Book contents
- After Marx
- After Series
- After Marx
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Black Marxism and the Antinomies of Racial Capitalism
- Chapter 2 Eco-Criticism and Primitive Accumulation in Indigenous Studies
- Chapter 3 Screening Insurrection: Marx, Cinema, Revolution
- Chapter 4 Marxist Ecology and Shakespeare
- Chapter 5 There Is No “More Commodification”: Periodizing Capitalist Transformation
- Chapter 6 The Irreconcilable: Marx after Literature
- Chapter 7 The Rise and Fall of the English-Language Literary Novel since World War II
- Chapter 8 Literature and the State
- Chapter 9 Post-Soviet Aesthetics
- Chapter 10 Lu Xun’s Literary Revolution in Chinese Marxism
- Chapter 11 Latin American Literature and Dependency Theory Today
- Chapter 12 Industry Culture: Labor and Technology in Marxist Critical Theory
- Chapter 13 In Service to Capital: Theater and Marxist Cultural Theory
- Chapter 14 Hidden Abodes and Inner Bonds: Literary Study and Marxist-Feminism
- Chapter 15 Poetry and Revolution
- Index
- References
Chapter 14 - Hidden Abodes and Inner Bonds: Literary Study and Marxist-Feminism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 March 2022
By
Book contents
- After Marx
- After Series
- After Marx
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Black Marxism and the Antinomies of Racial Capitalism
- Chapter 2 Eco-Criticism and Primitive Accumulation in Indigenous Studies
- Chapter 3 Screening Insurrection: Marx, Cinema, Revolution
- Chapter 4 Marxist Ecology and Shakespeare
- Chapter 5 There Is No “More Commodification”: Periodizing Capitalist Transformation
- Chapter 6 The Irreconcilable: Marx after Literature
- Chapter 7 The Rise and Fall of the English-Language Literary Novel since World War II
- Chapter 8 Literature and the State
- Chapter 9 Post-Soviet Aesthetics
- Chapter 10 Lu Xun’s Literary Revolution in Chinese Marxism
- Chapter 11 Latin American Literature and Dependency Theory Today
- Chapter 12 Industry Culture: Labor and Technology in Marxist Critical Theory
- Chapter 13 In Service to Capital: Theater and Marxist Cultural Theory
- Chapter 14 Hidden Abodes and Inner Bonds: Literary Study and Marxist-Feminism
- Chapter 15 Poetry and Revolution
- Index
- References
Summary
This chapter argues that Marxist-feminist methods informed by new readings of Marx that first emerged in Germany in the 1960s can provide capacious and flexible critical tools for feminist analysis. Drawing in particular on the concept of real abstraction, I demonstrate an approach to Marxist-feminist literary study that avoids structuralist and economistic understandings of cultural production, as well as the simplistic notions of false consciousness and ideology critique that inflect much twentieth-century Marxist literary criticism. Rather, Marx’s critique of value as a social form that operates “behind our backs,” as a set of impersonal compulsions that push forward independent of thought, can help us to better understand the dialectics of aesthetic experience – exemplified here in my reading of feminized poetry – as an important mode of sense-perception attuned to (or even able to “theorize”) the dynamic and contradictory reproduction of gender and its mediation by capital.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- After MarxLiterature, Theory, and Value in the Twenty-First Century, pp. 225 - 239Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022
References
Barrett, Michèle. Women’s Oppression Today: The Marxist/Feminist Encounter. Verso, 1988.Google Scholar
Best, Beverley. “Distilling a Value Theory of Ideology from Volume Three of Capital.” Historical Materialism, vol. 23, no. 3, 2015, pp. 101–141.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bhandar, Brenna and Toscano, Alberto. “Race, Real Estate, and Real Abstraction.” Radical Philosophy, no. 194, 2015, pp. 9–17.Google Scholar
Bonefeld, Werner. Critical Social Theory and the Critique of Political Economy. Bloomsbury, 2014.Google Scholar
Cecire, Natalia. “Ways of Not Reading Gertrude Stein.” ELH, vol. 82, no. 1, 2015, pp. 281–312.Google Scholar
Dalla Costa, Mariarosa and James, Selma. The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community. Falling Wall Press, 1972.Google Scholar
De’Ath, Amy. Unsociable Poetry: Antagonism and Abstraction in Contemporary Feminized Poetics. 2017. Simon Fraser University, PhD dissertation.Google Scholar
Elbe, Ingo. “Between Marx, Marxism and Marxisms: Ways of Reading Marx’s Theory.” Viewpoint Magazine, 2013, https://viewpointmag.com/2013/10/21/between-marx-marxism-and-marxisms-ways-of-reading-marxs-theory/.Google Scholar
Elson, Diane. “The Value Theory of Labour.” Value: The Representation of Labour in Capitalism, ed. Elson, Diane. Verso, 1979, pp. 115–180.Google Scholar
Federici, Silvia. Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism. PM Press, 2020.Google Scholar
Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation
. Autonomedia, 2004.Google Scholar
Federici, Silvia. Wages Against Housework. Power of Women Collective and Falling Wall Press, 1975.Google Scholar
Fortunati, Leopoldina. The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital. Autonomedia, 1995.Google Scholar
Franklin, Seb. The Digitally Disposed: Racial Capitalism and the Informatics of Value. University of Minnesota Press, 2021.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gabriel, Kay. “You Say Wife.” Social Text, 2019, https://socialtextjournal.org/you-say-wife/.Google Scholar
Hennessy, Rosemary. Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism. Routledge, 2000.Google Scholar
Marx, Karl. “Afterword to the Second German Edition of Capital.” The Marx–Engels Reader, edited by Tucker, Robert C.. Norton, 1978.Google Scholar
Meiksins Wood, Ellen. “Capitalism and Human Emancipation.” New Left Review, vol. 167, 1998, pp. 3–20.Google Scholar
Nealon, Christopher. “Value | Theory | Crisis.” PMLA, vol. 127, no. 1, 2012, pp. 101–106.Google Scholar
Ngai, Sianne. “Visceral Abstractions.” GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, vol. 21, no. 1, 2015, pp. 33–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Salamon, Gayle. Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality. Columbia University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Scholz, Roswitha. “Patriarchy and Commodity Society: Gender without the Body.” Marxism and the Critique of Value, edited by Larsen, Neil et al. MCM Publishing, 2014.Google Scholar
Sohn-Rethel, Alfred. Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology, edited and translated by Sohn-Rethel, M. Macmillan, 1978.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spahr, Juliana and Clover, Joshua. “Gender Abolition and Ecotone War.” The South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 115, no. 2, 2016, pp. 291–311.Google Scholar
Szeman, Imre. “Who’s Afraid of National Allegory? Jameson, Literary Criticism, Globalization.” South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 100, no. 3, 2001, pp. 803–827.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vogel, Lise. Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory. Rutgers University Press, 1983.Google Scholar
- 4
- Cited by