MATERIALIST

FEMINISM AND THE

POLITICS OF
DISCOURSE
Rosemary Hennessy

ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS:

FEMINIST THEORY
 ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS:
FEMINIST THEORY

MATERIALIST FEMINISM AND THE

POLITICS OF DISCOURSE
MATERIALIST FEMINISM AND THE
POLITICS OF DISCOURSE

ROSEMARY HENNESSY

Volume 21
ROUTLEDGE

Routledge
Taylor &. Francis Group

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First published in 1993
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materialist feminism and
the politics of discourse
materialist
feminism
A N D THE

politics of
discourse
rosemary hennessy

ROUTLEDGE
NEW Y O R K / L O N D O N
Published in 1993 by
Routledge
An imprint of Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc.
29 West 35th Street
New York, NY 10001

Published in Great Britain by

Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane
London EC4P 4EE

Copyright © 1993 by Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc.

Printed in the United States of America on acid free paper

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in
any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter in-
vented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or re-
trieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Hennessy, Rosemary.
Materialist feminism and the politics of discourse / by Rosemary
Hennessy.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-415-90479-X (cl.) ISBN 0-415-90480-3 (pbk.)
1. Feminist theory. 2. Marxist criticism. I. Title.
HQ1190. H46 1992
305.42 01—dc20 92-9689
CIP

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Hennessy, Rosemary
Materialist Feminism and the Politics of
Discourse.—(Thinking Gender Series)
I. Title II. Series
305.4
ISBN 0-415-90479-x
ISBN 0-415-90480-3 (pb)
For Molly and Kate
Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction xi

1. Materialist Feminism in the Postmodern Academy:

Toward a Global Social Analytic 1

2. The Materiality of Discourse:

Feminism and Post-marxism. 37

3. The Feminist Standpoint, Discourse, and Authority:

From Women's Lives To Ideology Critique 67
4. New Woman, New History 100
Notes 139
Bibliography 154
Index 173
Acknowledgments

This book could not have been written without support and encouragement of
various sorts, from diverse quarters, over many years. Because the first phase of
the project was a dissertation produced out of a time of great upheaval in English
departments nationally, and at Syracuse University in particular, its passage
through institutional channels was far from smooth. As a result, the support it
did receive was crucial and taught me much about the politics of discourse. For
their willingness to serve as directors, for their incisive readings and critical
advice, I am especially grateful to Robyn Wiegman and Steven Mailloux. I also
want to thank Linda Alcoff, Thomas Yingling, and Dympna Callahan who gave
my ideas their time and useful commentary. For his contribution to the intellectual
ferment and ideological discomfort out of which this phase of the book was
produced, I want to acknowledge Mas'ud Zavarzadeh. Although he did not see
the project through to completion, he extended immeasurably its political reach.
Financial aid from several sources helped provide the precious time I needed
for writing and research. Part of my work on Foucault was funded by a Syracuse
University Faculty Senate Research Grant in 1987. In 1991 a New York State
United University Professors New Faculty Development award from the Univer-
sity at Albany provided the resources for a summer spent on revisions.
Sections of this book have appeared previously in an essay published in
Rethinking Marxism. I want to thank the editors of this journal for their interest
in my work.
The materialist feminism I argue for here has been shaped by the solidarity
and critique of several friends and collectives. Many of the ideas that found their
way into this book are indebted to my work with Rajeswari Mohan whose bold
thinking, rigor, and incisive readings have always inspired me and whose critical
support through collaborative projects and difficult times I value highly. I also
owe a special thanks to Fred Fiske for years of unqualified endorsement of my
intellectual pursuits, despite their costs and often disruptive outcomes. At Syra-

iX
X / ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

cuse University long hours of debate, writing, and struggle with The Student
Marxist Collective (Amitava Kumar, Minette Marcroft, Raji Mohan, Bob Now-
lan, Ron Strickland, Mark Wood) helped shape my thinking on innumerable
facets of postmodern marxism and collective work. Hypatia: The Graduate Group
of Women's Studies taught me invaluable lessons in feminist praxis, and the
Feminist Theory Colloquium (1989–90) offered a useful forum for discussing
many of the issues I grapple with here. Thanks are also due to several colleagues
at the State University of New York at Albany who generously read the manuscript
or parts of it and offered encouragement—Ruma Chawla, Helen Elam, Jill
Hanifan, Deb Kelsh, Cy Knobloch, Steve North. The Feminist Theory Group at
SUNY Albany was a challenging testing-ground for materialist feminism. I want
to acknowledge especially those who participated in the session on my Foucault
essay: Lil Brannon, Judith Fetterley, Claudia Murphy, Marjorie Pryse, and Joan
Schulz. Discussions and collective work with Teresa Ebert have spurred my
thinking on many issues; her critical solidarity in negotiating what it means to be
an oppositional intellectual has often affirmed my faith in feminism. The students
at SUNY Albany in the courses I offered in 1990 and 1991 taught me a great
deal about feminist pedagogy and the function of theory in postmodern culture.
I owe a very special debt to Linda Nicholson who pursued the manuscript for
the Thinking Gender series; she has been a staunch friend and mentor and a
magnanimously supportive editor. I am also grateful to Maureen MacGrogan,
my editor at Routledge, for her endorsement of the project and patience with its
production.
Finally, I want to acknowledge Chrys Ingraham who more than anyone has
fortified my understanding of feminist practice. She read and commented on each
of the chapters; our countless conversations and debates thread their way through
all of the ideas here. Her renegade wisdom and humor, fierce commitments, and
keen theoretical insights have been my most valuable resources.
My daughters, Marian and Katherine Hennessy-Fiske, to whom this book is
dedicated, lived through the many years I was writing it with love and forbearance,
and I thank them for that. I hope that witnessing my labors has already persuaded
them to persevere and take risks in their own work for social justice and will
encourage them always to believe that failure is impossible.
Introduction

One of the foremost issues—perhaps even the issue—western feminism faces

in the nineties is the impact of the general crisis of knowledge on its historical
subject. This crisis of authority has intensified anxiety around the category
"woman," an anxiety which has to a greater or lesser extent haunted bourgeois
feminism from its inception in the form of questions about the woman—or
women—feminism speaks for. In some instances, questioning feminism's claim
to speak for all women has led to fears that dismantling the identity "woman"
may well lead to the dissolution of feminism itself. At the same time, the
myriad forms of violence against women, the persistent worldwide devaluation of
femininity and women's work, and the intensified controls over women's sexual-
ity and reproductive capacities are daily reminders of the need for a strong
and persistent feminist movement. Surely feminist critique of the systematic
oppression of women is still necessary, perhaps more now than ever. The chal-
lenge is to find ways to anchor feminist analysis in our recognition of the continued
brutal force certain social totalities like patriarchy and racism still exercise, at the
same time acknowledging that the social construction of "woman" is never
monolithic. Over the past decade materialist feminist theory has been in the
forefront of the effort to take up this challenge.
In the late 1970s materialist feminism emerged from feminist critiques within
marxism. Working in critical engagement with the formation of the New Left
in Britain and France especially, materialist feminist work contributed to the
development of theories of patriarchy and ideology, elaborating more specific
understandings of the relation between the operation of power in the symbolic
order and in other material practices. Annette Kuhn, Anne Marie Wolpe, Michele
Barrett, Mary Macintosh, and Christine Delphy were among the initial promoters
of "materialist feminism," favoring that term over "marxist feminism" on the basis
of an argument that marxism cannot adequately address women's exploitation and
oppression unless the marxist problematic itself is transformed so as to be able

Xi
xii / INTRODUCTION

to account for the sexual division of labor. With its class bias, its emphasis on
economic determinism, and its focus on a history exclusively formulated in terms
of capitalist production, classic marxism in the seventies had barely begun to
analyze patriarchal systems of power. At the same time, there was a marked
tendency in most feminist theory to conceptualize woman in essentialist and
idealist terms. In this context, materialist feminism provided a historically urgent
ground from which to launch a critical counterknowledge to both feminism and
marxism.
By the early eighties a small but growing body of materialist feminist theory
from across diverse national boundaries was making use of the insight that
subjectivity is discursively constructed to analyze the intersections of gender and
class. These analyses served as a powerful critique of mainstream feminism's
appeals to individual rights or to a universalized notion of "women's experience,"
but for the most part they gave priority to the social construction of gender.
This tendency to focus exclusively on gender has blunted materialist feminism's
effectivity in many areas of oppositional political struggle, however, and in this
respect aligned it with much mainstream western feminist work. Over the past
twenty years, the voices of women who have found themselves outside the
boundaries of that mainstream—women of color, lesbians, working-class, and
"third-world" women—have pressured feminism to question the adequacy of a
generic "woman" and a gender-centered feminist inquiry. These knowledges
draw from (and contend with) the discourses of the postmodern avant-garde which
have also rewritten the subject-in-difference by calling into question the empiricist
self. The materialist feminism that is circulating in the nineties—in the work of
Norma Alarcon, Evelyn Brooks-Higgenbotham, Teresa Ebert, Teresa deLauretis,
Donna Haraway, Chandra Mohanty, Toril Moi, Mary Poovey, Chandra Sando-
val, and others—has grown out of and been shaped by both of these critiques of
identity. Increasingly, materialist feminist analyses problematize "woman" as an
obvious and homogeneous empirical entity in order to explore how "woman" as
a discursive category is historically constructed and traversed by more than one
differential axis.
At a historical moment when the pressures to address difference are often
formulated in terms of a logic of inclusion or contingency, when imperatives to
abandon systemic thinking and "overarching totalities" in our analysis exert their
force from the left and from the right, materialist feminists need to insist on one
of the strongest features of feminism's legacy—its critique of social totalities
like patriarchy and capitalism—without abandoning attention to the differential
positioning of women within them. As a multinational military industrial complex
systematically expands its network of exploitative relations of production and
consumption, patriarchal and capitalist relations become even more securely
imbricated. Witness the growing violence against women in the periphery by
corporate research, the increasing sexualization of women internationally by an
all-pervasive commodity aesthetics, and the intensified contestation over worn-
 Introduction / xiii

an's body as the site of reproduction in the "first world" and of production in the
"third world." At the same time that capital's colonization has become more
wide-reaching and insidious, oppositional struggles are increasingly confined to
regional and isolated sites. As this strategy of localizing extends to many cultural
registers and becomes a common mechanism of crisis management, materialist
feminists need to attend critically to its effects on the conceptual frameworks
which structure our concepts.
This book is not an overview or a genealogy of materialist feminism. It
does not offer an introduction to materialist feminism or plot out its organizing
concepts. It is, instead, an argument for and within a materialist feminist problem-
atic that takes as its particular focus the problem of the subject—more specifically,
the discursively constructed subject. This focus leads me to explore some of the
theoretical and political issues that materialist feminism's appropriation of the
concept of a discursively constructed subject has raised: whether and how it
matters which theory of discourse we work with, for instance, or whether a
discursively constructed subject is coherent with feminism's emancipatory aims.
Throughout I argue for materialist feminism as a way of reading that need not
shrink from naming social totalities in order to address the complex ways in
which subjectivities are differentiated. And I present this argument by way of
several conceptual—which is to say theoretical, historical, and political—issues
it raises for the question of who feminism speaks for.
In naming this nexus of issues "the politics of discourse," I took the risk of
invoking a phrase that, in some circles at least, has become almost a cliché. It
seems to me, however, that for all of the invocations of "politics" in studies that
have addressed the "discursive construction of the subject," we still have very
few rigorous theoretical formulations of exactly what these terms mean. This is
even more the case when they are combined with another word, also lately in
vogue, "materialism." The title, then, is a way of insisting that we cannot shy
away from concepts like "politics," "discourse," or "materialism" simply because
they are last year's fashion, and now are no longer "hot" or "fresh." Instead we
need to continue the hard work of explaining and rewriting them.
Materialist feminism is engaged in this rewriting. Like other reading practices,
its ways of making sense of the world make sense; that is, materialist feminism
affects what gets to count as "reality" through the assumptions it valorizes and
the subjects it produces. It is in this sense a discourse that has a definite politics.
Even as it takes as its particular focus the elimination of patriarchal power, the
assumptions on which materialist feminist theory rests have been forged out
of appropriations from an array of discourses—postmodern, marxist, liberal
humanist, anticolonialist, anti-racist. In the following chapters I examine how
this focus is affected by the various and often contesting discourses materialist
feminism appropriates and the issues raised by its appropriation of concepts.
Throughout I suggest that the task of redefining who feminism speaks for is
intimately bound up with how the discursive construction of the subject is concep-
xiv / INTRODUCTION

tualized. This means, in part, that the various theories of discourse we appropriate
and how we articulate them into a feminist critical framework have an effect on
the sense we make of the world—on our feminist politics and the reality it
transforms.
I approach this general issue of the politics of discourse by way of several
problems. Chief among them is the problem of social analytics—that is, how the
social is conceptualized in the various theories materialist feminism draws from—
and the accompanying question of how to understand the materiality of discourse
and of history. The standpoint from which and for which I argue is a much more
emphatically postmodern marxist feminism than much recent work in materialist
feminism has been willing to embrace. However, to my mind taking the risk of
situating materialist feminism's materialism more firmly within a postmodern
marxist problematic has two crucial positive consequences. It avails feminism of a
framework for developing a more rigorous theory of the materiality of discourse—
including materialist feminism's own discursivity—and it opens a productive
avenue for rethinking feminism's subject.
Implicit in the organization of the book is the assumption that in order for
materialist feminism to be a powerful critical intervention in the reformation of
the hegemonic subject in the postmodern moment, we have to attend more
rigorously to the materiality of knowledge. This means, in part, that we have to
inquire into the processes whereby feminism appropriates and reformulates its
concepts. If feminist inquiry is not to be a re-enactment of the dominant pluralist
paradigm, it needs to make visible the contesting interests informing new knowl-
edges and disarticulate their salient features from analytics that often subvert the
aims of feminism's political agenda. In order to foreground the materiality of
feminism as a mode of reading, we also need to situate the various facets of a
materialist feminist theoretical framework in relation to other contesting materi-
alisms.
For the reader primarily interested in the feminism of materialist feminist
theory, these efforts may seem belabored "detours" through various marxisms
and post-marxisms. Anticipating these objections, I want to emphasize that
materialist feminism dismisses sustained inquiry into these discourses which also
claim to be materialist at the risk of reifying its own historicity. While the extent
of my critique of post-marxism in the first two chapters could be improved upon—
and no doubt will be in the continuing work of others—if we are going to take
seriously the notion that discourses have a materiality, we cannot shrink from
rigorous critical assessments of the theoretical paradigms we draw our concepts
from.
In order to relate the crisis of feminism's subject to the re-formation of subjec-
tivities in the larger culture now, I begin chapter 1 by situating materialist
feminism in the discursive field where it primarily circulates, that is, the postmod-
ern academy. The crisis of knowledge in the academy is increasingly being
understood in terms of forces that extend much more broadly than the invasion
 Introduction / xv

of postmodern theories. Provoked by pressures as wide-ranging as shifts in U.S.

hegemony and demographics, the technological revolution, and the installation
of a service-based economy now in recession, this "crisis" is a struggle over the
distribution of wealth and the reimagination of civic identity. Feminism has been
one of the primary new knowledges fomenting this crisis, at the same time it has
been affected by and helped manage it. The reconfiguration of what and how we
know has provoked feminism's critical assessment of who it speaks for, and
helped us reimagine the feminist subject as a highly differentiated one, positioned
across the multiple axes of race, class, gender, and sexuality. At the same time
that feminism's critical edge has been honed by the array of new knowledges
loosely identified as postmodern, its relationship to postmodernism has also been
contentious. Many postmodern theories have threatened to recuperate feminism's
oppositional force. Examining the social logic implicit in the postmodern theories
we appropriate—particularly those claiming to be materialist—can enable femi-
nists to assess the extent to which a particular theoretical framework may subvert
or enhance feminism's political objectives.
I inaugurate this process of "disarticulating" postmodern materialism in chapter
1, through a critique of the social logics in the work of Foucault and Laclau and
Mouffe. Each has important concepts to offer materialist feminism, and yet each
frames these concepts within a social logic of contingency, a framework that I
argue undermines feminism's critique of patriarchy. Disarticulating some of these
concepts—the notion of discursive practice, is one—from a contingent social
logic is a first step toward rearticulating them within an alternative systemic
conception of the social. Theories of ideology post-Althusser are to my mind a
very useful instance of systemic analysis for feminist theory now. Conceptualizing
discourse as ideology allows us to consider the discursive construction of the
subject, "woman," across multiple modalities of difference, but without forfeiting
feminism's recognition that the continued success of patriarchy depends upon its
systematic operation—the hierarchical social relations it maintains and the other
material forces it marshals and is shaped by. It is, moreover, a mode of analysis
that is coherent with feminism's commitment to the elimination of exploitation
and oppression.
In chapter 2 I turn to the problem of the materiality of discourse as it has been
formulated in the work of several post-marxists: Foucault, Kristeva, and Laclau
and Mouffe. Each of them has devised materialist theories of discourse which
have been extremely influential, particularly for feminist theory, in configuring
relations between language and the social. I pay particular attention to Foucault
because of the tremendous impact his conception of discourse has had on material-
ist feminism. Reading Foucault in relation to Kristeva, whose work is usually
seen as quite distinct from his, brings into relief certain shared features of their
analytics and demonstrates once again "the politics of discourse"—in this case,
how the framing of concepts in social theory has a bearing on larger social
arrangements. As part of their project of putting forward a conceptual outline for
xvi / INTRODUCTION

radical democracy, Laclau and Mouffe's materialist theory of discourse is also

relevant to feminists. Their understanding of the formation of a democratic
plurality gives a great deal of prominence to political movements, including
feminism, and is increasingly being appropriated by materialist critics of culture.
Reading these three theories against each other makes visible unexpected
similarities in their analytics: in the relationship between the discursive and the
nondiscursive, in their ways of understanding the disruptive "unthought" of
culture, in their notions of the body. It underscores the potentially useful ways
of conceptualizing the social construction of difference they make possible as
well as those they block. Reading them in relation to each other also foregrounds
the conservative implications of their theories of discourse, an issue often over-
looked in materialist feminist appropriations of their work.
My rewriting of the materiality of discourse for feminism begins with an
assessment of feminist standpoint theory in chapter 3. Although not without its
shortcomings, this body of work now comprises one of the major feminist
contributions to the rearticulation of the subject. It offers a very powerful critical
framework for explaining the relationships among knowledge, power, and subjec-
tivity. In this regard, standpoint theory supersedes many of the impasses of liberal
and postmodern feminism. However, one of its intractable issues is an often
contradictory allegiance to both a discursively constructed subject and an experi-
ential self. The theoretical problem that underlies this contradiction is standpoint
theory's failure to explain the material relation between the discursive (feminist
critique) and the nondiscursive (women's lives). Drawing critically upon develop-
ments in postmodern marxist theory, I argue that understanding discourse as
ideology offers a way out of this impasse.
A theory of ideology makes it possible to explain the complex ways social
reality is shaped—through the overdetermined relations among mechanisms for
making sense, distributing resources, dividing labor, and sharing or wielding
power. If we acknowledge, for instance, that discursive struggles over woman's
reproductive body in the U.S. now have less to do with women's "choice"—or
even with abortion per se—than with the maintenance of a social order in which
the few still benefit from the work of many, where power and resources are
distributed on the basis of wealth not human worth or need, and women are
generally devalued, we can begin to make sense of the contest over abortion from
the standpoint of those who are already most affected by the legislation of
women's bodies—the thousands of poor women who are also disproportionately
women of color. We need critical frameworks that can address these issues and
explain the complex ways in which the social marks of difference do not serve
as indices of plurality but rather as guarantors of inequity. The causal logic
underlying a theory of discourse as ideology makes it possible to acknowledge
the systematic operation of social totalities like patriarchy and racism across a
range of interrelated material practices. These totalities traverse and define many
areas of the social formation—divisions of labor, dimensions of state intervention