| Inspired by current accounts of Marxism's theoretical impact and political opposition to capitalist globalization, this dissertation explores various Marxist legacies that are present in U.S. feminist theories. More specifically, it examines both positive and negative ways that four Marxist legacies influence contemporary U.S. feminist theories. These four legacies are economism, class-consciousness, Leninism, and psycho-Marxism. After an initial chapter on the "Woman Question," the second chapter summarizes the socialist feminist "systems debate" that is influenced by classical Marxism's economistic base/superstructure distinction. Thinkers covered here include Heidi Hartmann, Iris Young, Anne Ferguson, Gloria Joseph, and Angela Davis. Ferguson's anti-racist multisystems, model is described as this chapter's most sophisticated system theory. The next two chapters address feminist standpoint theory, which analyzes tensions between social oppressions and group consciousness of these oppressions. First I discuss the work of Nancy Hartsock and Patricia Hill Collins in detail, arguing that Collins' elaboration of different race, class, and gender based standpoints is more useful than Hartsock's gender focused theory. Next I take a critical look at Catharine MacKinnon's authoritarian standpoint theory, which attempts to causally link pornography to sexual violence. Numerous feminist theorists note that MacKinnon shares much in common with Marxism, but I argue that her theory of consciousness-raising renders MacKinnon more specifically compatible with authoritarian Leninism. In these two chapters I introduce seven different terms that capture the wide variety of standpoint theories: mechanical, biological, automatic, achieved, immediate, mediated, and authoritarian. This study concludes with three scholars who engage both Marxist and psychoanalytic/post-structuralist feminist theories. Namely, Judith Butler's recent engagement with Althusser's ideas in her theorization of subjective complicity, and Gayatri Spivak's and Teresa Brennan's creative deconstructions of Marxist value theory provide invaluable contributions to contemporary feminist debates.;Beyond being a central concern of the psycho-Marxist theorists, psychoanalytic themes run throughout this study. A central aim of this study is to examine implicit or explicit theoretical links between "objective" economic and historical concerns and "subjective" concerns of agency, resistance, complicity, and unconscious processes. Theoretical consideration of women's differences is also a central critical criteria employed throughout the study. |
