Gender Relations - InkriT · Ethnological studies on gender relations ... August Bebel, Franz...

Gender RelationsA: al- a al >aq >at baina al- åginsain. – G: Geschlechterverhältnisse.F: rapports (sociaux) de genre. – R: polovye/gendernye otnoseni ja .S: relaciones de los sexos. – C: xingbieqingkuang .

‘Gender relations’ is a common expressionin many fields of research, yet it is hardlyever clearly defined in conceptual terms. Itis therefore necessary to clarify the conceptof ‘gender relations’ itself while discussingdifferent versions of it. The concept shouldbe suitable for critically investigating thestructural role that genders play in socialrelations in their totality. It presupposes that which is a result of the relations to beinvestigated: the existence of ‘genders’ inthe sense of historically given men andwomen. Complementarity in procreation isthe natural basis upon which what has cometo be regarded as ‘natural’ has been sociallyconstituted in the historical process. In thisway, genders emerge from the social processas unequal. Their inequality then becomesthe foundation for further transformations,and gender relations become fundamentalregulating relations in all social formations.No field can be investigated meaningfullywithout complementary research into theways in which gender relations shape andare shaped. When they are ignored – as is traditionally the case – an image of allrelations as implicitly male gains generalacceptance. Opposing this tendency andforcing the sciences to research the ‘forgottenwomen’ was the great contribution of thefeminist movement of the last third of thetwentieth century. Often, though, the per-spective is fundamentally obscured by thephenomenology of men and women as theyrelate to each other as effects of genderrelations, which thus focuses analysis onrelations between particular individuals, asif these could be founded upon themselves.In German, this is particularly noticeablewhen the concept of gender relations moves

into the singular: ‘the gender relation [dasGeschlechterverhältnis]’ which appears inalmost all scientific studies (of the 145relevant titles which, according to an internetsearch, appeared in German in the period1994-2000, only 4 use the concept in theplural. In English the plural is used exclu-sively, while ‘gender’ appears only in thesingular). The singular may be appropriate,if it is a matter of the proportional rep-resentation of men and women in selec-ted areas. Whoever uses it in a broader sense, however, consequently has diffic-ulties avoiding an assumed certainty re-garding what genders are. In order to define the concept in such a way that it isable to comprehend the moving and trans-formative aspects of its object, the plural is appropriate. In the widest sense, genderrelations are, like relations of production,complex praxis relations. Their analysisconsiders both the process of formation ofactors and the reproduction of the socialwhole.

1. The French Revolution was the scene ofOlympe Marie de Gouges’s publication ofa manifesto entitled Declaration of the Rightsof Woman and the Female Citizen (1791). (Bornin 1748, she was executed in 1793 due to her protests and organisation of women’sclubs.) Without having an expression suchas ‘gender relations’ at her disposal, sheeffectively thought total social reproductionas being determined by such relations. Pub-lic misery and corruption of governments,she declared, were a product of ’scorn forthe rights of women’ (89). ‘A revolution isbeing prepared which will raise up the spiritand the soul of the one and the other sex,and both will work together in the futurefor the common good’ (88). Without socialand political equality of the sexes, the revo-lution would become a farce. Gender rela-tions appropriate to forms of dominationwere enforced by the law; thus the lawwould also be a means for the enforcementof emancipatory gender relations. The

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‘unnatural’ domination of men over womenwas derived by de Gouges psychologically:the male, ‘extravagant, blind, [. . .] bloatedand degenerated, wants to command des-potically a sex which possesses all intel-lectual capacities’ (88). Women, kept likeslaves in the contemporary society, wouldconsequently, however, begin to rule asslaves over men (Friedrich Nietzsche latertook up this point from an opposed stand-point, when he depicted the slave rebellionof women). De Gouges characterised thatdoubled reversal as the very quintessenceof general ruination. Since its education hadbeen neglected and it was without rights,the female sex developed deceitful forms ofdomination. Women thus became moredestructive than virtuous; they applied theircharm as a ‘political instrument’ for thecultivation of corrupt power over men; theirweapon was poison. In all previous politics,there had been a de facto domination ofwomen in the Cabinet, in the Embassy, in the Command of the Armed Forces, inthe Ministries, in the Presidency, in theBishoprics and in the Sacred College ofCardinals, and ‘everything which thestupidity of men constituted [. . .] wassubjected to the greed and ambition of thefemale sex’ (92). De Gouges did not pursue,therefore, a victim discourse; she thought,at an early stage, the interpenetration ofdomination and oppression while presup-posing a fundamental equality of the capac-ities of the sexes. More clear-sightedly thanlater feminisms, she saw the necessity toinclude the concrete social situation in theidea of the social construction of gender. The form of gender relations depended onmorality [Sittlichkeit], justice and freedom.Brutes developed in deformed relations. Thefact that women used their beauty as a leverfor the acquisition of power and money wasa consequence of their exclusion from regularparticipation in these goods: ‘Yet mustn’twe admit that in a society where a man buysa woman like a slave from the African coast,any other way to gain prosperity is closedto her?’ (93). Brecht later formed a similarjudgement (Me-ti, GW 12, 474).

De Gouges linked the oppression ofwomen to their function in the reproductionof the species and further articulated both

of these with the law of inheritance andwomen’s lack of rights to the free expressionof opinion. On the basis of their bondage(they were not allowed to name the fatherof their child), many women and, with them, their children, were thrown into pov-erty, an act ideologically reinforced by bi-goted prejudices against public admission offatherhood. ‘The rich, childless Epicureanhas no problem with going to his poorneighbour and augmenting his family’ (94).The mingling that was actually occurringwas hushed up in order to maintain the classbarriers. However, de Gouges also declaredmarriage to be ‘the grave of trust and love’(93). She demanded the entry of women intothe national assembly (89), access to all publicoffices for all according to their capabilitiesas well as equal rights in paid occupations.The state’s expenditure was to be publiclyaccounted for, the use of budgetary fundsby women according to their needs to bedemanded. A ’social contract’ between thesexes was to protect the free decision ofindividuals on the basis of affection, protecttheir rights regarding joint assets and alsogive recognition to children born outside ofwedlock. The opponents of these politicswere ‘the hypocrites, the prudes, the clergyand their entire infernal following’ (94).

The following elements can be gainedfrom de Gouges which strengthen a conceptof gender relations: egalitarianism in relationto the sexes is heuristically fruitful; rela-tions of subordination of one sex lead tobrutality and the ruination of society; it isimportant to think actors in gender rela-tions in their particular structures of powerand subjugation (slave morality) and theirconsequences; law as a form in which thedominant relations are reproduced is to benoted in the dispositif of gender relations.The assignment of the reproduction of thespecies to women as a private affair insteadof a social solution receives a fundamentalsignificance.

2. Ethnological studies on gender relationsin the development of humanity emergedwith the evolutionism of the nineteenthcentury. They referred in the first instanceto matriarchy and patriarchy. The most wellknown representatives are Johann Jakob

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Bachofen and Lewis Henry Morgan. TheJesuit Joseph-Francois Lafiteau (1724), whoassociated the image of feminine dominationin antiquity and in Native-American groupswith specific forms of social regulation suchas autonomous self-governance of villagesand a type of council system, is regarded asa precursor. He showed the connectionsbetween matrilineal systems of inheritanceand descent, political rights of women anda differentiated spectrum of activities thatundermined the focus upon the mother.

While preparing his work The Origin ofthe Family, Private Property and the State,Engels read Bachofen, alongside Marx’sexcerpts from Morgan and others. It wasBachofen who became the most influentialfor the reception of this field of research inMarxism. Among others, Paul Lafargue,August Bebel , Franz Mehring , MaxHorkheimer, Walter Benjamin and ErnstBloch referred to him, and he also played adecisive role in later feminist discussions.

Bachofen presented (from 1861) empiricalstudies on the basis of a re-reading primarilyof classical mythology. Central was the ideathat the maternal principal was expressedin love, peace, freedom, equality, human-ity and commonality and therefore that the dominance of women which was basedupon matriarchy represented the ‘civilised’part of humanity’s history. He portrayeddevelopment as a violent-subversive dialec-tical process. Monogamous marriage wasrepresented as a women’s victory after along drawn-out struggle against the humil-iating institution of hetaerism. It was avictory that was difficult to win, because mar-riage as an exclusive association seemed to injure the divine decree. Hetaerism thusalso appeared as accompanying atonement.Accordingly, he read Greek mythology as ahistory of the struggle between powersaffirming the legality of marriage (Demeter)and those which sought to undermine it(those related to the hetaerism). The hardroad from mothers to the domination ofwomen conflicted, according to Bachofen,with the sensual and erotic dimensions of the ‘life of women’; the latter eroded‘necessarily more and more the Demetrianmorality and ultimately reduced matriarchalexistence back to an Aphroditean hetaerism

modelled on the full spontaneity of naturallife’ (102; trans. modified). ‘The progressfrom the maternal to the paternal conceptionof man forms the most important turningpoint in the history of the relations betweenthe sexes’ (109); ‘the triumph of paternitybrings with it the liberation of the spirit from the manifestations of nature, a sublim-ation of human existence over the laws ofmaterial life’ (ibid.). – Bachofen’s criteriabecame decisive for later debates concern-ing matriarchy: female lines of descent, group sexuality with the impossibility ofdetermining the father; social and politicalcommunal participation, complemented bycommunal property, and including the con-tradictory gender stereotype of the woman-mother, morally superior, on the one hand,natural, on the other. This final elementserved further to romanticise matriarchy asthe originary form of social organisation.

Bachofen used the concept of ‘genderrelations’ alternately in the singular or inthe plural. He thought the sexes as fixed in their determinate qualities and limitedhis interpretations primarily to legal andreligious forms. Departing from a strictattribution of that which is naturally femaleand male, he ‘found’ in classical mythologyprecisely those commonly accepted thought-forms: the opposition of reason and emotion,nature and sensuality, intellect [Geist] andculture. Here, it can be observed how vene-ration of women and enthusiastic apprecia-tion of a feminine nature can act as thereverse side of the oppression of women, by romanticising them in compensation. – Ernst Bloch (1987) diagnosed thatBachofen’s heart was for matriarchy, hishead for patriarchy, so that, at the end, hefinally prophesised abhorrent communismas a return to the figure of the mother. –Because Bachofen derived the real relationsof life out of their celestial forms (myths,religion) instead of vice versa, the real work,that is, of deciphering domination andoppression in gender relations and theutopian forms in which they were figured,remained still to be done.

Morgan (1871) combined a re-reading ofancient and particularly Greek and Romansources as well as those of the Old Testamentwith ethnological reports about tribes in

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Asia, Africa and North and South America(his fundamental reference was the Iroquois).He depicted two lines of history: technical-civilising progress (invention and discovery)and the development of institutions fromgroup marriage to the monogamous familyand the state. The description of inventionincluded livestock breeding, agriculture,pottery, in short, the whole of human life,since the question of the spread of humansover the whole of the earth depended onprogress in the forms of sustenance of life(increase in the sources of sustenance).Morgan did not speak of matriarchy, but of descent in the female line; his chief criteria were economic: common occupationof land, work in common, a household of acommunist type. According to his view, therehad been an originary community consistingof equals. The development of private prop-erty led to the disintegration of collectivestructures. A chief focus of his research wasthe process of separation of family formsand lines of kinship; he comprehended thelatter as passive, the family as active, andkinship structures as fossils of earlier formsof organisation. Forms founded upon descentin the female line interested Morgan becausethey preceded the emergence of propertyand its accumulation. – A theory of genderrelations can gain from Morgan the ideas ofthe development of the productive forces,of the acquisition of the means of sustenanceof life and of the forms in which procreationand child-rearing are organised, all of whichare to be thought in their mutual inter-penetration.

3. In his first sketch of a critique of politicaleconomy, the Economic and PhilosophicalManuscripts of 1844, Marx spoke of ‘bothsexes in their social relations’ (MECW 3, 243).This formulation can be used for a theoryof gender relations. The early Engels spokeof the relation of the sexes, but he meantessentially the relationship between men andwomen. From their early writings, both Marxand Engels were concerned with man-woman relationships free from domina-tion, anchoring this in the very foundationof their project of social emancipation. Thefamous sentence, taken up from Fourier, in

which they argue that the ‘degree of fem-ale emancipation’ is ‘the natural measure ofgeneral emancipation’ (HF, MECW 4, 195),established the principle that the develop-ment of humanity is to be read off from thedevelopment of the relationship of the sexes,‘because here, in the relation of woman toman, of the weak to the strong, the victoryof human nature over brutality is mostevident’ (ibid.). According to the Economicand Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 , ‘the relation of the man to the woman’,determines ‘to what extent man’s need hasbecome a human need, to what extent manhas become, in his most individual being,at the same time a social being’ (MECW 3,294).

The scenario of The German Ideology movesthe problematic of the sexes onto centrestage. Among the ‘moments’, ‘which havesimultaneously existed from the beginningof history’ is the one in which ‘humans, whodaily reproduce their material life, start toproduce other humans, to procreate [. . .]This family, which in the beginning is theonly social relation, later becomes subor-dinated when the increased needs createnew social relations and the increasednumber of individuals creates new needs’(GI, MECW 5, 35). And, from the begin-ning, they state: ‘The production of life, both of one’s own in work and of others inprocreation, already appears immediatelyas a double relationship – on the one handa natural one, on the other hand a social one – social, in the sense that we can under-stand it as a cooperation of several indiv-iduals. From this we conclude that a certainmode of production or industrial stage isalways connected with a certain mode ofcooperation or social stage, [. . .] thereforethe “history of humanity” always has to bewritten and elaborated in interrelation withthe history of industry and exchange’ (35).Unrecognised here is only that the com-plementary rule must also be regarded asvalid, namely, that political-economic historyis never to be studied in abstraction fromthe history of that natural-social relation.The remark that ‘the family’ becomes a’subordinated relation’ demands that theprocess of this subordination be specially

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investigated. The German Ideology contains aseries of remarks regarding how develop-ment in this area proceeds. The ‘unequal,quantitative just as much as qualitative,distribution of labour and of its products[. . .], that is, property, which has its seed,its first form, in the family where womenand children are the slaves of men’ (35) is regarded as fundamental. The ‘latent slavery in the family’ was comprehended as ‘the first property’, which, the authorsemphasised, ‘here already corresponds per-fectly to the definition of modern econom-ists, according to which it is the power ofdisposing of the labour-power of others’ (35). The division of labour developed fur-ther together with needs on the basis ofsurpluses and, in turn, generated furthersurpluses, just as independent productionof the means of life was both a result of an‘increase in population’ and, in its turn,promoted this (30). The division of labourfurther contained the possibility of thepossession by different individuals of‘pleasure and labour, production and con-sumption’ (33); it was, therefore, at the sametime a precondition of domination and ofdevelopment. Two forms of dominationwhich overlap each other had determinedthe process of history: the power of some todispose of the labour-power of many in theproduction of the means of life and thepower of (the majority of) men to disposeof women’s labour-power, reproductivecapabilities and the sexual body of womenin the ‘family’. The contradictory inter-penetration caused the development of com-munity to advance at the same time as thedestruction of its foundations, supportedand borne by gender relations, in which, forreasons bound up with domination, thesocially transformed was claimed to benatural and the sensuous-bodily substancewas subordinated together with nature.

In their works on the critique of politicaleconomy, Marx and Engels time and againran into blockages that were forms in whichgender relations were played out. Both notedcarefully the composition of the new factorypersonnel according to sex. Marx made thefollowing excerpt: ‘The English spinningmills employ 196,818 women and only

158,818 men; [. . .] In the English flax millsof Leeds, for every 100 male workers therewere found to be 147 female workers; InDundee and on the east coast of Scotlandas many as 280. [. . .] In 1833, no fewer than38,927 women were employed alongside18,593 men in the North American cottonmills’ (MECW 3, 244). After the analysis ofa multitude of statistics, Engels came to theconclusion that in the English factory systemin 1839 at least two-thirds of the workerswere women. He called this a ‘displacementof male workers’, ‘an over-turning of thesocial order’, which would lead to the dis-solution of the family and neglect of chil-dren. He did not consider further at this stagethe gendered division of labour, leading him to think of the labour force as essentiallymale (MECW 4, 434 et sq.). A little later, hediscovered that, in the social division ofdomestic and non-domestic labour, the agentof the first, independently of the respectivegenders, was dominated by the agent of the second. Such a discovery grasped afundamental element of gender relations ofdomination. Nevertheless, Engels gave anaccount of the outrage over the situation ofthe factory workers essentially with moralcategories (deterioration of morals). Thismade it difficult to see the context as an effectof gender relations specific to conditions ofcapitalist exploitation. He recognised ‘thatthe sexes have been falsely placed againstone another from the beginning. If the reignof the wife over the husband, as inevitablybrought about by the factory system, isinhuman, the original rule of the husbandover the wife must have also been inhuman’(MECW 4, 438). He located the problem inthe community of goods with unequalcontributions, concluding that privateproperty corroded the relationships of thesexes. Conversely, he thought that theproletarian family, because it was withoutproperty, was free of domination. ‘Sex-lovein the relationship with a woman becomes,and can only become, the real rule amongthe oppressed classes, which means todayamong the proletariat. [ . . .] Here there is noproperty, for the preservation and inheritanceof which monogamy and male dominationwere established’ (MECW 26, 180). The idea



functioned as an ethical ideal in the workers’movement. As a pronouncement on an actualhere and now, it was always contradictedby the facts. It misunderstood theoreticallythe function of the division of labour be-tween house and factory and therefore therole of gender relations in the reproduc-tion of capitalist society. Engels’s furtherinterest was directed in particular to theman/woman relation, not the investigationof how gender relations traverse all humanpractices. He expected from communistsociety that it would ‘transform the relationsbetween the sexes into a purely privatematter [. . .] into which society has nooccasion to intervene. It can do this since it does away with private property andeducates children on a communal basis, and in this way destroys the two bases oftraditional marriage, the dependence rootedin private property, of the women on theman, and of the children on the parents’(MECW 6, 332; trans. modified).

In Capital, Volume I, Marx noted that themaintenance and reproduction of the work-ing class as a condition for the reproductionof capital remained left ‘to the labourer’sinstincts of self-preservation and of propa-gation’ (MECW 35, 572). This is the case,except for forms of ‘care for the poor’ and’social welfare’, but can nevertheless misleadtheory into no longer focusing its intereston the process as a private matter and pos-sibly to treat it as a mere gift of nature. Aneffect of the control of men over women in the family consists in the lesser value ofthe labour of women compared to that of men. This situation makes women’s workparticularly suitable for capitalist exploitationas cheap labour.

Marx evaluated official reports in whichthe workers appeared grammatically, in thefirst instance, as gender-neutral; as soon asthere were women and children, they werenamed as extras and as a peculiarity. Thusan implicit masculinity appeared in thediction; at the same time, Marx registeredthat woman and children were replacingmale workers. In a context of unchangedgender relations, this practice brought aboutthe destruction of the natural foundationsof the working class. Since the masculinityof the proletariat was implicitly assumed

in the texts, it was not really made explicit that the form of wage-labour actually pre-supposed the male wage-labourer, preciselybecause gender relations in which the labourof the production of the means of life (in sofar as this occurred in commodity forms) isa social affair which occurs under privateforms of domination. The reproduction of theworkers (MECW 35, 182), on the other hand,entrusted privately to individual families,did not appear to be a social affair. The inter-penetration of capitalist exploitation and thedivision of labour in traditional gender rel-ations demonstrated that capitalist produc-tion is based, among other elements, uponthe oppression and exploitation of women. –In the midst of concentrating on capitalism,Marx had a flash of inspiration: ‘Howeverit still remains true that to replace them theymust be reproduced, and to this extent thecapitalist mode of production is conditionalon modes of production lying outside of itsown stage of development’ (MECW 36, 108).(The idea was taken up by Rosa Luxemburgin The Accumulation of Capital.)

Already in the Economic and PhilosophicalManuscripts of 1844, Marx had noted ‘agreater economic independence’ of women,because ‘a wider area of employment op-portunities has been opened up’ to them by ‘changes in the organism of labour’, as a result of which ‘both sexes [had been]brought closer together in their socialrelations’ (MECW 3, 243; trans. modified).In Capital, Volume I, he then directed hisattention to the ‘peculiar composition of thebody of workers, composed of individualsof both sexes’ (MECW 35, 424 et sq.), andfinally the placement of women ‘in sociallyorganized processes of production outsidethe domestic sphere’ as a ‘new economicfoundation for a higher form of the familyand of the relation between the sexes’ (489).Here, the relation (in the singular) is actuallymeant as an attitude or disposition to oneanother, emanating out from relations inwork into all fields. The co-operative labourof the sexes in close quarters and at nightwas regarded by Marx, under the givenrelations of production, as a ‘pestiferoussource of corruption and slavery’ (ibid.; cf.Engels, MECW 4, 438); the hope remained,however, that they would become a ’source

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of humane development’ as soon as ‘theprocess of production is for the worker’(ibid.). – This perspective was restricted inthe lands of state socialism to the professionaloccupation of women. Since the totality oflabour necessary for reproduction and itsreinforcement in morality, law, politics (inshorthand: ideology), sexuality and so forthdid not enter into the analysis, this solutionmisunderstood the persistence and complex-ity of gender relations. – In the workers’movement, that foreshortening lead to theadoption of a theory of the succession of thestruggles for liberation, in which it wasforgotten that gender relations are alwaysalso relations of production, and thus howstrong are the relations of reinforcement and support for the reproduction of the cur-rent form of relations in their totality. Therelations of production cannot, therefore, berevolutionised first and, only later, the genderrelations.

In the last three years of his life (1880–2) Marx made copious ethnological ex-cerpts from Morgan, John Budd Phear,Henry Sumner Maine and John Lubbock.Lawrence Krader designated them as an‘empirical ethnology that is simultan-eously revolutionary and evolutionary’(‘Introduction’, Marx 1972, 12). He under-stood their perspective in the following way:‘the originary community, consisting ofequals, is the revolutionary form of societywhich will have a new content after thehistorical transformation which humanityhas experienced and after exploitation in theform of slavery, serfdom and capitalism hasbeen overcome’ (14 et sq.). He thought hehad found in ethnology proofs for thepossibility of co-operative institutions andcommunal, community-oriented labourrelations.

The excerpts from Morgan constituted themajor share of this work. The focal pointsof the ‘family’ and kinship make themfruitful for the question of gender relations.Marx mostly followed Morgan’s views, sothat astonishment when gender relations arenot mentioned and when they are treatedapplies to both authors. The material sug-gests the view that human developmentproceeded from an original communistequality to domination and oppression

through the emergence of private prop-erty, that this process was accompanied byprogress and, crossing stages of barbarism,led to civil society. Inventions and discov-eries assured not only survival, but also thepossibility of surplus and thus the founda-tions for the emergence of wealth, whichbecame an historical reality to be privatelyappropriated.

Marx excerpted exactly the kinship linesdemonstrated by Morgan – from the fam-ily related by blood to the punaluan and the syndyasmian or pairing family, to thepatriarchal family (which he held, with Mor-gan, to be an exception) and to monogamy.What interested him in Morgan was the idea, later to be more fully developed byBloch, of a non-contemporaneity. ‘The sys-tem has out-lived the uses from which itemerged, and survives as if those uses werestill valid, even though such a system is inthe main unsuited for present conditions’(Marx 1972, 135). Which women and whichmen were allowed to marry each other in group marriage thus became relevantbecause the tribal lines of the gentes weredetermined in this way. Everywhere therewere female lines of descent, and the chil-dren remained with the mother or with thegens of the mother. The father belonged to an-other gens. At the beginning of humanity’sdevelopment inventions, aimed at theacquisition of the means of subsistence andwere in this way easily conceivable for both sexes. ‘Common estates and agriculturein common must have led to communalhousing and a communistic household. [. . .] Women received stability and security,provided with common supplies and house-holds in which there own gens had a num-erical predominance’ (344). The situation ofwomen deteriorated ‘with the rise of themonogamous family, which abolished thecommunal dwelling, placed the woman and mother in a single family dwelling inthe midst of a purely gentile society andseparated her from her gentile kin’ (ibid.).One gains the impression that regularmilitary campaigns led to the invention ofbetter weapons and to the formation ofmilitary leaders; the bow and arrow, the ironsword (barbarism) and firearms (civilisation)were regarded as important inventions.



Inasmuch as chieftains, councils and politicalassemblies are considered – the selectioncriteria are noted as personal competence,wisdom and eloquence (199) – women arerepresented only enigmatically: the Iroquois‘women were allowed to express their wishesand opinions through a speaker which theyhad selected themselves. The council madethe decision’ (227). After the forms of mar-riage, the excerpts are concentrated on thedevelopment of the cultivation of grain, dom-estication of animals, military campaignsand the development of property, and laterthe development of political society. Theactivity of women, however, is conspicuousby its absence. For example, the followingisolated note from Morgan’s presentation ofthe Moqui-Pueblo Native Americans appears(without commentary): ‘Their women, gen-erally, have control of the granary, and theyare more provident than their Spanishneighbours about the future. Ordinarily theytry to have a year’s provisions on hand’(Morgan 536; Marx 1972, 179). One canimplicitly gather that responsibility forchildren – as presumably also for births; at any rate, humans multiplied rapidly, buteven this notice only obtains a reference toincreased means of consumption (172) – heldwomen back from the warpath. Such wars,however, when successfully issuing in con-quests, lead to an accumulation of wealth.‘Following upon this, in course of time, wasthe systematic cultivation of the earth, which tended to identify the family with the soil, and render it a property-makingorganization’ (Morgan 543; Marx 1972, 184).This sheds light on the seeming ‘naturalness’of male property, succession according topatrilineal descent and corresponding mono-gamy. Finally, the head of the family (male)became ‘the natural centre of accumulation’(ibid.).

Concentration on the history of menoccurred rather implicitly, and was oftenrevealed in the spontaneous choice of words.Marx noted: ‘The higher qualities of hum-anity begin to develop on the basis of thelower stages: personal honour, religiousfeeling, openness, masculinity and couragenow become common character traits, butalso cruelty, treachery and fanaticism’ (Marx1972, 176). He did not appear to note the

androcentrism. – As long as there was noprivate property, matrilineal descent wasclearly just as little problematic as was themother’s authority. Marx wrote again with-out further explanation: ‘as soon as moreproperty had been accumulated [. . .] andan ever greater part was in private possession,the female line of descent (due to inheritance)was ripe for abolition’ (342). Parentage wasnow defined according to the father (patri-lineal). This was possible due to the fact,among other reasons, that the graduallyforming ‘political’ positions of power (chief-tains, councillor, judge) were occupied bymen as well.

In Morgan’s reading of Fourier, Marxnoted an extension of earlier definitions ofthe family and of its relations to the broadersociety: ‘Fourier characterized the epoch ofcivilisation according to the presence ofmonogamy and private ownership of land.The modern family contains in essence notonly servitus (slavery), but also serfdom,since from the beginning it had a relation toservices for agriculture. It contains in itselfin miniature all of the antagonisms whichlater were widely developed in society andthe state’ (Marx 1972, 53).

It can be inferred from the study ofMorgan and Marx that war and privateproperty determined gender relations,undermining the originary community andthus promoting development on the basisof inequality. – Unfortunately, Marx aban-doned a form of ethnological research which,after the complications of who was allowedto marry whom and how descent in thefemale line and primitive communism wereconnected, considered the activity and livesof women.

The re-reading of ethnological studies that broke this silence was the later work ofMarxist and feminist ethnology. ClaudeMeillassoux criticised Marx’s reading (andits continuation by Engels) for havingstumbled ‘into the ideological trap of bloodkinship’ and claimed that they had failed toapply their own method, namely, that ofanalysing the ‘reproduction of life’ and therelations of production as ’social relationsof reproduction’ (1994, 318). This critiquecan be extended to the treatment of genderrelations by all of the classics. – A more

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sophisticated version of gender relations in the development of humanity remainsalmost invisible in historiography, if femalelabour in the context of total social labourand the participation of women in politicsand administration are not searched for withthe attentive eye of a detective.

The Ethnological Notebooks of Marx werefirst published in 1972 by Lawrence Krader.Engels, however, had already in 1884summarised Marx’s excerpts from Morganand the notes from his own reading ofBachofen in The Origin of the Family, PrivateProperty and the State, thus providing thematerial and the style in which the oppres-sion of women was thought. Simultan-eously, he had thus strengthened a mode ofreading that, to a certain extent, compre-hended gender relations as an addition to,and outside of, the relations of production.In his famous passage on monogamy (takingup an insight from The German Ideology) he opened up a personal relation into a social one by means of the application of the concept of class to the man-womanrelationship: ‘The first class conflict [. . .]coincided with the development of the anta-gonism between husband and wife in mono-gamous marriage, and the first instance ofclass oppression with the oppression of thefemale sex by the male’ (MECW 26, 175).Furthermore, with monogamous marriagebegan an ‘epoch in which every step forwardwas simultaneously a relative backward step,in which the well-being and the developmentof the one group prevail through the miseryand repression of the other. It is the cell form of civilized society in which we canalready study the nature of the oppositionsand contradictions which fully developtherein’ (ibid.). – Marx had noted to thecontrary, incidentally, that ‘the family – eventhe monogamous family – could not formthe natural basis of gentile society, just aslittle as today in bourgeois society the familyis the unity of the political system’ (Marx1972, 285).

Engels’s stirring rhetoric conceals the fact that the form of monogamous marriagedoes not imply any specific labour rela-tions. Concepts such as ‘antagonism, classes,well-being and misery’ allowed genderrelations to be regarded as mere relations of

subjugation – as after a war – and not aspractices of both sexes. Thus studies ongender relations did not lead to a com-prehension of the connection of relations ofproduction, but rather, on the contrary, to aseparation of the terrains of the productionof life and the production of the means oflife. That, admittedly, corresponds to thedevelopment of capitalism, but neverthelessprevents one from seeing precisely thegeneralising imposition of obligations as aneffect of the relations of production. In thePreface to Origin, Engels sketched out whatwas supposed to be understood by ‘pro-duction and reproduction of immediate life’:‘On the one hand, the production of themeans of life, of the objects of food, cloth-ing and shelter and the tools necessary forthat production; on the other hand the pro-duction of human beings themselves, thepropagation of the species’ (MECW 26, 135et sq.). He named both ‘production’ andthereby established the starting-point for atheory of gender relations. However, heimpeded its further elaboration by defini-tions which appeared to establish all labour(nutrition, clothing and housing) on the oneside, and, on the other, the family; the latterwas distinguished not by specific labourconnections, but, rather, through relationsof kinship. Consistently, following Marx’snotebooks of excerpts, he noted in detail, inOrigin, the variants of organisation of sexualrelations and reproduction, but did not notewhat the relation was between the labourcarried out in the family and total sociallabour and to the reproduction of society.To this extent, his work can be read as a fai-lure to write the history of gender relationsas a dimension of the relations of production.Instead, he treated the levels of sexualityand morality – in which Engels, as Blochnoted, obeyed ‘puritanical motives’ whenhe proclaimed monogamy to be a femalevictory against ‘disorderly sexual dealings’and claimed a ‘mysterious seizure of power’of men on the basis of taking up, all toounconsidered, ideas from Bachofen (1967). –Engels gathered much material in order toprove the humiliation of women. However,it also escaped him in this instance thatgender relations determine the whole societyand are not restricted to the domestic sphere.



His most famous sentence in this connectionpresented women as mere victims: ‘theoverthrow of matriarchy was the world-historic defeat of the female sex’ (MECW 26,168 et sqq.).

Engels’s perspective for liberated genderrelations was the inclusion of women inindustry, a movement which he saw alreadybecoming a reality in capitalistically organ-ised production, because modern indus-try ‘not only allows female labour on a large scale, but in fact formally demands it, and [. . .] strives more and more to dis-solve private domestic labour into a publicindustry’ (MECW 26, 261). Since this per-spective defined the state-socialist project,the problems can be studied in concrete andhistorical terms.

Critical conceptual summary – The criticalsurvey of Marx and Engels demonstratesthe approach to comprehend gender relationsas relations of production just as much asits abandonment. The greatest barrier provesto be the tendency to think of gender rela-tions as relationships between men andwomen. It must obviously become a rule toinvestigate the different modes of productionin history as always also gender relations.Neither can be comprehended without theanswer to the question of how the pro-duction of life in the totality of the relationsof production is regulated and their relationto the production of the means of life, inshort, how they determine the reproductionof the whole society. That includes thedifferential shaping of genders themselves,the particular constructions of femininityand masculinity, just as much as the develop-ment of the productive forces, the divisionof labour, domination and forms of ideo-logical legitimation.

4. Politics concerning gender relationsemerge in the history of Marxism as astruggle against the ban on abortion, as ademand for gainful employment for womenand equal wages for the same work, but alsoas demands for a better family life (amongothers, by Clara Zetkin), as a promise toraise women up out of the restrictive con-finements of the domestic sphere (Lenin,

alongside many others), and as an attemptto liberate also the feminine psyche from itslove-prison (Alexandra Kollontai). Finally,in the late twentieth century, there was thedemand to create the preconditions thatwould allow the combination of family workand paid employment. In short, the questionof gender relations always emerged as the‘women’s question’, which took no account ofits connection to the relations of production.

An exemplary exception stands out inAntonio Gramsci’s notes on Fordism. Hispoint of departure was the rationalisationof labour on the assembly line (Taylorism),the related creation of ‘a new type of man’among workers and the political regulationof structural conditions. Gramsci introducedthe concept of historical bloc for this process.He understood by this the combination ofgroups in the dominant power relation – inthis context, the combination of the modeof mass production, private life-styles andstate-sponsored campaigns concerning mo-rality (Puritanism/Prohibition). From thisperspective, gender relations emerged, inthe first instance, as a particular subjuga-tion of men under intensified ‘mechanical’exhausting work conditions for higher paywhich allowed the support of a family andrecreation, and which, in turn, was necessaryfor the maintenance of precisely this Fordistlabour subject. His exhausting work con-ditions required specific morals and waysof living, monogamy as a form of sex whichdid not waste time or indulge in excess, littleconsumption of alcohol, and the forma-tion of housewives who watched over (andwere accordingly actively engaged in pro-moting) discipline, life-style, health andnutrition of the family, in short, the modeof consumption. One sees the disposition of the genders and thus essential aspects of their construction, along with politicalregulations. Among other aspects, it can be seen how this whole structure was trans-formed with the change of the mode ofproduction, and the essential points ofarticulation that flexibly hold capitalistsociety together can be recognised in thisprocess. Related to the transition to the high-technological mode of production, Gramsci’sinsights teach us how to investigate the

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transformation of the relations of manual to mental labour by the new mode of pro-duction through an examination of genderrelations: the new mode of productionrequires less labour-power than other typesand its hegemony is correspondingly dif-ferently enforced; it needs another type of intervention by the state; it producesanother effect on the terrain of civil societyand so on. The question of the new laboursubject must include the new determinationof gender relations, precisely because itconcerns life-style, maintenance and devel-opment, which, to a certain extent, representa ‘marginalised centre’ of social relations (cf.F. Haug 1998).

5. The book on the subjugation of womenpublished by John Stuart Mill together withhis wife, Harriet Taylor, and their daughterHelen in 1869 aroused a great sensation andwas translated into German in the same year.The goal was a kind of social psychology ofgender relations as a foundation for thepolitical and legal equality of women inorder to support the struggles for the rightto vote, the right to work and the educationof women. Mill and Taylor used the conceptof gender relations, even though it becameunrecognisable in the German translation[‘Beziehungen zwischen den Geschlechtern’,‘relationships between the sexes’] (Mill 1997,3). The primary terrains upon which existinggender relations were thought were habitsand feelings, opinions on the nature of menand women and their current positions in society which were derived from suchopinions, above all in terms of their legalstatus. Since ‘the subjection of women bymen’ was ‘a universal habit’, every deviationfrom this appeared as ‘unnatural’ (16). Their research was consequently directedtoward the terrains of everyday experience,the morality regulating it and the law. Theassumption of the naturalness of the‘feminine’ was criticised, and insteadcomprehended as a product of an educationin dependency, a ‘result of forced repressionin some directions, unnatural stimulation inothers’ (28). The main focus of their workwas the legal treatment of women: forexample, the marriage contract (35 et seqq.),

which they portrayed historically from stagesof violence to the modern form of ’slavery’in which women, to a large extent withoutlegal status and without property, owedobedience to their husbands, ‘in a chronicsituation of bribery and intimidationcombined’ (14), until, finally, a gradualcorrection in the direction of the right ofdivorce. Olympe de Gouges remainedunnamed, but her ideas are certainly present.‘Marriage’, declare Mill and Taylor, ‘is theonly actual bondage known to our law. Thereremain no legal slaves, except for the mistressof every house’ (102). Humanity would gaininfinitely if women were allowed to developtheir capabilities and to apply them (105 etsq.). According to the assumption of a mas-culine arbitrary violence, no attempt wasundertaken to establish a connection to the relations of production. Their own field of experience, the fate of women of thebourgeoisie, allowed them also to overlookthe formation and education of the femaleproletariat. – It remains to be recorded that,since the end of the eighteenth century,insight into the constructed nature of gender,in particular, the gender of women – first,in de Gouges, now in Mill/Taylor – belongedto the standard stock of knowledge. Twocenturies later, this insight emerged againwith no sense of its own history, as if it werethe most novel of all ideas.

Just seventy years after Mill/Taylor,Virginia Woolf, writing in a context in whichbourgeois gender relations had remainedrelatively stable, bade farewell to the hopethat society would gain when women wereplaced on an equal footing with men andcould take up the careers reserved for andpractised by men. In this case, she argued,women would become just as ‘possessive,suspicious, and quarrelsome’ as men (87).In the gender relations in which the bour-geoisie reproduced itself, she detected thepossibility of the capitalist mode of pro-duction, of war and of its ideological an-choring. These gender relations producedon the side of the subject: ’senselessness,pettiness, malice, tyranny, hypocrisy, im-morality in excess’ (108). On the basis of the difference between the practices of thegenders, she came to the conclusion that the



emancipation of women required anothersociety in which, among other things,education and development would not be‘for capitalism, market, war, but for theperfecting of spirit and body, life and so-ciety’ (ibid.). Although, again, limited to the bourgeois class, knowledge was heredeveloped concerning the structural role ofthe sexes in the reproduction of the relationsof production.

Ten years later, Simone de Beauvoirexplained that the oppression of women was due to the ‘capacity for reproduction’of woman; she saw feminine subalternitymaintained by the respective socially specificconstruction of social gender. ‘The balanceof the productive and reproductive powersis realised in different way in differenteconomic epochs of humanity’s history.These, however, create the pre-conditionsfor the relationship of the male and femaleparts to their descendants and thus also toeach other’ (46). Her conclusion, which wasinfluential for the later women’s movement,was aimed at the employment of women inorder to make them economically indepen-dent from men, the structural integration oftechnical progress in human reproductionand the transformation of the ideological-psychological construction of the feminine.

6. Important elements for a theory of genderrelations were developed in the discussionsconcerning a Marxist anthropology in Francein the 1960s. Insights into the connection ofpolitical and cultural dimensions in thedevelopment of modes of production weresupposed to be gained from the analysis ofprecapitalist societies. A point of contention,among others, was what ‘the economic inthe last instance’ meant. Maurice Godeliergrasped the role of relationships of kin-ship for the regulation of the relations ofproduction as a question of a dominancewhich then ‘”integrates” all other socialrelations’, which not only defines relationsof descent and marriage, ‘but also regulatesthe particular laws regarding the disposalof the means of production and products oflabour, [. . .] and when it serves as a code,a symbolic language to express man’srelation to man and to Nature’ (35). ClaudeMeillassoux responded critically that kinship

was, for Godelier, the ‘Alpha and Omegaof all explanation regarding primitivesocieties; kinship in some way is seen asgenerating its own determination. It followsfrom this that the economy is determined bysocial evolution [. . .] and that historicalmaterialism is left without scientific basis’(1981, 49). The critique is unjust, sinceGodelier’s formulation of the researchquestion posed to the social sciences was:‘Under what circumstances and for whatreasons does a certain factor assume thefunctions of relations of production and doesit control the reproduction of these relationsand, as a result, social relations in theirentirety?’ (36). He understood this as aspecification of Marx’s formulation of theultimate determination of the social andintellectual life process by the mode ofproduction.

Meillassoux’s suspicion that, in thisarticulation, kinship was given given ‘a doublerole of both infra- and superstructure’ (1981,49) and was even regarded as a key foranthropology is, however, not to be rejectedout of hand. Of course, the seesaw of in-stances and dominances vanishes as soonas kinship relations are grasped as relationsof production. Meillassoux opened the way for this by defining as the central pointof departure the concept of relations ofreproduction. With this, he concluded that a society for its continuation must establisha ’satisfactory balance in the communitybetween the number of productive and non-productive members and among these [. . .]enough people of appropriate age of eachsex’ (42). Since this is not given in itself insmall cells of production, the elders, whoenjoy a higher standing due to work donein the past, develop a system of exchangeof women (43 et sq.); their power shifts ‘fromcontrol over subsistence to control overwomen – from the management of materialgoods to political control over people’ (45).In the proto-agrarian mode of production(which was based in addition upon hunting),this authority of the elders did not exist;there was kidnapping of women and thusthe necessity to protect women, whichexcluded them from hunting and war. Atthe same time, war became more importantfor the foundation of masculine domination.

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Meillassoux agreed with the view of Marxand Engels that ‘women probably con-stituted the first exploited class’ (78), butadded that they were subjected to differentrelations of exploitation and subjugationaccording to sexual maturity. He agreed withEngels that one could speak of an ‘historicdefeat of the female sex’, but objected thatthis is not to be linked to the emergence ofprivate property. Rather, it was founded inthe relations of reproduction, in which, oncloser inspection, a multiplicity of relation-ships of dependence are also to be detectedamong men, differing according to the modeof production. He connected the necessityof marriage with farming, in which the wifebecame an instrument of reproduction.

Meillassoux showed as an example of the agricultural household how the ‘rela-tions of reproduction’ became ‘relations ofproduction’, since ‘filiation relations have tocorrespond to the relations of dependenceand anteriority established in production’(47). In this case, the relations in reproductionare politically formed, subjugated, however,to the determining constraints of produc-tion. In the central themes of the studies onprimitive societies – forms of the family,female lines of descent, their dissolution by patriarchal lines of descent, authority of elders, fertility cults, compulsion to en-dogamy, incest taboo – he highlighted theachievement of relative independence of theorganisation of reproduction. ‘The domesticcommunity’s social reproduction is not anatural process, nor is it [. . .] the result ofwar, abduction and kidnapping. It is apolitical enterprise’ (46). Meillassoux held,with Marx, to the primacy of the relationsof production and explained that ‘the placeoccupied by the relations of reproduction in social organisation and management’establishes the meaning ‘which the juridico-ideological representation, i.e., kinship has’,so that relations of reproduction ‘tend tobecome accepted in a non-egalitarian classsociety as fundamental “values”’ (48).

The domestic mode of production, theeconomic centre of primitive societies,continued, according to Meillassoux, untilthe late phases of imperial capitalism andwas assimilated to the laws of capitalist classsociety as a meagre basis of production of

life and labour-power, preserved there and,at the same time, destroyed. Accordingly,Meillassoux opposed Marx’s view (C I,MECW 35, 565) that there was no longer anyinflow of elements originating outside of the capitalist mode of production into devel-oped capitalism after the phase of primitiveaccumulation, overlooking, of course, Marx’scomment to the contrary (C II, MECW 36,105 et seqq.).

Following Meillassoux, studies becamepossible that allowed the structural role of the sexes in the regulation of total re-production (determined by the state ofmaterial production) and, in this, the role ofpolitics, ideology, morality and their relativeindependence to be analysed. Nevertheless,he did not keep completely to his inten-tion to think the relations of production onthe basis of the relations of reproduction, sothat, for example, the power of the eldersappeared to him as masculine, conditionedby production. Here, the comprehension ofgender relations still needs to be adequatelyintegrated into the analysis.

7. Feminist ethnology concentrated on thetreatment of gender relations. Thus, OliviaHarris and Kate Young gave as a reason fortheir turn from women’s studies to researchon gender relations the fact that the rela-tionships between different actors only be-comes understandable in connection to therelations of production (1981, 111). As aterrain of analysis, they suggested changingfrom the general terrain of the mode ofproduction to the more concrete one of the‘conditions of reproduction of historically-located productive systems’ (117).

Engels’s Origin has regularly been astarting-point or critical point of departurefor feminist ethnologists. One of the first,Eleanor Leacock, following Engels’s pro-posal to connect the oppression of women tothe emergence of private property, worked from the 1950s on research into non-classsocieties in order to grasp in a new way theposition of women in relations of produc-tion, distribution and consumption. Her fieldsof research were, among others, organisedhunter-gatherer societies before the emer-gence of the state. In her re-reading of thestudies of Morgan, Wright, and Lafiteau,



but also later authors such as Landes (1938),Leacock criticised both their inadequateresearch of the self-transformative socio-economic conditions and their ethnocentricpoints of view (147 et seqq.). Instead ofequality, she spoke of an autonomy of thesexes (134). She criticised the generalisationof the division, common in class societies,between the public and private, doubted the universal representation of the familyand noted the absence of leaders, marketsand private land ownership as essentialdimension of hunter-gatherer societies (140).The division of labour between the sexeswas accompanied by a high reputation forwomen because of their ability to give birthto children. To be noted, according toLeacock, is the fact that women in everysociety make an important economic con-tribution, but their status is dependent upon ‘whether they control the conditionsof their work and the dispensation of thegoods they produce’ (152 et sq.). Her con-clusion is that, in societies in which thedomestic economy makes up the wholeeconomy, gender relations were not deter-mined by relations of domination (144) andthat ‘household management’ was deci-sive in council assemblies which decided onwar and peace.

Inside feminist ethnology there con-sequently developed three tendencies inopposition to the thesis of the binary divi-sion of the history of humanity into a matri-archy and – after a break – a patriarchy asprecondition of progress. The idea of womenas victims was positively taken up, or rather,updated in a slightly modified form, by afirst tendency. Thus, the view of Claude Lévi-Strauss (e.g. 1968, 1979), among others, thatmen everywhere behaved toward womenjust as culture to nature and that womenrepresented the non-cultural wild element,also enjoyed feminist recognition (cf. e.g.Ortner 1974; Rosaldo 1974; Benard/Schlaffer 1984). Sherry B. Ortner, forexample, inspired in an equal measure byboth Simone de Beauvoir and Lévi-Strauss,claimed that universal oppression of womenstems from the fact that ‘woman’s bodyseems to doom her to mere reproduction oflife; the male, in contrast, lacking naturalcreative functions, must [. . .] assert his

creativity externally, “artificially”, throughthe medium of technology and symbols’; themale creates in this way ‘relatively lasting,eternal, transcendent objects, while thewoman creates only perishables – humanbeings’ (1974, 75).

A second group regarded the victim dis-course as a result of a masculine mode ofresearch which did not notice (or, due to theseparateness of women’s culture, could noteven raise) the activities of women. Carol P. MacCormack criticised the constructednature of such a model as a product of thelate eighteenth century and demonstratedat the same time the dominatory uses of thismode of thought: ‘When women are definedas “natural”, a high prestige or even moral“goodness” is attached to men’s dominationover women, analogous to the “goodness”of human domination of natural energysources or the libidinal energy of individuals’(1980, 6). The perception of non-Europeanwomen and their symbolical appropria-tion by means of Western ethnology wastreated in a similar way. ‘The conscious andunconscious symbolic reification of the“primitive” woman in the everyday life, artand science of the metropoles has legitimatedher actual subordination and encouraged anactivity which continues it’ (ArbeitsgruppeWien 1989, 9).

A third tendency of critical-feminist re-search was directed toward the search forgender-egalitarian societies. Equality washere understood as equal value, because thedivision of functions is not necessarilyaccompanied by hierarchy. Ilse Lenz (1995),who spoke of ‘gender-symmetrical societies’,criticised the conclusion suggested byEngels’s binary division of history into amatriarchal phase of reproduction and apatriarchal epoch determined by production,namely, that women could only liberatethemselves through participation in the latter(38 et sq.). ‘Gender and domination aresimply seen in relation to each other in thisbinary division of epochs, and the necessarymediating steps of the economy, society andthought are missing’ (44). The question forethnological research, on the other hand,had to be ‘in which form women and menare active in these socio-political processesand what power they derive from them’ (45).

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Research questions were directed towardproduction, reproduction and sexuality,knowledge of the body, political authorityand symbolic order. Lenz rejected the usualconcept of power (for example, that of MaxWeber) as masculine, since it one-sidedlyreferred to the opportunity to enforce one’swill over and against others and was thuslimited from the outset to the victor. Shecomprehended power as determination overprocesses and resources. Only this allowedthe multiplicity of gender relations to becomprehended, to discover, for example,women’s power also in patriarchal societieson the ‘underside’ of official power (55), andthus to think in terms of a ‘power balance’,rather than having to think a complete sub-jugation of one gender by the other (64).

The thesis ‘that forms of marriage give anexcellent insight into the organisation ofrelations of production specifically relevantto gender in all classless societies’ (Collier/Rosaldo 1981, 278), was contested by UteLuig (1995) who pushed rites of sexualmaturity and of access to economic, politicaland religious resources back onto centrestage. Her main conclusion: a gender-specificdivision of labour does not have to beaccompanied by hierarchy, dependence andexploitation. ‘Egalitarian relationships donot correspond to any natural, originarysituation, but are perpetuated by conscious,social strategies and control mechanisms and are continually formed anew’ (95). As preconditions of equality, she named the absence of accumulation, that is, theimmediate consumption of foodstuffs, and,accompanying this, autonomy as a capacityto provide for one’s self. For the most part,Luig used the concept of gender relationsin the singular. This mode of formulatingthe question produced the effect that thedifferent practices into which the sexes enter were not seen in connection to thereproduction of society, but, rather, on thecontrary, social production, hunting andgathering, were comprehended as momentsof determination of the interaction of thesexes – as if the genders as such were ante-cedent and as if society was additionallyproduced as a particular (e.g. egalitarian)relation of both to each other.

The study of distant cultures and their

gender relations led at times to a kind ofsophisticated tolerance for which all mate-rial evidence appeared to be unimportant.Thus Ina Rösing (1999) reported from aninvestigation of an Andean village in whichshe claimed to have discovered ten insteadof the normal two genders. She demon-strated this in the multiple and changing‘gender’ allocations of space, time, field andpublic offices and so forth – thus, for ex-ample, the sun is masculine in the morning,but feminine in the evening. Research intogender relations was here dissolved into a multiplicity of discourses. Nonetheless,even in this many-stranded fabric, there isa central thread to be discovered: ‘The fun-damental, everyday division of labour, family life and sexuality are not affected by symbolic genderness’ (56). She explained the conspicuous gender symbolism mate-rialistically as a recharging of the sexual, in the sense of entreaties for fertility madenecessary by the hard conditions of survivalin the Andes.

Maxine Molyneux, in her re-reading ofstudies on Gouro-formation (which had beenstudied by Emmanuel Terray (1974) andGeorges Dupré and Pierre-Philippe Rey(1978)), demonstrated that leaving the statusof women out of an account led to moregeneral conceptual and epistemologicalproblems. The point of contention was thequestion of whether or not this was alreadya class society. The focus of the analysis wasthe relation of elders to the younger menwho found themselves in an ambivalentexploitative relation. Molyneux showed thatopponents and supporters of the thesis of aclass society departed from a vision of apurely male society (61). Central for theanalysis of any mode of production, however,according to Molyneux, was the comprehen-sion of the gender-specific division of labour(62). Among the Gouros, women’s surplus-production was appropriated by the eldest,so that they would have represented a classfor Terray, whose point of departure wasobserved exploitation rather than property.Attention to women, however, could alsohave corrected Terray’s concept of class: inthe separation of women from the land andfrom the product of their work one couldhave seen ‘the dissolution of collective



property in land and the emergence ofrelations of private property’ (71 et sq.) and,consequently, the transition from primitivecommunism to a class society (70). In op-position to Engels, Molyneux did not seethe subordination of women as founded intheir marginalisation by the development ofsocial production. Rather, she argued that it consisted precisely in the fact that theywere supposed to remain central to produc-tion’ (76), because they brought prosperity.Women and their labour were, thus, essentialfor the dissolution of community. – Molyneuxused the concept of ‘relations between thesexes’, but this was made unrecognisable by the German translator as ‘Beziehungenzwischen den Geschlechtern [relationshipsbetween the sexes]’ (78).

The study of feminist ethnology demon-strates, among other elements: an historicalmaterialism which is attentive to real historydemands that gender relations be com-prehended as relations of production, thatis, demands research into the participationof the genders in different modes of pro-duction and thus the investigation of themany and diverse practices and their sym-bolic expression, and their reinforcement indeterminant customs, traditions and valuesystems. If the standpoint of the reproductionof society is abandoned, the phenomenaappear as arbitrary. In the re-reading ofexisting research it becomes apparent that,due to the ethnocentrism and/or andro-centrism of language and concepts, it isappropriate to proceed with caution andscepticism; this is also the case for feministresearch.

8. The perception that there lay a furthersystem of domination beyond that of capit-alism, namely, patriarchy, raised the ques-tion for the feminism of the second wave of the women’s movement of how theinteraction of the two types of dominationwas to be thought. The discussions aboutchief and secondary contradictions, in-fluenced by Maoism, sought to affirm an integral totality. Its analysis, however,was simultaneously blocked by this sameconceptual paradigm. The discussion strug-gled against Marxism, by which Marx wasunderstood as standing for the centrality

of class relations. After the struggles of the 1970s concerning the recognition ofhousework, the question was furtherdeveloped into a problematic of the totalsocial economy. The debate was conductedunder the name of ‘dual economy’.

Linda Phelps was one of the first whosought to comprehend capitalism andpatriarchy as different relations of produc-tion: ‘If sexism is a social relationship inwhich males have authority over females,patriarchy is a term which describes the wholesystem of interaction arising from that basicrelationship, just as capitalism is a systembuilt on the relationship between capitalistand worker. Patriarchal and capitalist socialrelationships are two markedly differentways human beings have interacted witheach other and have built social, politicaland economic institutions’ (1975, 39). ZillahEisenstein proposed speaking of twodifferent modes of production mutuallysupporting one another (1979, 27); SheilaRowbotham (1973) regarded such a co-existence as merely specific to capitalism;Ann Ferguson (1979) coined the term’sex/affective production’ in relations ofreproduction as a term for the mode ofproduction occupied dominantly by women.The most well-known was Heidi Hartmann’sattempt of 1981, in connection to the thesesof Marx and Engels that the seed of thepatriarchy is the power to dispose of femalelabour-power (GI, MECW 5, 37), to establisha materialist theory of gender relations. Thiswas aimed against the view proposed by,for example, Juliet Mitchell, that there were‘two autonomous areas, the economic modeof capitalism and the ideological of pa-triarchy’ (1974, 409). – Roisin McDonoughand Rachel Harrison (1978) insisted thatpatriarchy could only be comprehended ifit was defined historically and concretely in the interaction of ‘relations of humanreproduction’ and the relations of production(26). This meant, for capitalism, the intro-duction of class relations into the analysisof gender relations. – Gabriele Dietrichquestioned the priority of commodity pro-duction, since ‘the production of life is aindispensable condition for every furtherproduction process’; in a socialist perspective,this involved ‘not only the problem of how

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we want to get to the association of freeproducers, but also of how we want to shapethat which was called “reproduction” forthe society of free humans’ (1984, 38). IrisMarion Young proposed to overcome the‘dual system’ approaches in the direction of a single theory ‘that can articulate andappreciate the vast differences in the situ-ation, structure, and experience of genderrelations in different times and places’ (1997,105). Michèle Barrett (1980) summarised thedebate for her foundation of a Marxistfeminism.

9. The analysis of gender relations pre-supposes the category of gender. The pos-sibility available in English of distinguishingbetween biological sex and social gender wasthe basis for a conjuncture which lasted morethan twenty years in which gender wascomprehended as socially constructed, tothe extent that the concept of ‘gender’ wasalso adopted in other languages. However,the analysis of gender which – not least of all due to the decline of the women’smovement – had dissolved the apparentnaturalness of previous thematics of quest-ions concerning women, had also dispensedwith the connection to relations of pro-duction which had still been dominant inthe debate concerning housework; thus, thediscussion centred upon the concept ofgender, but not gender relations.

The fall of state socialism made it abso-lutely necessary for Marxist feminists tothink the relation of gender relations andmodes of production in a new way, not leastof all because the now obvious demolitionof women’s rights in the former state-socialistlands caused by bringing them into line withthose offered by capitalism was accompaniedby the claim that state socialism had op-pressed women just as much as capitalism,and, at the same time, the claim that thecollapsed state socialism’s mode of pro-duction was entirely different from the cap-italist mode of production, with which ithad not been able to compete. This mannerof posing the problem assumed that genderrelations and a mode of production do nothave any internal connection. It was not thetime for social theory, and thus thinkinggender relations as relations of production

could be made out to be a relic of thoughtfrom days gone by.

The following thesis led to intense contro-versy: ‘The dominant economy of exchange,the market, profit and growth is setting outupon an extensive exploitation, not only ofemployed labour-power, but just as muchother (third) worlds which do not produceaccording to the same principles. It is ne-glecting care for life and its commitment to the people who do these things out oflove, out of a feeling of “humanity” and whotherefore cannot be treated as the same. Thesymbolic order, the fields of art and scienceand the entire model of civilisation are allequally imbued and legitimated by suchgender relations as relations of production.That is also the case for subjects themselvesas personalities’ (F. Haug 1993/1996, 151).Hildegard Heise saw in this a modernmaceration of the concept of relations ofproduction (1993, 3), while Ursula Beerdetected the reduction of ‘Marxist conceptualparadigms’ to ‘a purely illustrative character’(1993, 6). Such conception of gender rela-tions as relations of production would resultin ‘one of the most essential concepts ofMarxism being comprehended in an anti- or un-Marxist way’ and ‘the necessary, inMarxist terms, transformation of capitalistrelations of production’ would be seen as ‘acontradiction between male production andfemale appropriation’ (Rech 1993). Beerregarded it as arbitrary whether the con-cept of gender relations was used in thesingular or the plural; in order to avoid an‘unnecessary addition’ ‘of gender relations’‘to the capital relation’ (3), she spoke of‘moments of sexual inequality which arespread across the whole system [. . .] e.g.the exclusion of women from positions ofinfluence and power, the gender-specificdivision of labour in the family and at work,cultural production as, to a large extent,men’s business’ (1993, 8). Such definitionsoverlook both that, in the lands of statesocialism, women were almost fully inte-grated into working life, and that the mul-titude of female writers can be taken as anindicator that cultural production was alsowomen’s business.

The following concepts were suggestedin the place of gender relations: ‘gender



inequality to the disadvantage of women’and ‘gender domination’, analogous to classdomination (Beer, 10). Classes, however, can be abolished, they are not a ‘natural’phenomenon; genders, on the other handare (although socially formed) also a ‘natural’phenomenon; the existence of genders isthus not simply an element of ‘genderdomination’ as the existence of classes is anelement of class domination. – The conceptof ‘gender inequality’ is dubious, because‘gender equality’ would be understand-able, at best, as an expression of politicalslang. To speak of genders is to speak of the differences between genders. Or, evenfurther: difference is too weak a term forthinking the complementarity conditionedby the naturally unequal contribution of thetwo genders to procreation. Equal rightsbefore the law for women and men placesthem on the same level as legal subjects,abstracted, that is, from gender. Where equalrights are not really realised and compen-satory measures such as quota regulationsare resorted to, the members of the indi-vidual genders are in fact treated in indi-vidual cases, departing from inequality, as‘unequal’, in order to arrive at an averageequal treatment in a determinate respect. Tospeak of ‘asymmetrical power relations’(Bader 1993, 6) or ‘masculine supremacy’(Becker-Schmidt (in Beer 1993, 5)) is tooweak, because power relationships couldonly have any effect at all as asymmetrical,and supremacy is a shifting phenomenon,while domination is something structural.‘Gender antagonism’ (Heise 1993, 1), formu-lated following the class antagonism, issimilarly not fully conceptualised. Sexualcomplementarity is the natural form of mam-mals, but the development of dominationin relations between complementary gendersis an historically variable form of humansociety. Heise feared that thinking of genderrelations as relations of production instigated‘the substitution of genders for classes’ (3).Her general concept was the concept of a‘combinatory of genders’, which, however,would only make sense if one sought tomodel the reality and the mode in whichgender relations find their field-specific formsin all social fields. To think all of these forms

as a ‘combinatory’ (to be comprehended asa strategic encoding), however, assumes theconcept of gender relations.

Gender relations and the category of gender. –Already in 1987, Donna Haraway registereda fundamental critique of the explanation ofwomen’s oppression by the ’sex-gender-system’. Her critique of the biologicalessentialism of this distinction prepared theway also for the surrender of thinking interms of gender. This terrain was furtherexplored primarily by Judith Butler, whorejected ‘gender’ as an ‘identicatory site ofpolitical mobilization at the expense of raceor sexuality or class or geopolitical position-ing/displacement’ (1993, 116). She radicalisedthe representation of the socially constructednature of gender also regarding the partwhich was taken for granted as biologicallygiven and in this way transposed theKampfplatz to the process of the formationof identity. ‘There is no “I” prior to itsassumption of sex [. . .] to identify with a sexis to stand in some relation to an imaginaryand forceful [. . .] threat’ (99 et sq.). In thesymbolic, the ’sexualised’ subject is formednormatively by language (107). – The dis-placement of power struggles in the assign-ment of gender allows exclusions, bans and stabilisations to be deciphered as ele-ments of gender relations. The dispute aboutthe respective priority of race, class and gen-der, which resulted in the correspondingmovements falling out with each other in a depoliticising way, can also be pro-ductively turned around by the question ofthe articulation of the one with – and at thecost or rather to the benefit of – the other(116). Butler extended this approach into abasic principle of productive conflicts ‘for aLeft which is “universal”, not in then senseof being unitary or uniform, but rather inthe sense of having a universalist per-spective’ (1998, 36 et sq.). This is the liberat-ing side of Butler’s intervention. She pleadedfor a type of democratic coherence (followingGramsci) worked on by individuals forthemselves and for their identities, withoutalways repeating exclusions through un-reflective unification. Against the plunderingof ‘the Third World’ [by feminists] in search

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of examples of ‘universal patriarchal subor-dination of woman’ (1993, 117), Butlerproposed ‘to trace the ways in which identi-fication is implicated in what it excludes,and to follow the lines of that implicationfor the map of future community that itmight yield’ (119). The dilution of categoriesis easily comprehensible; however, the avoid-ance of any functionalism for the questionof gender relations has the disadvantage oflosing sight of how it really also concernsthe reproduction of humanity. It is from thesupport, enabling and contemporaneousmarginalisation of the necessity of the re-production of the species that the actionsdecoded by Butler gain their virulence inthe symbolic sphere, in language and in theimaginary.

Nancy Fraser attacked Jürgen Habermas’sanalysis of modern society as a paradigmof androcentric social theory. Here, thecapitalist economic system was compre-hended as ’systematically integrated’, whilethe small family, on the other hand, wasunderstood as ’socially integrated’ (1984(1981), 341, 357 et seqq.; 1987 (1981), 234,243). She demonstrated the wasted oppor-tunity in Habermas’s model of different fieldsof material and symbolic reproduction tounderstand in a genuinely new way thepublic and the private realms in their inter-penetrating relation. Habermas’s modelmade it difficult to analyse families as ’sitesof labour, exchange, calculation, distributionand exploitation’ – in short, as economicsystems (Fraser 1989, 120). That Habermascomprehended the raising of children assymbolic, but wage-labour, on the otherhand, as material, while each of them areboth, made the fact that he took up at allthe former in his model at once problematicand a supporting argument for the privateraising of children as a form of femalesubordination. Fraser understood theweakness of this concept as its inability tothematise the ‘gender subtext’ (DorothySmith 1984) of the described relationshipsand arrangements. All mediating per-sonifications are however determined bygender: ‘There was a struggle for a wage,[. . .] as a payment to a man for the supportof his economically dependent wife andchildren’ (Fraser 1994, 124). With Carol

Pateman (1985), Fraser demonstrated thatwomen are not absent from paid employ-ment, but, rather, are present in a differentway: for example, reduced to femininity,often to sexualised servants (secretaries,domestic servants, saleswomen, prostitutes,stewardesses); as members of the caringprofessions with maternal capacities (suchas nurses, social workers, primary schoolteachers); as lowly qualified workers insegregated work places; as part-time work-ers under the double burden of unpaid housework and paid employment; as supple-mentary wage-earners. Thus, the officialeconomy is not merely bound to the familyby means of money for commodities, butalso by the masculinity of ‘normal’ wage-labour. Conversely, the consumer ‘is theworker’s companion and helpmeet in clas-sical capitalism’ and advertising ‘has elab-orated an entire phantasmatics of desirepremised on the femininity of the subject of consumption’ (125). This is, of course,dependent upon the product, and changesin this branch of industry which also ap-peal to men come into conflict not only withthe attributes of the feminine, as BarbaraEhrenreich (1984) demonstrated in ananalysis of Playboy. Habermas’s dramatispersonae lacked the child-minder, Fraser’scritique continued, which he neverthelessneeded to cast in a central role in his defi-nition of functions of the family. A con-sideration of them could have shown thecentral meaning of gender relations for the‘institutional structure of classical capitalism’(126). The ‘citizen’s role’, this connectingposition between the private and the pub-lic, is self-evidently masculine – it relates tothe participant in political discourse andnaturally to the soldier as defender of thecommunity and protector of women, childrenand the old. It escaped Habermas how theprotection/reliance structure runs throughall institutions and how, finally, ‘the cons-truction of masculine and feminine gen-dered subjects is necessary in order to fillevery role in classical capitalism’ (127).

Fraser used the concept of gender relationsonly marginally, though in the Germantranslation it becomes completely casually‘the gender relation [das Geschlechter-verhältnis]’ (cf. 137). Her central concepts



were gender identity and gender; she thusfalls behind her own analysis with herdemand for ‘gender-sensitive categories’(128). Finally, she highlights practices intowhich humans enter for the reproduction of their life. She proposes to understand‘worker’, ‘consumer’ and ‘wages’ as gender-economic concepts, and citizen as a gender-political concept. But, in this way, only thegender-typical effects of the social relationsof production are noticed. Thus the openquestions which Fraser gains from thisextensive engagement appear to be com-paratively harmless: should a future societywhich is not founded upon the subjuga-tion of women (and which therefore needs no firm attribution in the construction of masculinity and femininity) conceive all labour under the form of wage-labour,or should the political part of society(Habermas’s citizen’s role) be expandedthrough making the raising of childrenobligatory for all? – Fraser’s critique was atthe same time her answer to the ‘dualeconomy debate’, whose supposition of a‘fundamental distinctness of capitalism andpatriarchy, class and gender’ had left unclear‘how to put them back together again’ (8).

Feminist sociology – Attempts to undertakefeminist research in the terms of social theoryoperate with the concept of gender relations.For Ursula Beer (1990), ‘the gender relation’was limited without exception to ‘generativemaintenance of survival’ or ‘generativereproduction’. She claimed to inscribe it inMarxist social theory as such a ’structuralelement’, which she accordingly renovatedwhen necessary. She understood Marx’swork as fundamentally a structural theory,whose central concept was ‘totality’ (70 etseqq.). She screened off ‘the production oflife’ conceptually against empirical prac-tices. Nor was she concerned with praxis-relations, but rather with the status that, forexample, women’s ability to give birth hasin a structural theory of society. The viewcomes from above, from the perspective of atheoretical organisation of categories inwhich individuals are allocated a ‘categorial’place. That individuals in reality shape theirlives either in forms of resistance or thoseof obedience is not taken into account. The

concepts which were suggested for ‘empirical’purposes allow a sociological investigationonly at the cost of marginalising the con-tradictions in which actual human beingsrealise themselves: ‘differentiation of fields oflabour’ (52) remains vague; ‘forms of labour/production not mediated by the market’ (73,76 et sq.) resolves only seemingly the problemof the housework debate, as these activitiesinclude not merely reproduction, but also,for example, left-wing theory, gardening,bowling and voluntary work of all types.

Regina Becker-Schmidt and Gudrun-AxeliKnapp (1995) wanted critically to overcomethe limitedness of feminist research, whichthey thought had been bogged down in theanalysis of the construction of gender.Moving ‘the gender relation’ into the centreof feminist sociology was supposed to dothis. The research question was how man-woman relationships ‘are organised inparticular historical conjunctures’ (7), ‘towhat extent predominant connections andconditions influence the relation of thegenders’ (8) and, conversely, how ‘genderrelationships’ react upon society. The wayof formulating the question remainedstructural-theoretical, organised accordingto the logic of cause and effect. In this way,genders themselves appeared to be fixedand society was grasped as a type of spacein which human relationships merely occur.They talked of ‘arrangement of the genders’(following Goffman 1994), of ‘compositionof gender relations’ or, five years later,evading the difficulty by changing termi-nology, ‘gender-relations [Gender-Relationen]’(2000, 45). In order to overcome the merelypsychologising research of ‘gender rela-tionships’ Becker-Schmidt und Knappcomprehend these as ‘cultural, political and economic’ (1995, 18) and related themto ‘exchange’ in ‘labour, performances, and satisfaction of needs’ (17 et sq.) or to‘exclusion’ from ’spaces, terrains of praxis,resources and rituals’. In distinction, theyhere regarded gender relations as ‘contextsof domination and power in which the socialposition of gender groups is institutionallyanchored and prolonged’ (18). Thus, gen-der relations were articulated to social re-production like a type of administrativemachine; they are to be studied additionally

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and appear to function according to theirown rules which can simply be modified bythe total social reproduction.

In the foreword to Becker-Schmidt/Knapp (2000), the use of the singular andthe plural of gender relations is describedin this way: ‘If we want to express the mu-tual social relatedness of gender groups [. . .] epistemologically only the concept of“gender relation” makes sense. If we comeacross empirical situations of disparity on all social levels of a society, if all socialorders turn out to be based upon similardeterminations of relation, the singular isadvisable. [. . .] The plural is called for whenwe [. . .] consider international variability’(154). The linking of the concept of genderrelations to international usage was justifiedby ‘ethnographical diversity’; meant by ‘the gender relation’ was a cultural order asan expression of structure (social fabric,symbols). In this way, society can hardly bethought practically, even though it strivesto somehow bring together structure andactivity by means of the concept of ‘con-nections [Konnexionen]’ (40). Following Beer (1990), they sought to comprehend theequality of determinant mechanisms indifferent fields (here, families and servantand service rights) ‘as an expression of thestructure of the relations of production’ (165).Alternatively, a patriarchal population poli-tics, a gendered division of labour and amasculine politics were supposed to sus-tain the complementary idea of thinkinggender as a structural category. The investiga-tion of diversity, discrepancy and even thecontrariness of human practices, however,is blocked by such an expressivist theory. –In the end, Becker-Schmidt summarisedtheir argument as follows: ‘Feminist researchhas not yet succeeded in sketching out atheory of gender relations which would becapable of itemising all of the complexes ofcausation and motivation contexts whichtraverse the relations between gender groups’(61). But the approach of ‘itemising all ofthe motivations and causes’ persisted, itselftrapped in the irredeemable idea that it ispossible to sketch such a model theoretically,instead of researching the practices ofhumans in the organisation of their life andtheir reproduction in their interconnections.

Masculinity research – Robert Connell gavethe concept of gender relations a funda-mental status in this field: ‘Knowledge ofmasculinity arises within the project ofknowing gender relations’ (1995, 44). Herecognised that it is not meaningful to speakof genders without relating their foundationhistorically to the question of the repro-duction of the species, upon which ‘one ofthe major structures of all documentedsocieties’ (72) was formed. Connell arguedthat ‘definitions of masculinity are pro-foundly interwoven with economic struc-tures and the history of institutions’ (48),and assumed that, in capitalist relations ofproduction, the field of human reproduc-tion is subordinated to that of the productionof the means of life (understood in thebroadest sense).

10. Gender relations, as ‘relations into whichmen enter in the production of their lives’,are always relations of production, just as,vice versa, relations of production are alwaysalso gender relations. The duplication of‘production’ into the production of life (inthe broadest sense, including rearing andcare) and the production of the means of life(again, in the broadest sense, including themeans of production) was the point ofdeparture for the historical naturalisation of the latter into the system of the econ-omy and – in capitalism – its dominance overthe production of life. The state stabilisedthis dominance, inasmuch as it ensured thatthe economy did not destroy its ownfoundations. For the analysis of relations ofproduction, the codification of the wholewith overdeterminations, relations ofarticulation and dependencies must betreated. To research into gender relations asrelations of production requires a differen-tial combination of historically compar-ative studies, attentive to moments oftransition, with social-theoretical and subjec-tive analysis. All of these aspects requireclarification.

The development and capitalist utilisa-tion of gene technology, intervening in humanreproduction, has now moved the bound-aries between the production of life andgoods so decisively, however, that the con-nection of gender relations as relations of



production must be thought in a new way.If it could previously be assumed that cap-italism allowed, for the purposes of its dif-fusion, the continuation of the ‘domesticmode of production’ of the family – or rather,thrived from it – capitalist industry is nowpushing its borders further, into the terrainof the sexual body and its propagation. Anantecedent was medical transplants, whichturned the body into a usable resource oforgans and opened up a new field of activityfor business just as for crime. Reproductivemedicine has moved the borders further.Sperm, eggs and embryos have becomecommodities; fertilisation, training andimplantation have become services for sale.The ability to give birth can be bought likelabour-power or like the right to use a bodyfor sexual gratification. So long as the crea-tion of children was not organised in a cap-italist form, the protection of women andcontrol of the woman’s body appeared as a dimension of the second order of therelations of production. Now, however, herorgans themselves – just as previously malesperm – are becoming raw material or meansof production of a mode of production whichhas added a further form, that of the ’sur-rogate mother ’, to the former forms ofindividuality – such as housewife, busi-ness woman, wage-worker and prostitute –according to which sexual bodies were activeand positioned in relation to each other. Thisis the beginning of a development whoseeffect upon gender relations constitutes thetask of future analysis and a politics ofemancipation. Within gender relations inwhich social interference in the lives ofwomen with the ability to be mothers andthe corresponding protective and blockingstrategies was mostly haggled over anddiminished, the penetration of the forms ofcapital into the sphere of procreation canbring all borders into flux.

At the beginning of the second wave ofthe women’s movement great hopes ofliberation were placed in reproductivetechnology. Shulamith Firestone (1970)regarded test-tube babies to be an indis-pensable revolution, because she thoughtthe oppression of women as biologicallydetermined. Donna Haraway proposed, ina fiercely contested manifesto, to infiltrate

gene technology with socialist-feministprinciples, and argued for ‘pleasure in theconfusion of boundaries and for responsibilityin their construction’ (1984/2004, 8). Harawaycomprehended the ‘translation of the worldinto an encoding-problem, into a pursuit of [. . .] a universal key which subjugateseverything to an instrumental control’ as anapproaching ‘info-tech of domination’ (11).Since women have lost more than they havewon from previous boundary consolida-tions, they should not withdraw to mother-hood, human dignity and similar ‘innocent’positions, but, instead, answer offensivelythe dimensions produced by the capitalistcommissioning of this ‘info-tech of domi-nation’, and the violence against womenwithin it, with their ‘own biotechnologicalpolitics’ (13). Further, they should negotiateopenly the problems of gene technology,taking into account gender, race and classas well as labour, poverty, health andeconomic power. Feminist science-fictionnovels were an important medium for suchnegotiation ( Joanna Russ, Ursula K. LeGuin,Marge Piercy). A sociological fantasy wasdeveloped regarding what a transformationof gender relations by technological andeconomic development would look like, inthe best as well as the worst of cases, ifmotherhood’s attachment to the female bodywas dissolved, if dreams of an end to allnatural lack were satisfied by capitalism in the form of ‘flawless’ children likecommodities for exchange, or the human-machine-boundary became permeable. Here,the threatening destruction of the earth bythe neoliberal unleashing of a savagecapitalism was anticipatorily explored. Aworld in which everything is subjugated tothe profit principle cannot maintain itselfwithout increasing self-destruction.

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1960, ‘Die neue Familie’, in C. Zetkin 1960,Ausgewählte Reden und Schriften, Bd 1, Berlin/GDR.

Frigga HaugTranslated by Peter Thomas

Anthropology, Labour, Family Work/Domestic Labour,Women’s Labour, Women’s Movement, Women’sQuestion, Free Love, Spirit, Community, Gender Main-streaming, Gene Technology, Total Labour, His-tory, Gender, Gender Contract, Gender Democracy,Gender Egalitarian Societies, Healthy/Sick, Equality,Equal Opportunities Politics, Domestic Mode ofProduction, Domestic Labour Debate, Housewife,Domination, Classes, Body, Matriarchy, Mother,Patriarchy, Periodisation of History, Private/Public,Relations of Production, Mode of Production, Forcesof Production, Rights, Reproductive Labour, Relationsof Reproduction, Reproductive Rights, Revolution,Sexuality, Subsistence, Suffragettes, Exchange, Theoryof Social Development, Non-Contemporaneity, Ori-ginary Community, Kinship, Precapitalist Modes ofProduction.

Anthropologie, Arbeit, Familienarbeit/Hausarbeit,Frauenarbeit, Frauenbewegung, Frauenfrage, freieLiebe, Geist, Gemeinwesen, Gender Mainstreaming,Gentechnologie, Gesamtarbeit, Geschichte, Geschlecht,Geschlechtervertrag, Geschlechterdemokratie, ge-schlechtsegalitäre Gesellschaften, gesund/krank,Gleichheit, Gleichstellungspolitik, häusliche Produk-

tionsweise, Hausarbeitsdebatte, Hausfrau, Herr-schaft, Klassen, Körper, Matriarchat/Mutterrecht,Mütter, Patriarchat, Periodisierung der Geschichte,privat/öffentlich, Produktionsverhältnisse, Pro-duktionsweise, Produktivkräfte, Rechte, Reproduk-tionsarbeit, Reproduktionsverhältnisse, reproduktiveRechte, Revolution, Sexualität, Subsistenz, Sufragetten,Tausch, Theorie der gesellschaftlichen Entwicklung,Ungleichzeitigkeit, ursprüngliches Gemeinwesen,Verwandtschaft, vorkapitalistische Produktionsweisen.

302 • Frigga Haug


Gender Relations - InkriT · Ethnological studies on gender relations ... August Bebel, Franz...

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Transcript of Gender Relations - InkriT · Ethnological studies on gender relations ... August Bebel, Franz...