concepts involved in elaborations of

her theory, be it immanence, radical immanence, nomadic subject, becoming, or the sensible

transcendental. Though these concepts do not seem to be ordered or structured in a complex

relational net, in which their meanings would be defined exclusively, I will go through some

of them in a cluster, taking them to have the character of a Wittgensteinian family

resemblance or Foucault’s toolkit.

20
3.2 THE DELEUZIAN NOTION OF IMMANENCE

While Rahman and Witz (2003) refer to current antinomies within feminist social theory

in which the material is situated, e.g the material and the cultural, materialism and idealism,

structure and lived experience or historicization and deconstruction (p. 245), the classical

philosophical antinomy of immanence and transcendence remains absent in their

enumeration. The missing link to the immanence-transcendence antinomy however can be

said to result from their primary focus on precisely feminist social theory, while Braidotti’s

theory of sexual difference evolves more or less from the ontological description and

diagnostics (Braidotti in Braidotti & Butler, 1997, p. 43). Braidotti, after criticizing Deleuze

for joining the club of philosophers universalizing the feminine (in the concept of becoming

feminine) into a metaphor in Patterns of Dissonance (1991), aims to draw on his concepts

with respect to elaborating the notion of (radical) immanence, although her relation to

Deleuze remains unspecified as she negatively contends that “nomadology is not at all

incompatible with feminist practices of sexual difference” (Braidotti, 2002, p. 5). The notion

of immanence, occasionally in conjuncture with the attribute ‘radical’ seems to connote

materialism in a more transparent way than the other categories.

Nevertheless, Kerslake (2002) warns of equating the two concepts and considering

immanence as something that “can be immediately affirmed, without any prior investigation

into its possibility” (p. 10). Instead he insists on the problematic and changing status of

immanence through all periods of Deleuze’s philosophizing and analyzes the problem on a

scale stretched between Kant’s transcendentalism and Hegel’s idealism. The term itself has a

rich theological and philosophical history.4 Deleuze’s careful reading of Spinoza’s absolute

immanence might serve as a crossroad for explication of other tracks of both his and

4
In Deleuze’s history of philosophies of immanence the term goes back to Neoplatonism and
culminates in Spinoza who is, notwithstanding this long history, invoked almost as an originator if not only
prominent philosopher of immanence by recent philosophers.

21
Braidotti’s thought. Spinoza’s deductive defining of substance and its attributes leads him to

the assertion of “one substance composed of the set of really distinct attributes” (p. 13;

emphasis in original). If there is only one substance (which is in Spinoza’s elaboration God),

all attributes have to be affirmed univocally of this absolutely infinite substance and not any

other. Provided attributes cannot transcend the substance (so that they cannot be ‘backed’, so

to say, by another substance), their difference and infinity5 ‘give rise’ to the substance, in

which they are not in a compelling unity or totality, but are always in relations of “real

distinction” or “pure difference” to one another. In Deleuze’s terms it means that there is

absolute immanence—“the absolute identity of Being and difference” (Deleuze; as cited in

Kerslake, 2002, p. 13).

Furthermore, Deleuze claims “immanence must be realized” (Kerslake, 2002, p. 13;

emphasis in original). This would imply his discrepancy from Spinoza’s traditional

ontological argument that “it pertains to the nature of a substance to exist” (Spinoza; as cited

in Nadler, 2001, para. 7). This realization takes the shape of an expression of Being in

absolute difference. Kerslake argues that Hegel pursues this goal rather convincingly but with

a risk of traversing the immanent and making it realize itself in self-differentiating

(teleological) Being that, however, pertains to “an illegitimate transcendence” (Kerslake,

2002, p. 15) because it proceeds by the means of the direct movement of negation (pp. 14-

15). “If absolute immanence is to be affirmed, it cannot be as a possibility, but as a necessity.

And that requires that it defeat the other ontological possibilities” (p. 15; emphasis in

original).

But Deleuze’s intention is not to be a mere descriptor, a photographer of the structure of

being already there, possibly as Spinoza, whose goal consisted in “demonstrating the structure

of the absolute” (p. 15; emphasis in original) and, as such, was in the position of a detached

5
“Proposition 8: Every substance is necessarily infinite. (....) Proposition 10: Each attribute of a
substance must be conceived through itself.” (Spinoza; as cited in Nadler, 2001, para. 7)

22
subject. If we accept Kerslake’s preliminary definition of a philosophy of immanence saying

that “thought is shown to be fully expressive of being” (p. 10), this can move our reasoning

more closely to Kant’s notion of critical reason, i.e. immanent critique of reason by means of

which “reason can perform a critical operation upon itself” (p. 16; emphasis in original). So

‘the plane of immanence’ is not inherent in being predominantly but also denotes the specific

character of cognitive faculties.

Kerslake claims that Deleuze profits from the double nature of the location of man (sic!)

within the realms of noumena and phenomena in Kant and in this way he solves one of the

most precarious problems for “he can legitimately claim that thought has access to noumenal

being” (p. 17; emphasis in orginal). What is the disposition of this access? Does Deleuze want

to claim that people’s cognitive faculties have the ability to immediately grasp the Ideas of the

noumenal? Hardly, yet the question needs to be reformulated: Can we claim one is capable of

a totalizing knowledge with the help of the regulative ‘function’ of the Ideas? Deleuze’s view

takes its stance directly from the other side. Ideas as a horizon cannot be generalized, i.e.

cannot be included into knowledge as positive claims but they are what motivate one to

pursue knowledge and engage in the activity, process of thinking.

Does this imply a notion of transcendentalism, i.e. the delimitation of the conditions of

the possibility of experience? Kerslake argues that Deleuze’s philosophy encourages one to a

“transcendent use or exercise” (p. 20; emphasis in original), running into the limits of

experience while at the same time transgressing them. Precisely at those moments when the

faculties of cognition have to stop in Kant, hitting the boundaries of their capacity as they get

stuck in irresolvable antinomies, does Deleuze reformulate the regulative relation of Ideas and

thinking while he asserts that we have to “treat problems [Ideas] as concepts” (p. 20;

emphasis in original). Thus, Ideas do not form a Kantian “purely logical world of

representation” (p. 20). The task for a theoretician therefore is to affirm their problematicity

23
and understand them as a Spinozian absolute difference, “toward which cognition and critique

move” (p. 20). All this suggests that what is immanent is not something we already hold in

our hands (manceps), immediately touch upon, or a kind of pre-reflexive plane to be acted

upon by the critical capacities of thinking. Instead immanence forms a teleological horizon of

thinking activity.

Similarly to the manner Kerslake views the shifts in Deleuze’s notion of immanence one

does not have to subject Braidotti’s re-working of this concept to what she might call the

Oedipal authority of her philosophical ‘master’, either. Shortly, Braidotti seems to be more

Spinozian than Kantian, which means that her conception of sexual difference is in need of

the ontological argument saying that “it pertains to the nature of Being to exist” (Spinoza; as

cited in Nadler, 2001, para. 7). Her understanding of “radical immanence” as “issues of

embodiment, (...) representing the body” and commitment “to think through the body, not in a

flight away from it” (Braidotti, 2002, p. 5) can imply that she assumes the immanent to be

pre-reflexive. The claim that “philosophical materialism (...) highlights the bodily structure of

subjectivity and consequently also issues of sexuality and sexual difference” (p. 20; empahsis

added) confirms this understanding of immanence and materiality. In order to analyze the

meaning of immanence and materiality I will return to Braidotti’s primary design of the

sexual difference project or “the project of feminist nomadism” (Braidotti, 1994, p. 158).

3.3 THE LEVELS OF SEXUAL DIFFERENCE

Braidotti draws a spatial-temporal map, diagram, multi-layered project (her terminology

seems to vary) of sexual difference on three basic levels. Relations among them are not

supposed to be dialectical at all, while they can coexist in space and time. In fact in the

everyday life they are not easy to be distinguished and, she claims, they “can be entered at any

level and at any moment” (Braidotti, 1994, p. 159; emphasis in original). In accordance with

24
her distinction between descriptive and programmative aspects of sexual difference (Braidotti

& Butler, 1997, p. 58) she takes the three levels of sexual difference to be its three different

aspects. On the first plane of sexual difference we find “the perverse logic of (...) dualism”

(Braidotti, 2000, p. 299). This is the difference between men and women as it is defined and

symbolically at work in patriarchal society, drawn into a diagnostic map. On this map, the

subject organization of woman is molar, i.e. traditional in that she is defined as the Other of

the Same – a molar machine, a “stabilized aggregate of molecular elements” narrowed down

and invested “in determinate formations of [these] multiplicities which exclude other

formations” (Lorraine, 1999, p. 114).

The second level of sexual difference explores the notion of sexual difference in terms

of political cartography (Braidotti, 2000, p. 301) and demands to think of sexual difference in

distance from the unified representation of Woman as that which mirrors and gives existence

to the universal, though, male subject. It introduces the possibility of creating women’s

liaisons and at the same time also the recognition of multiplicity (i.e. molecular constitution)

of real-life women. This is the axis of difference upon which they are recognized. So then

each woman’s identity is expected to consist of “successive identifications that is to say of

unconscious internalized images which escape rational control” (p. 303).

On the third level sexual difference culminates in the utopia of “a visionary mode of

thinking where the poetic and the political intersect powerfully” (p. 305). It is up to each real-

life woman to consume and digest the traditional representation with which she is equated in a

mimetic repetition and position herself in different experience levels. Above all, she is

expected to project herself upon this u-topos, “the nowhere” and “‘not yet’” of sexual

difference where “the material/maternal” (Braidotti, 2002, p. 23) coincide and which probably

finds its more pregnant articulation in need of activating and enlivening one’s memory for

women’s embodied genealogies.

25
 Braidotti’s project of feminist nomadism insists on the predominant role of sexual

difference. However, I do not want to enter into endless discussions on essentialism but rather

leave this term aside and try to grasp the problem from slightly different angles. I would

rather rephrase the question like this: Does Braidotti have to draw on the Spinozian

ontological argument or can she afford to recognize the more Kantian interpretation of the

faculty of human thinking (not reasoning) in rethinking sexual difference? While considering

the determinacy of variables such as class, race, sex, nationality and culture for the

constitution of human subject, Braidotti insists that it is a “human capacity for simultaneously

incorporating and transcending” them (Braidotti, 2002, p. 21) that structures the embodied

subject. Therefore “the embodiedness of the subject is a form of bodily materiality, not of the

natural, biological kind” (pp. 20-21). But if the appropriations of the subjects by the

seemingly determinate molar machines of race, class or sex can be resisted, renounced while

at the same time the subject is being constituted under the keeper of another variable, where,

then, is the source of Braidotti’s conviction that sexual difference is always there, either

retrospectively or in a utopian vision, where it is said to occupy a primary position? Braidotti

suggests these unclear turns e.g. in the above cited claim, in which the bodily structure of

subjectivity consequently implies sexual difference. This is not to say that such a case is non-

existent but, I suppose, this implication is not necessarily of a general character. I suspect

Braidotti is “working backwards through” (Braidotti in Braidotti & Butler, 1997, p. 47;

emphasis in original) in a way that can be legitimate as long as we parallel this ‘consequential

chain’ with the power of the ontological argument to endow sexual difference with an

unconditioned being.

But on the other hand, approximating the Kantian end of the setting in question,

Braidotti follows the steps of Deleuze in his engagement with transcendental empiricism. As

Colebrook (2000) states, the task for philosophy of transcendental empiricism is not to

26
approach the given by the means of the search for its conditions (i.e. by relying on reason’s

capacity of synthesis in experience), but “to respond to the given” (p. 113). This alone, I

think, would not be enough because response can take many forms and what else should one

call responding, reacting if not the labor of feminist theory in analyzing and critically

reassessing ‘male-stream’ philosophy? I suppose that at the time of Braidotti’s entrance into

the club of renowned international feminist theoreticians, her call for a non-reactionary and

creative theory that would not exhaust itself in quarrels with the mainstream, could already

find a very sustaining environment. If the subject that is being theorized in her account is

always a becoming-subject, then the process of its becoming has to be sustained. And it is

precisely “will to know, the desire to say, the desire to speak” that altogether form “a

founding, primary, vital, necessary and therefore original desire to become” (Braidotti, 2002,

p. 22) sustaining the process of becoming.

It is the ontological desire that stands at the beginning of the sexual difference project.

But it has much more in common with the Foucauldian technologies of self-fashioning than

with Butler’s account of the necessity to be, notwithstanding the expenses of one’s

denigration or oppression. Desire, as Braidotti says, is meant to be opposed to the will (p. 22)

and at the same time is not equated with libidinal desires without exception. However,

libidinal desire and epistemophilic drive (Moi, 1989, p. 199) seem to be hardly separable.

Instead of ‘cogito ergo sum’ the subject now proclaims “’desidero ergo sum’” (Braidotti,

2002, p. 20). This desire lies at the heart of the activity of thinking (which might imply that

the pedestal of reason would not to be that easy to occupy) and is meant to “encompass a

number of faculties of which affectivity, desire and the imagination are prime movers” (p.

20). Subjectivity contains both power and desire and their boundaries seem to be permeable in

that in Braidotti’s account of power, in addition to being in charge of repressive means as

potestas, it probably shares certain potentia with desire (p. 21-22). In its desire to be the

27
subject of sexual difference, in short, not only is the one delimited by potestas of the false

symmetry of the first-level Same/Other dichotomy, is also the bearer of “social change and in-

depth transformations” (p. 22).

Affirmative politics demands affirmative and passionate philosophy, “far from being a

reactive or critical kind of thought” (p. 22). It seems Braidotti does not take into consideration

the immanence of the Kantian critique. Colebrook re-asserts this line by saying that “feminist

philosophy’s engagement with concepts might not be critical (...) but inventive: creating new

concepts, new questions and new problems” (Colebrook, 2000, p. 114; emphasis in original).

Braidotti’s redefining of sexual difference in Irigarayan and Deleuzian terms can without any

doubts be called a kind of meaning-making that expects to be inserted into a field of events so

that it will not critically review the past events it cannot effect. Precisely the opposite is what

Braidotti, similarly to Deleuze, demands from philosophical creativity, i.e. “concepts that are

equal to the event” (p. 114).

Although Braidotti attempts to stand the challenge of “thinking about processes, rather

than concepts” (Braidotti, 2002, p. 1), I suppose this is more of a remark specifying the

character of wished concepts than ground-breaking ‘conceptual’ change in her vocabulary.

Philosophizing through the body, realizing “a bodily philosophy” (Colebrook, 2000, p. 126;

emphasis in original) is what will open the sense of the events so dear to feminism. A concept

that points to the virtuality of an event and thereby realizes the difference of a (sexual)

difference, always sets up a new question, problem. Therefore it does not resort to the

negativism of a reaction. It seems as if Braidotti’s philosophizing attempts to be always a step

in advance - avant-garde, so to say. To some extent, I suppose, here rests a problem to be

criticized in Braidotti’s theory.

By adopting a position which gives credits to the substantiality of the thinking activity

and by positing the affirmative philosophizing activity almost into its center, Braidotti seems

28
to avoid the risk which endangers any theory: “The worst metaphysical positions are those

which one adopts unconsciously whilst believing or claiming that one is speaking from a

position outside philosophy” (Le Doeuff; as cited in Gatens, 1992, p. 122). Although this

condition of a non-hierarchized theory seems to be fulfilled, I assume Braidotti shifts her

positions about ‘the feminist subject’ in order to secure the alleged stability and the status of

the philosophical or thinking activity in it.

3.4 THE PROBLEM OF/WITH SEXUAL DIFFERENCE

In Metamorphoses (2002), we can trace the same problems that were sketched on three

wide planes already in Nomadic Subjects (1994). In the previous paragraphs I already

summarized the most important aspects of each of the levels, now I am pointing merely to the

shift essential to Braidotti’s project. Though it is almost self-evident that a/ny feminist

philosopher holds certain feminist stance, Braidotti’s “feminist subjectivity” (Braidotti, 1994,

Table 2, p. 162) is a critical location enabling the positivity of sexual difference as a political

project in that it unveils the asymmetry of the differences in level 1 and is supposed to form a

“critical hiatus between (...) women as the other [and] real-life women” (p. 162). This female

feminist subject “starts with revaluation of the bodily roots of subjectivity” (Braidotti, 2002,

p. 22), i.e. it engages in the mimetic transcribing of the sexual difference codes, opening the

sense of Irigaray’s ‘virtual feminine’—the feminine purporting to acknowledge the absolute

difference among women. But the phrases denoting the subject in question shift from “the

female feminist subject”, “the subject of feminism” through “the feminine” to “female

feminist women”, even “female experience” (pp. 22-23). However, the critical hiatus

characteristic of feminist subjectivity informs the “real-life women” (Braidotti, 1994, p. 162),

those allegedly enfleshed, embodied, located (similarly to the female feminist subject) in a

way that transfers the positioning on a critical plane of feminism to women, the feminine in

29
general. I assume the ontological desire to be another term that is easily transferable from the

‘elevated’, ‘avant-garde’, ‘consciousness-raised’ feminist subject to women in general, too.

This raises the question, who are the ones engaged in a “collective repossession of the images

and representations of Woman” (Braidotti, 2002, p. 25)? By what kind of a move of

difference can the feminism of sexual difference posit “a female, sexed, thinking subject (...)

as radically other?” (p. 26) What women must “speak the feminine?” (p. 26)

Also by the rhetoric of writing Braidotti uses and which is deliberately attempting to

escape the closure of sense and let the absolute difference among women articulate itself, one

can detect a hegemonic gesture that takes place more on the level of the symbolic that seems

to be separable “from any given social organization” (Butler in Braidotti & Butler, 1997, p.

58). Being a feminist definitely can mean one position in the politics of location and

resistance but can’t there be other positions that are not connected with or deducible from this

one? Braidotti’s proclamatory insistence on the politics of location, diversity and ethical

accountability is so pervasive that it obfuscates even those marginal ‘examples’ offered as

figurations of it. Moreover, if the feminist subject is indeed the subject of knowledge, what is

this knowledge like and are there any other knowledges, different from it? My question then

would be, if there was not a feminist subject as a hiatus and at the same time as a span over

the hiatus between women as the Other and real-life women, what difference would sexual

difference make?

I suppose, the sexual difference paradigm owes a lot of its seemingly explanatory power

to obviousness, which is cumulated in the very basic terms it refers to and the kind of

common-sensical realism we are socialized in. Nonetheless, one cannot bypass apocalyptic

and messianic tones surfacing in Braidotti, that were already criticized in Irigaray (Bray,

2001) and which can invoke the very transcendental schema (not the Kantian one) that

purported to be subverted in both their theories. This ‘transcendental’ aspect is precisely what

30
balances the obviousness present. I find the call for the celebration of sexual difference, even

divinity in women more suitable for feminist theology that already adopted Irigaray’s views

to different extent.6

“The discourse of sexual difference feminism (...) remains invested in the high drama of

an apocalyptic battle between a phallocentric culture of sameness and the healing forces of a

redemptive feminine difference” (Bray, 2001, p. 322). Its account allows the material body to

be discursively constructed in the conceptual logic that is later on expected to find a common

language with the corporeal logic of non-discursivity (Lorrain, 1999, p. 194). The body can be

invested as a “complex interplay, (...) a play of forces, a surface of intensities, pure simulacra

without originals, (....) a relay point for the flow of energies” (Braidotti, 2002, p. 21) unless

the forces, intensities, and energies themselves are not subject to any specifying and possibly

constraining or structuring conditions. The discursivity of sexual difference itself on whatever

level, would not find many adherents, if any.

I conclude, unfortunately that the quest both for materialism and locations that are

ethically accountable is more of a wishful thinking than an elaborated task in Braidotti’s

Metamorphoses (2002). At the same time her approach implies a question whether the

diversity of popular culture phenomena depicted can sufficiently suggest the diversity of the

politics of location, which is not however an uninteresting issue in terms of theories of

ideology prevalent in the currents of cultural materialism. Although I did not indicate all the

points into which the notion of material converges, I hope to have at least referred to some

problematic issues in the sexual difference paradigm or as Braidotti puts it (probably in efforts

to resist the accusations of neglecting sexuality, homosexuality in particular), “[the] sexuality

and sex paradigm” (p. 34). Still I consider a critical engagement with her works important

precisely because of the politics of feminist knowledge and the politics of representation that

6
See e.g. Günter, 1998.

31
takes place in founding the project of European Women’s Studies.7 Maybe this is a gross

comparison but similarly to how the female feminist thinking subject of sexual difference can

territorialize women, also the appropriation of the European in the field of women’s and

gender studies by Braidotti can set up frameworks not easy to be questioned, if we want to

include some particular subjects at all. I am really wondering whether the sexual difference

theory is not eventually becoming the first article of the constitution of European Women’s

Studies. In that case, I would reply to Colebrook’s question “Is sexual difference a problem?”

(2000, p. 110) Yes, it is.

7
See Braidotti & Griffin, 2002.

32
 4 MATERIALIST FEMINISM: ROSEMARY HENNESSY

Words in papers, words in books/Words on TV, words for crooks/Words of comfort,

words of peace/Words to make the fighting cease/Words to tell you what to
do/Words are working hard for you/Eat your words but don’t go hungry/Words have
always nearly hung me/What are words worth?/What are words worth? – words.

Chicks on Speed citing Tina Weymouth

4.1 HISTORICAL MATERIALISM AND SYSTEMIC ANALYSIS

If one takes the appeal of Hennessy to comprehend materialist feminism as a reading

practice, more precisely as a practice of Althusserian symptomatic reading seriously, even an

attempt at its self-definition will sooner or later expose its failure in terms of “the gaps in

narrative coherence” (Hennessy, 1993, p. xvii). But if symptomatic reading conveyed merely

the exposure of such failures, it wouldn’t have covered any space beyond regular criticism

which can detach itself from its object and step aside. I assume Hennessy’s labor on definition

and precision of her own materialist feminist stance to be one of the most persistent efforts in

non-self-defeating criticism that sets as a point of its departure the task of making sense of the

gaps in narrative coherence “as signs of the dis-ease that infects the social imaginary”

(Hennessy, 1993, p. xvii). The dis-eases of social imaginary can emerge in the form of the

symptoms of one’s unease with her placement—when one is out of place she used to be in. In

the domain of practical, bodily knowledge, the sense of one’s place as a practical sense leads

one to unconscious adjustments, such as “in situations of bilingualism, the choice of language

appropriate to the situation” (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 184). But one’s theoretical stance is not a

placement in this practical sense but an “explicit position-taking” (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 184). In

what follows I summarize Hennessy’s view of the productive use of materialism in feminism

and will accentuate the shifts in her position. The elaboration of these shifts is then

contextualized in broader Marxist theorizations of the social by Louis Althusser, Ernesto

33
Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, and David Harvey. Nevertheless, Hennessy’s, I assume,

pioneering aim and labor consists in theorizing sexual identities as they are “played out in

local situations (...) by late capitalism’s global reach” (Hennessy, 2000, p. 9).

As Martha Gimenez notes, what is today called materialist feminism is what she cannot

distinguish from Marxist feminism (Gimenez, 2000, p. 18). Likewise, Rahman & Witz (2003)

set the broadly materialist paradigm in the context of various recuperations of Marxist

historical materialism (p. 246). In offering a collection of recent materialist feminist

theorizing Hennessy and Ingraham (1997) explicitly distance their editorial effort from

postmodern cultural materialist feminists and emphasize an orientation towards recent

elaborations of historical materialism. In their opinion neither former socialist feminists who

became, in Hennessy and Ingraham’s diction ‘post-marxist feminists’, such as Michele

Barrett, Drucilla Cornell, Nancy Fraser, Donna Haraway, Gayle Rubin or Iris Young can be

named materialists while they reject historical materialism’s “systemic view of social life” (p.

5). It is the understanding of this systemic character that enables us to move beyond the

provisional definition of materialist feminism I offered on the introductory pages of my thesis.

As Hennessy argues, the need for the systemic view (2000) or global analytic (1993)

and its effect as that of a knowledge contributing to the production of material life (1993, p.

14) comes out of the contradictions late capitalism has faced and produced recently. In her

view, late capitalism is “an array of contradictory global and local structural adjustments in

the organization of production and consumption that are altering the way life is lived”

(Hennessy, 2000, p. 5), meaning that it is not an abstract term describing merely the nature of

economic processes going on, but in fact “concrete, immediate, and palpable” (p. 5) in the

way it contradictorily organizes the experience of people. The constant crises of the capitalist

world-system (Wallerstein, 2000, p. 101) can be said to affect the stabilization of particular

identities in contradictory ways, e.g. the identity of women, who are in most of the world’s

34
countries positioned “as free workers and citizens, yet devalued as females” (Hennessy, 2000,

p. 5). The recent particularization of identities and the definition of their cultural differences

(on which their emancipatory politics is often grounded) themselves can be viewed as a

cultural-ideological concealment of the exploitative arrangement of production because they

comply with “the celebration of ‘the local’” (p. 8) that proves to be effective for the economy

mainly. In the attempt to provide a ‘big picture’, systemic view pursues historical-materialist

analysis that makes these ideological investments seeable as they permeate and organize

everyday experience.

The point of departure for historical materialism consists of the presence of real living

individuals. In order to continue their existence they have to satisfy their very basic needs, so

they produce basic necessities for survival and this requirement to do so is “the fundamental

material reality of human life” (Hennessy, 2000, p. 10). What makes the analysis of this real

life systemic is the fact that “the continual production of life through the satisfaction of

human needs is a collective undertaking (....) one that takes place through a system of related

activities” (Hennessy & Ingraham, 1997, p. 4; italics added). Nevertheless, under capitalism

there is a gap between all human laborers producing the means of subsistence and a small

group of those who own resources and control production. As far as the capitalist mode of

production pursues the accumulation of profit, the relationship between worker and capitalist

in which the capitalist benefits from the extraction of surplus labor of the worker (worker’s

unpaid labor), is an exploitative relationship. In order for capitalism to persist, its basic motor,

i.e. the very basic inequality between people has to find its ways of legitimization and

justification. This process takes place in the domain of what Hennessy calls ‘culture-ideology’

complex, meaning a broad scope of beliefs, images, representations, narratives, norms, and

modes of intelligibility. Their employment seemingly eradicates the fundamental

contradiction of aforementioned class relationship—nevertheless, this contradiction gets, in a

35
very broad sense, displaced from its original site and takes on various forms that enable the

perpetuation of the founding inequality necessary for the capitalist mode of production

(Hennessy & Ingraham, 1997, pp. 3-6; Hennessy, 2000, pp. 10-11).

Still, one can find the intricacies of this process going on between the fundamental

material reality and its cultural-ideological concealment theorized in various ways that

consequently put emphasis on different elements of this process. I assume the

conceptualization of these interrelationships to be decisive for not merely distinguishing

between variations of the same Marxist theme, but first and foremost for the sake of doing

theory itself. Although a theoretician does not have to proclaim herself to be dedicated to a

particular idea with practical implications, doing theory for the practical use, so to say, she is

nevertheless providing both her contemporaries or successors with a conceptualized mode of

intelligibility, a visual apparatus, to use Donna Haraway’s phrase. Therefore taking up Marx’s

Thesis Eleven on Feuerbach (1978, p. 145) that suggests integral connection of the

explanations of the world and its change can be considered more in terms of the positioning of

the researcher or theoretician and her commitment to a particular project than in terms of the

mere acknowledgment of the existence of the mutual effectiveness of theory and practice. The

former interpretation ‘converts’ a historical materialist theoretician into a producer of

“emancipatory critical knowledge” (Hennessy & Ingraham, 1997, p. 4; emphasis in original).

Under this perspective one can also trace the theorizings by Rosemary Hennessy as a

feminist critique (Hennessy, 1993) against recent developments of capitalism and thereby

arriving at a new materialist feminist position (Hennessy, 2000, p. 12). While in Materialist

Feminism and the Politics of Discourse (1993) Hennessy argued that “global analytic posits

the social (...) as an ensemble of relations in which connections between cultural, economic,

and political practices are overdetermined” (p. 16) and that she wanted to reformulate the

subject of feminism, pushing the materialist feminism beyond gender, it is obvious already in

36
her editors’ note (Hennessy & Ingraham, 1997) that class comes to the foreground. The

advance of neoliberalism and the concomitant systematic suppression of the class dimension

of societal changes have led Hennessy to insist on the primacy of the famous ‘last instance’,

economy (2000, pp. 11-12). Ultimately, Hennessy identifies several ‘social totalities’ or

‘systemic structures’ that persisted and organized people’s lives across social formations—the

“capital’s extraction of surplus labor, imperialism’s tactic of eminent domain and white

supremacy, and patriarchal gender hierarchies” (p. 26). In the following subchapter I will

discuss the differential changes of emphases, with their consequences for theorizing the

social.

4.2 THEORIZING THE SOCIAL

If one assumes the historical-materialist premise that it is the character of the social that

deserves attention as a locus of human relations through which needs are met, it can prove

desirable to interrogate its conceptualizations in those theories whose instruments are often

being referred to though without questioning their competing views of the social logic. I mean

Louis Althusser’s attempt to unravel the relation between base and superstructure in the

concept of overdetermination, its further and very influential reworking by Ernesto Laclau

and Chantall Mouffe in their project of radical democracy, and finally the new elaborations of

dialectics by David Harvey and overdetermination by Ellen Meiksins Wood and Rosemary

Hennessy. The social as an inclusive term for the production of social life in late capitalism

consists primarily of a commodity exchange that entails meaning-making processes (i.e. ‘the

cultural’) of both discursive and non-discursive nature (Hennessy, 2000, p. 33).

While the meeting of human needs (the material) depends not only on a particular

division of labor, but also developed political structures and forms of consciousness, which

try to make the contradictory class relations unnoticed, the issue of how these two types of

37
production—economic and cultural—are related is decisive for the unveiling of the various

societal conflicts and the account of social change. Althusser’s notion of overdetermination

questioned the allegedly obvious logic of the unidirectional causal affectivity of the base (the

economic) on the superstructure (including the cultural) (Althusser, 1996a, 1996b) in that it

attempted to valorize the importance of what Lenin called ‘the weakest link’, i.e. the existence

of many various contradictions out of which one, and not necessarily the economic one can be

decisive for starting the process of societal change. The phrase “a chain is as strong as its

weakest link” (Althusser, 1996a, p. 94) suggests a potentially equal possibility of various

factors to radically interrupt one way of the production of social life and make a chain’s link

weak so that it splits and gives rise to a new articulation of the elements of the chain.

Nevertheless, the way these factors interact does not every time issue into a (radical)

rupture. In Althusser’s account the dynamics of societal processes take form of either the

aforementioned condensation or displacement, while the latter is in fact a more usual practice

of everyday societal life. The use of Freudian terms of condensation and displacement

(Althusser, 1984) provided Althusser with an approach to understand the dynamics of

changes in a complex totality. But while he, although just for descriptive and not explanatory

reasons, retains the notions of base and superstructure and at the same time insists both that

“the economic base ‘determines’ (‘in the last instance’) which element is to be dominant in a

social formation” (Althusser in “Glossary”, 1996, p. 255) and acknowledges the relative

autonomy of superstructure and the reciprocal action on the economic base, there still remains

an unresolved tension between these two (Hennessy, 2000, p. 85). In short, overdetermination

means “the accumulation of effective determinations (...) on the determination in the last

instance by the economic” (Althusser, 1996a, p.113; emphasis in original), where these

effective determinations are said to derive from the superstructure. Hennessy criticizes the

misreading of Althusser’s expression that “the lonely hour of the ‘last instance’ never comes”

38
(Althusser, 1996a, p. 113) by cultural materialists who understood Althusser’s appeal for “the

theory of the specific effectivity of the superstructures and other ‘circumstances’ largely

remains to be elaborated” (Althusser, 1996a, p. 113) in terms of equal mutual determination

of the economic and the non-economic instances of society8 (Hennessy, 2000, p. 86). I

assume that instead one should understand this in a way that says that human relations

through which needs are met cannot be viewed without their mediation via meaning-making

processes. Nonetheless, this interpretation still does not provide a sufficient explanation of the

social, though it can be pointed out that “overdetermination remains a useful concept for

addressing the complex ways capitalism’s fundamental social contradiction—its exploitative

relations of production—is enacted and inflected ideologically in history” (Hennessy, 2000, p.

87).

Probably it is the indecisiveness in the interpretation of Althusser’s notion of

overdetermination that sustained the proliferation of its reworkings. One of them is Ernesto

Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s (1985/1992) theorization of the social, drawing predominantly

on Althusser’s structuralist traits. Hennessy contends that Laclau and Mouffe overestimate the

distinction between determination in the last instance and overdetermination in that they

attach it to the distinction between determinism and contingency and to the equation of

production with economic activity and overdetermination with the symbolic (Hennessy, 1993,

p. 24). The efforts in reworking Marxist concepts beyond their (mis)reading as exclusive

economic determinism are present in their conception too, however with an unexpected result

of the complete evasion of the economic from the considerations of the social.

By a method similar to Althusser’s when he was elaborating the notion of

overdetermination in relation to Lenin’s work on the historical conditions of the 1917

8
The dual system theory was an influential appropriation of the idea of the relative autonomy of the
superstructure from the base in socialist feminism. Synthesizing Marxist analysis of the modes of production
with radical feminist views on patriarchy in some theorizations led to an ahistoricized understanding of
patriarchy as ideology. For details of the dual system theory debate, see Barrett (1997) and Young (1997).

39
Revolution (Althusser, 1996b, p. 179), Laclau and Mouffe turn to the change in the character

of the political movements at the beginning of the twentieth century. At that time, they

contend, the actual political development took the form of the agency of a democratized mass

instead of a class agency of economic determinism (Hennessy, 1993, p. 23). In their project

they develop the former line that does not limit the construction of a political identity to its

class foundation. Hennessy observes that though on the one hand this contention is valuable

in that it challenges a reductive equation of social agents with social classes (as the Marxist

class subject cannot encompass the diverse and contingent interests of masses, e.g. women,

youth, sexuality movements), on the other hand, Laclau and Mouffe’s conception of the social

logic of articulation, i.e. the social logic of contingency grants primacy to the political sphere

and in fact to the indeterminate constitution of political agents about whose one does not

know why exactly these and not else were articulated in their distinctive (though never final)

difference (Hennessy, 1993, p. 59; Hennessy, 2000, pp. 59-60).

Laclau and Mouffe attend to the disarticulation of overdetermination from Althusser’s

conception of society as a complex structured whole (Althusser, 1996b, p. 193). In their view,

despite Althusser’s explicit distancing from Hegel’s understanding of dialectics as dependent

“on the radical presupposition of a simple original unity which develops within itself by virtue

of its negativity, and throughout its development only ever restores the original simplicity and

unity in an ever more ‘concrete’ totality” (Althusser, 1996b, p. 197), Althusser’s notion of

overdetermination and of the social still bears the legacy of reworking of Hegelian dialectics

(Laclau & Mouffe, 1992, p. 97). Therefore they refer to Althusser’s inspiration from

psychoanalysis, which Althusser himself never really elaborated in an affirmative way

(Althusser, 1984a). This shift enables them to claim that “the most profound potential

meaning of Althusser’s statement that everything existing in the social is overdetermined, is

the assertion that the social constitutes itself as a symbolic order” (Laclau & Mouffe,

40
1985/1992, pp. 97-98). They ‘free’ the overdetermination from the ‘residua’ of determination

in the last instance by the argument that if the ultimate (economic) determination were a truth

valid for every society, it would already had to be “an apriori necessity (....) defined

independently of any specific type of society (...) separately from any concrete social relation”

and in corollary it would have to be “an internal moment of the economy as such” (p. 98),

thus having the character of Hegelian dialectics. In Hennessy’s view, such misconception is

merely evidence of ignorance of Marxist elaborations on cultural practices as part of social

production (Hennessy, 2000, p. 60).

Accordingly, they refuse to distinguish between discursive and non-discursive practices

(Laclau & Mouffe, 1985/1992, p. 107) and so the social gets equated with the symbolic

consisting of elements and discursive formations. In the latter, floating signifiers, i.e.

elements, articulate themselves into moments, ‘nodal points’ which are however only partial

fixations of meaning. The dynamics of the social relies on the non-fixity of meaning in

continuous signification—surplus of meaning. That is, the indeterminacy of signification is

seen to be the ‘motor’ of the social in which the identities of social and political agents,

described in terms of ‘nodal points’, can be only temporary and never entirely delimited (p.

111).

Though this logic might in certain respects meet the requirements of the Butlerian

coalitional politics that establishes “identities that are alternately instituted and relinquished

according to the purposes at hand” (Butler, 1990, p. 16), nevertheless it circumvents the issue

of how precisely these and not other purposes come to appear at hand. Similarly to the

impossibility of evaluative distinction between various particular resignificative practices in

Butler, also in Laclau and Mouffe one has a difficulty to pinpoint “why certain ‘nodal

points’—no matter how unstable—come to be the ones around which identities are

organized” (Hennessy, 2000, p. 88). The contingency of ongoing partial fixations of meaning

41
prevents society from its totalization—exactly because of the proliferation of signifiers

society never can be identical to itself and only signification produces its shifting boundaries.

In that surplus of meaning, “the logic of the signifier becomes a transhistorical given”

(Hennessy, 1993, p. 61).

Wood’s historical account of the developments of theoretical historical materialism in

the 20th century implies that Laclau and Mouffe’s particular appropriation of Althusser was

enabled by his “rigid dualism between theory and history” (Wood, 1995, p. 7). I assume the

most notable division line of this kind was drawn between his account of ideology and the

science of Marxist analytic (Althusser, 1984b), whereby this science achieved the attributes of

structural determinations and abandoned ‘crude economism’ (Wood, 1995, p. 8). The collapse

of Communism can be also said to contribute to the theoretical development, in which, Wood

maintains, the postmodern, “the ahistorical, metaphysical materialist tradition of Marxism”

has won over historical accounts. In this way it should be no surprise that the postmodernist

‘contingency’ approach “has in large part been the story of a disappointed determinism”

(Wood, 1995, p. 9).

However, there are elaborations of the social that identify certain determinism at work

in late capitalism and therefore refuse to strictly differentiate between the economic and the

political (a distinction necessary for the elaboration of liberal justifications of capitalism)

(Wood, 1995, pp. 19-21). These try to resolve the tension between the mode of production

(the abstract capitalist relations) and its concrete historical embodiment in the social

formation. On the one hand I assume that Althusser’s claim that “the lonely hour of the ‘last

instance’ never comes” (Althusser, 1996a, p. 113) points precisely to the impossibility of

finding the capitalist mode of production in a ‘pure’ state anytime and anywhere, on the other

there still remains the momentous question of how to theorize and “understand any causal

relationship between social structures (...) and the ways they are lived in any particular time

42
and place” (Hennessy, 2000, p. 16). In order to do so, I try to read Hennessy’s elaboration of

the culture-ideology complex (Hennessy, 2000, pp. 15-22) against Harvey’s (1995, pp. 77-95)

theory of the dialectics of discourse.

In his account of the social, Harvey emphasizes the understanding of processes over the

analysis of what he calls ‘permanancies’, i.e. things or organized systems. In his view the

social process consists of several ‘moments’ (Harvey, 1995, pp. 49, 78). By distinguishing six

of them he sets a cognitive map that is able to overcome Hennessy’s implicit preservation of

the dualism of base and superstructure in her juxtaposition of economy and culture-ideology.

He recognizes the moments of language/discourse, power, beliefs/values/desires, institution

building, material practices and social relations among which none is declared to be

privileged, but “is constituted as an internal relation of the others within the flow of social

and material life” (Harvey, 1995, p. 80; emphasis in original). At the same time Harvey has to

clarify the details of how the social process “flows in, through and around all of these

moments and [how] the activities of each and every individual embrace all of the moments

simultaneously” (Harvey, 1995, p. 79).

Despite a prompt disclaimer against the possible accusations of linguistic monism or

monadic idealism, Harvey considers discourses to “internalize in some sense everything that

occurs at other moments” (Harvey, 1995, p. 80). I presume that Harvey’s insistence on

discourses as a locus of ‘condensation’, ‘internalization’ of all other moments stems from the

importance both he and Hennessy assign to ‘the meaning-making’ process (Hennessy, 2000,

p. 18-19). So though the heterogeneity of all moments is internalized in each of them in the

manner of even conflicting, overdetermined, effects, Harvey captures this activity of the

mutual shaping of moments in terms of ‘translation’ (Harvey, 1995, p. 80). Hennessy’s

concept of culture-ideology is supposed to indicate both the provisional stability and

permanent possibility of undermining “the meaning-making systems, practices, and forms in a

43
social formation” (Hennessy, 2000, p. 18). In that she considers culture and ideology to form

a complex, Hennessy points out the instability of processes of meaning-making that can at

some point become “ways of knowing that legitimize and help to reproduce the kernel of

human relations capitalism rely on”, i.e. ideology (p. 18).

What does one subscribe to when she assumes the logic/process of the social to be

productively theorized in Harvey’s and Hennessy’s account? What is, if one wishes to

paraphrase Harvey, ‘the foundational belief’ of their theorizing of the social? Harvey carefully

interrogates the logic of many theories that privilege one of the moments as the locus for the

social change, thus refusing Marx’s privileging of the ‘logic of capital’ or Spender’s

‘prisonhouse of language’9 (Harvey, 1995, p. 92). At the same time Harvey also insists that

Marx’s arguments consist of exploring “how dynamic and fluid processes get transformed

historically into ‘structured permanences’” (p. 92) and how both Marx’s analytic and political

project “operate (...) across all the ‘moments’ of social action” (p. 93). Harvey proposes that

we understand the return of ‘the last instance’ of the material practices of production and

reproduction “as both the starting point and the measuring point of achievement—the point

where we can tangibly judge what has been accomplished” (p. 93). And language is to play a

key role in these struggles and achievements (p. 93)

4.3 THE GENEALOGY OF HETERONORMATIVITY, COMMODITY CULTURE

AND CAPITALISM

In the focus of feminist theory there is what one can call together with (and at the same

time reductively of) Hennessy the “gender structures” (Hennessy, 2000, p. 26). Though there

is an agreement that heteronormativity is one (at times the only) of their features,

9
For a detailed critique of Spender’s influential theory of ‘man-made-language’ see Black & Coward
(1999).

44
theorizations of these structures substantially differ. In what follows, I give a summary of

Hennessy’s account of the emergence and solidification of heteronormativity, which

nevertheless considerably differs from Butler’s theorizing of the establishment of secure links

between sex, gender and desire in the heteronormative matrix of the law of sex. While Butler

universalizes and dehistoricizes her own use of Foucault and engages in the discussion and re-

working of Lévi-Strauss and Lacan, Hennessy’s analysis of the social structure of gender

order develops along the lines of the historicization of permanencies. In Hennessy this

imperative “Historicize!” (or “Contextualize!”) does not represent a mere addendum to the

need of analyzing gender always ‘at the intersection’ with race and class, but is in fact a way

of conceptualizing that enables their emergence. Thereby it puts an enormous explanatory

significance right at their own somewhat ‘unruly stories’ or genealogies.

The genealogy of heteronormativity that acquired the status of permanency at the turn of

the 19th and 20th century at a particular point in the development of capitalism is also of this

kind. Hennessy does not consider herself to be a pioneer in the field of exploring the

emergence of sex and sexual identities, nevertheless she thinks that Foucault’s rejection of

historical materialism foreclosed dealing with the issue “why these changes [i.e. the new

deployment of sex as normative mechanism] happened and what they have to do with

commodification or with capital” (Hennessy, 2000, p. 98; emphasis in original).10 At the same

time Hennessy’s insistence on the historical-materialist approach cannot be said to fall under

the sway of “pre-existing causative complex” (Weeks, 1995, p. 21) of capitalism that delimits

the restrictive definitions of homosexual behaviors entirely. Moreover, contrary to Butler’s

conviction concerning the structural heterosexism of the political economy and in accordance

10
By reproducing this account I am aware of its ‘disruptive’ effect on the ‘fluency’ of the summarizing
and analyzing of the theories I am dealing with here. Nevertheless, if it is my intention to point to the
effectiveness of the concealments feminist theorizing participates in, I hope to do so by the short introduction of
the genealogy of heteronormatively defined sexual identities that purports to step beyond the exemplification of
an unspecified (and ever-present) change.

45
with Fraser (Butler, 1998b; Fraser, 1998), Hennessy contends that “capitalism does not

require heteronormative families or even a gendered division of labor” (Hennessy, 2000, p.

105). Nevertheless, the way heteronormativity came to play an important role in the definition

of sexual identities can be located in a particular period of capitalist production.

In Hennessy’s account, by the late 19th century sexual identity was reified due to the

overdeterminations of the structural changes in capitalist production entailing the

advancement in technologies, the de-skilling of work and the concomitant process of women

entering the service sphere of the labor market, which then gave rise to the production boom,

the widening of new markets and the growth of consumer culture. Under these circumstances

people’s unmet needs (such as for education, leisure time, or even shelter and health care)

were displaced onto new desires that were to be fulfilled and compensated in the pleasure, or

at least in the promise of the pleasure of commodity consumption. Hennessy argues that the

mobilization of work force, drawing the sexuality both out of the family and procreation, and

the wide spreading consumer culture induced the emergence of the new desiring subjects. It is

significant that the subject position of a desiring being was not reserved exclusively for male,

but exactly opposite to the previous Victorian ideology of ‘the angel in the house’, it

gradually included women, too. Hennessy refers to George Chauncey’s findings concerning

the shift of the paradigms of human sexuality—that of the active or passive sexual aim (the

former one being characteristic of men as sexual agents and the latter of women as passive

recipients) to the paradigm of sexual object choice. The sexual object choice put emphasis on

the gender of the sexual partner primarily and only in regard to this did distinction between

hetero- and homosexuality come to exist (Hennessy, 2000, pp. 98-99).

At the same time as the paradigm of the sexual object choice together with the

proliferation of the new identity categories of homo- and heterosexual opened the possibility

for women to be an active sexual agent, this process was overdetermined by the patriarchal

46
gender ideology. The gender hierarchy enacted its transcription in “the emergent heteronorm

and its homosexual other” (Hennessy, 2000, p. 100) by “a double reification of the human

capacity for sensation, affect, and social intercourse” (p. 100) of the structures of gender and

desire. This reification of the human affective potentiality demanded the equation of sex and

gender and further on, the gendered asymmetry of desire between the (masculine) sexual

subject and the (feminine) object choice. As the desire for the same sex was relegated as

abject and at the same time active desire remained linked to the masculine gender,

homosexual identity was allowed to emerge as the male homosexuality. Lesbian desire could

not be articulated besides an image of female inversion, which simply meant non-coherence

in one’s gendered being.

The sexualization of woman in Britain, with which Hennessy deals, was patterned in

different ways in respect to the classes. While working-class women were domesticized and

housewifeized after their labor in the textile industry was supplanted by the new technologies,

middle-class women were increasingly entering the tertiary sector. The contradictoriness

involved in the sexualization of woman consists on the one hand of the independent woman

that enters the public space but threatens the safe haven of family, and on the other hand of

the woman in the private sphere, that is not predominantly the moral agent of Victorian age,

but a knowledgeable and responsible mother, breeder and consumer (Hennessy & Mohan,

1997, pp. 202-203). Nevertheless, this sexualization of woman remains operative in the

heterosexual framework only—meaning that although women’s new sexual agency ‘freed’

from the reproductive aim and its familial setting was certainly a break with the passive

womanhood of bourgeois gender ideology, the new sexual agency was allowed only if woman

devoted her desire to the heteronormatively defined masculine opposite. If lesbianism

emerged, it had to be theorized in terms of a mannish or butch inverted female (Hennessy,

2000, pp. 101-102).

47
 Although the consolidations of the distinct sexual identities and their overdetermination

by political and economic conditions are undergoing constant change, I assume Hennessy’s

framework of the rise of consumer culture to be a good starting point for their reassessment.

Nevertheless, the emphasis put on the role of capitalist production in her account does not

necessitate the inevitability of heteronormativity for the continuation of the capitalist system.

As defined in the heteronormative matrix, the gender difference has propped up the capital

accumulation in that it enables and fosters the unequal division of labor in both the household

and the labor market. To put it plainly—the reality of unwaged domestic labor “still has to

bear a great share of the burden for the production of surplus value” (Hennessy, 2000, p. 105)

and one can only (critically) wonder, whether this is to change with the emergence of the new

gay families.

Apart from that one can have good reasons for supporting the legalization of gay

marriages or the policies demanding e.g. higher share of women in certain domains of the

labor market and in political participation so that the gender and sexual identity differences

will seem to become non-decisive, questions should be raised where and when these clearly

emancipatory defined goals are to be achieved. As Hennessy (1993, pp. 100-138) and

Hennessy and Mohan (1997) point out, the identity of ‘the New Woman’ of the bourgeois

ideology at the turn of the century—the embodiment of the middle-class femininity in

Britain—was established at the expense of the colonial feminine subject in India. At the same

time the policies consolidating both these identities were articulated in terms of patriarchal

responsibility, Western moral maturity and progress and the liberal humanist individualism.

Several implications can be drawn from the previous. From the position of the global

social analytic that should prove productive predominantly in doing away with regionalism in

theorizing and the separation of the political and economic, and the privileging of the former

(Hennessy, 1993, p. 25), one can delineate “the assumption that the history of sexual identity

48
(...) has been fundamentally, though never simply, affected by several aspects of capitalism:

wage labor, commodity production and consumption” (Hennessy, 2000, p. 4). As was already

mentioned, for capitalism heteronormative sexual identities are not a necessary requirement,

as many private company policies that equally support gay partners and heterosexual families

prove (Fraser, 1998, p. 147; Hennessy, 2000, p. 105). Instead, “what it [capitalism] does

require is an unequal division of labor” (Hennessy, 2000, p. 105), effect of which is the

overproduction of commodities and their consumption based on ‘individual choice.’ But

identities defined in the heteronormative boundaries—straight, gay, lesbian or queer—and the

different plays of eroticism, the economics of pleasure they shape and are involved in at the

same time are in fact in accordance with the permanent call for and the proliferating signs of

their subversive transgressions, reified and commodified. As Hennessy contends, the precise

historical account of the parallel emergence and the continuous linking of the commodity

culture and the new sexual identities distinguishing between hetero- and homosexuality has

yet to be done, but this does not prevent one to inquire about the effects commodification has

on the articulation of sexual identities in the political struggles of late capitalism (Hennessy,

2000, p. 97).

4.4 RADICAL SEXUAL POLITICS

Because the point of departure of historical materialism consists of real living

individuals whose meeting needs is to be the bottom line of history, it is precisely needs and

their displacements from where any historical-materialist theorizing should begin. Although

‘human needs’ as such seem to refer to the discourse of natural necessities for survival, their

materiality flows in bodies that are nevertheless not naturally labeled. The negotiation

between corporeality and its needs always takes place in social interaction, thus “human needs

49
have an individual corporeal dimension and a social one in that meeting them is always a

historical, collective practice” (Hennessy, 2000, p. 210).

In Hennessy’s view, heteronorms organize the human potentiality for affection and

sensation in that they reify “sensory-affect into identities that legitimate and enable certain

historical processes of capitalism” (p. 105). The author is very careful in not insisting on the

pervasiveness of cultural-ideological heteronorms that would find their justification as such—

though heteronorms are still pursued by state, their transgression celebrated in the domain of

e.g. ‘white gay middle-class families’ or “middle-class professional lesbian, gay, and queer-

identified subjects” (p. 107) can be considered a symptom of the de-linking “sexuality from

its historical connection to the human relationships of exploitation capitalism relies on” (p.

109). As the examples of ‘acceptable queers’ show, these subjects represent marketable

identities that are rhetorically depicted as new lifestyles on offer. But if non-heteronormative

sexual identities do not want to fall into the trap of being part of the constant and repeating

mechanism of innovations in lifestyle, while shoring up the production of surplus value, the

politics of their articulation should first and foremost take their embeddedness in capitalist

social relations into account.

Nevertheless, in her elaboration of the proposal for the relinking of human needs to the

potentiality for affect and sensation and further on to sexual identity (Hennessy, 2000, p. 209),

Hennessy seems to ambiguously retreat to the very domains of desire she left beyond as

detached from the historically defined vital human needs. Her quest for the theorization of

affect rests on Arlie Hochschild’s sociology of (worker’s) emotion that makes the distinction

between feeling and the naming of feeling (in terms of emotional management exercised by

the corporations) while emphasizing the potentialities of the former, she problematically

presupposes a kind of “worker’s actual feelings” (p. 212), theorization of which might

produce the basis for “revolutionary love” (p. 203). Both Hennessy’s engagements in the

50
theories of Hochschild and Deleuze’s follower Brian Massumi are conveyed in order to point

to the discursively and symbolically non-signified reservoirs of affect. However, instead of

emphasizing the questionable prerequisites of radically productive intensities of desire, she

insists on the incoherent bodily interface of intensities-affects that is always permeated and

shaped by social elements (p. 213) and only so made intelligible (p. 218). Thereby she gives

way to the discursive elements she interrogated in details in her older work (1993), but still

they are at risk of being disrupted and reorganized by the human potential, which is restricted

by capitalism (Hennessy, 2000, p. 218).

Her argument for historical-materialist account of sexual identities is more convincing

when she refers to the conceptualization of human needs as not directed primarily to the

objects (that always pose the danger of commodification), but to the people’s “capacity to

participate in the mediating societal arrangements by which the objects of need are produced

and distributed” (p. 218) in the critical psychology theories. The “action potence” (p. 219;

emphasis in original) of individual can be always thought only in one’s immediate life

situation and to put it briefly, it expresses the amount of control one can exercise over her

own life. In case the action potence is restricted, one follows the patterns of a subject who

gets along, but does not deploy her “human potential” (p. 219). As Hennessy argues, this

became the problem of identity politics that reached the queering of identities, too, in that it

seriously delimits the potentiality to understand the historical emergence and ‘success’ of

particular sexual identities (p. 220) and thus it delimits its action potence, so that the effort of

getting along can however turn in ‘getting alone’.

In summary, Hennessy comprehends the identity politics as an understandable political

reaction to the injuries done to particular groups that process their fears stemming from the

dissatisfaction of their human vital needs into the resistant identities. But as far as the scope of

identities reclaiming their location in the social is broad and the particular sexual identities

51
form only a part of them, the range of unmet needs points to the unresolved tensions or

contradictions, which are, in Hennessy’s phrasing, pertinent to the capitalism itself. As broad

and diverse is the capitalist suppression and outlawing of needs, such as “many basic human

needs (...) for food, housing, health care, and also for love and affection, education, leisure

time” (p. 228), as broad should be the oppositional political movement reclaiming them.

Hennessy assumes that for creation of the coalition between such diverse groups, a collective

consciousness has to emerge, which makes her proposal for political associating far from

Butler’s purposeful coalition building (Butler, 1990, p. 14-16). Instead of relying on one’s

identity Hennessy calls for dis-identificatory practices that would entail discomforting the

identities, though at the same time she does not subscribe to the illusion of the possibility to

get rid off the patterned and reified normative identities completely. The aim of dis-

identification is the rearticulating of one’s experience precisely in the gaps that are covered by

the hegemonic cultural-ideological investments that atomize identities at the same time as

they grant them the ‘right’ to have their say by reclaiming their own specificity (Hennessy,

2000, pp. 229-232). In this way, Hennessy makes a strong argument against the logic of

individual choice and responsibility and attempts to envisage the society where the relevance

of the needs, sexual affectivity among them, would be recognized.

52
 5 CONCLUSION

Literally translated from the German, Bildungsroman means ‘formation’ or ‘education

novel’, i.e. a novel which documents the formation or education of its protagonist (...)
These novels chart the metaphorical or literal journey of the hero or heroine from
inexperience and ignorance to experience (...) This progression from error to
enlightenment to increased self-knowledge is a movement that may be characterized as
dialectical.
Sara Salih

After interrogating three ‘materialist’ feminist theories one should be able to give a

provisional answer to the persistent question “What really matters?” (Rahman & Witz, 2003).

Its very phrasing incites an array of possible replies—some of them I attempted to introduce

and interrelate in the previous chapters. As I stated in the introduction, their choice depended

upon my perception of contradictoriness and the limits of this uneasy condition present

among the scope of prominent feminist theories of gender and sexual difference that was

mediated by both explicit and implicit dialogues of Judith Butler and Rosi Braidotti as the

representative figures of theories, or even paradigms of gender and sexuality, and sexual

difference. Similarly to what Bray (2001) says about the apocalyptic battle in which the

sexual difference theory is involved in a fight against the tyranny of the phallogocentric

signifier, one can also construe another argumentative exchange—that of ‘the Trans-Atlantic

disconnection’—as a kind of almost apocalyptic battle for and about the conceptual

foundations, so to say, of feminist theorizing.

Judith Butler’s (1990) precise formulation of the trouble with gender and subsequent

investigation into the apparatus of constitution of sex and gender gave rise to the recognition

of the role of sexuality and desire, particularly heterosexual desire which in a function of a

normative plot proved to be decisive for the subject constitution. As a counterpart to the

intelligible subjects who meet the norms of the heteronormative law of sex, Butler (1993)

contends that there is a domain of the abjected, who’s bodies do not matter and whose

53
‘existence’ is grasped merely in terms of social death. The reification of desires in the

heteronorms delimits what comes to matter. Nevertheless, Butler argues for a possibility to

transgress the solidified norms of materialization of bodies that rests on the process that is

reiterative and therefore contingent and changeable in its nature. The deployment of

Derridean différance together with exclusively discursive production of the realm of the social

allows Butler to insist on resignificatory practices as a theory of the agency of the subject.

Nevertheless, the critical perspective I attempted to adopt, points to the untenability of

Butler’s position in several respects. The locating of the possibility of the social change into

the character of the signifying process universalizes the social into the net of subject positions

and the dynamics between them is narrowed down to the mechanism of displacement and

condensation. Though in her account of the social she deprioritizes the economic (Rahman &

Witz, 2003, p. 255) in order to give way to the understanding of the reproduction of human

beings in the heteronormative matrix, Butler takes heteronormativity not only as one axis of

the subject constitution in the social. As Hennessy (2000, p. 58) argues, Butler substitutes

sexuality for the political economy. Drawing on Rubin and Lévi-Strauss, Butler equates the

kinship system with the relations of production, and thereby dehistoricizes heteronormativity

and turns it into inherent component of capitalist system. Materiality in her view rests in

pervasive normativity—view that is distant to the tradition of historical materialism because it

in fact subordinates the material to the discursive.

Braidotti’s (2002) appropriation of the material draws on the tradition of French

philosophy, Deleuze and Irigaray predominantly. She further develops their understanding of

immanence as radical immanence—a notion that is missing in the assessment of recent

recuperations of materialism (Rahman & Witz, 2003, p. 247). Nevertheless I argue that

Braidotti does not deploy the potentialities of the Kantian interpretation of immanence in

terms of immanent critique of reason that possibly would allow her conception of sexual

54
difference not to resort to the Spinozian ontological argument, on which she implicitly relies.

Moreover, Braidotti’s three-level theory of sexual difference in the way it prioritizes the free

and strictly non-dialectical moves between these levels that depict the feminine from the

multiplicity within women to the Woman as the patriarchal Other, refrains from the politics of

location on which Braidotti otherwise perpetually insists. The need to critically interrogate

and problematize sexual difference theory derives also from Braidotti’s determination to

make “poststructuralism and sexual difference (...) represent an attempt to redefine leftist

politics after the historical failure of Marxism-Leninism” (Braidotti, 1997, p. 24).

In the last chapter I argue for materialist feminism developed by Rosemary Hennessy

(1993, 2000) that views both aforementioned currents of cultural materialism as complying

with the late capitalist logic of the ideologically invested separation of the social from the

economic. The actual purpose of Hennessy’s scholarship is to trace back the constitution of

hetero- and homosexual identities that seem to emerge at the turn of the 19th and 20th century,

at the point of rapid development of consumer culture. Thereby she does not conflate the

heteronormativity with the political economy and thus does not posit heteronormativity as

pertinent to the perpetuation of capitalism or a structure that can be univocally universalized.

In fact, she contends the opposite: ‘non-traditional’ sexual identities are easily co-optable as

they conform with the innovative logic of capital and so form another market niche.

Furthermore, her arguments imply that mere visibility of non-normative sexual identities does

not necessarily mean subversion of the heteronormative law of sex. Hennessy very

convincingly points out that at the same time as capitalism systematically denies the

satisfaction of human vital needs that range from the need for education to the basic need for

food and shelter, it displaces these unmet needs onto new desires that are supposed to be

fulfilled in pleasure or an expectation of pleasure of the commodity consumption. One of her

main objectives is to set up the global social analytic that is capable of integrating the

55
overdeterminative character of the social processes. While she considers the production of

material life to be embedded in the social interaction of people and therefore in the meaning-

making processes, she insists on the symptomatic reading that identifies and interrogates the

incoherencies of ideological strategies. Although her retreat to the exploration of bodily

sensations in Massumi’s terms of yet non-signified affects remains problematic, I find her call

for a ‘big picture’ produced by the systemic analysis worth following.

I assume that the contradictory setting of the first two aforementioned feminist theories

can be understood as a product of the politics of location. The currency of Anglo-American

feminist theorizing and scholarship in gender and women’s studies may appear to be prolific

as seen from the perspective of an ‘old-European’ researcher in women’s studies, such as

Braidotti. Nevertheless, the position of a ‘new-European’ graduate may situate the project of

European Women’s Studies in a different light. At the same time the preoccupation with the

discussion of gender and sexuality as well as sexual difference paradigms can prove to be

neglecting other theorizations, such as Hennessy’s historical-materialist systemic analytic.

While I presume that sustaining particular conceptualizations in feminist theory, women’s and

gender studies is inevitably interrelated with their institutional settings, I suggest that further

examination of the conceptual apparatus of feminist theory is desirable.

56
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