Socialist Feminism

This article examines the role of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and its youth wing, the Young Communist League (YCL), in the advancement of gay rights in the 1970s and 1980s. Although the CPGB was the first major organization of the British labour movement—and the British left—to advance a policy of gay rights, its participation in the gay liberation movement has tended to be neglected by scholars. In contrast to the general perception of the CPGB in the last decade (or so) of its existence as a party of declining influence and cohesion, easily ignored by the mainstream of the labour movement, we argue that the embrace of gay rights provided communists with a means of pushing for a diversification of labour politics. This coalesced in the mid-1980s with the co-founding of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) by the communist activist Mark Ashton. With the recent scholarly and public interest in the LGSM and its impact upon the Labour Party's attitude to gay rights, this article aims to reveal that the 'pre-history' of the group is firmly rooted in the CPGB/YCL and the Eurocommunist section of the British communist movement. The year 2014 saw the 13th anniversary of the beginning of the 1984–5 miners' strike and the establishment of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM). The moment was used to launch the British film Pride, which tells the story of LGSM. One of the controversial points of the film's narrative was the silence over the co-founder of LGSM Mark Ashton's membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain

Tea Rooms. Mujeres obreras (1934) es una novela escrita por una mujer de origen obrero que quiere ser lectura para las mujeres trabajadoras. En ella Luisa Carnés, escritora largo tiempo postergada, tal vez por su condición de mujer y el compromiso militante de su producción literaria, retrata de soslayo la sociedad de la II República, pero sobre todo representa y problematiza la doble explotación de las mujeres, jugando con repeticiones, metáforas, imágenes e innovaciones estéticas, en un tono vanguardista, pero desde un lenguaje directo y claro de denuncia. Nos proponemos estudiar la función de los mecanismos literarios y la poética de esta novela, en la que la sencillez y los elementos vanguardistas, lejos de ser opuestos, convergen en un objetivo común: conmover, movilizar a las y los lectores para caminar hacia la transformación radical de la sociedad, poniendo especial atención en la emancipación de la mujer trabajadora. 

Tea Rooms. Mujeres obreras (1934) es una novela escrita por una mujer de origen obrero que quiere ser lectura para las mujeres trabajadoras. En ella Luisa Carnés, escritora largo tiempo postergada, tal vez por su condición de mujer y el compromiso militante de su producción literaria, retrata de soslayo la sociedad de la II República, pero sobre todo representa y problematiza la doble explotación de las mujeres, jugando con repeticiones, metáforas, imágenes e innovaciones estéticas, en un tono vanguardista, pero desde un lenguaje directo y claro de denuncia. Nos proponemos estudiar la función de los mecanismos literarios y la poética de esta novela, en la que la sencillez y los elementos vanguardistas, lejos de ser opuestos, convergen en un objetivo común: conmover, movilizar a las y los lectores para caminar hacia la transformación radical de la sociedad, poniendo especial atención en la emancipación de la mujer trabajadora.

"Passion killings"--murders of young women by their young male partners, sometimes followed by suicide--became a public issue in Botswana in the 1990s, and have continued. Two conflicting narratives emerged, one blaming the loss of cultural values of respect, one blaming the persistence of cultural values of male domination. This paper argues that there is some truth in both narratives, but that an understanding, and remedies, for increased intimate partner violence must be understood within the context of Botswana's diamond-based high pressure capitalism, with its commodification of social relations, and within the long perspective of the impact of Botswana's location as a labor reserve for SA mines on relations of  kinship and gender.

This class begins with a seemingly straightforward question: What is theory? And what, more specifically, is 'feminist' theory? Centering the various demands for feminist theory to explain the ongoing oppression, exploitation, and dispossession of all those who are not cis men (and most often non-white, non-able-bodied or-minded, non-Western, non-middle class, sometimes incarcerated, undocumented, or institutionalized), this class will provide a historical overview of various writings classified as feminist theory, from indigenous feminisms to the thought produced by Black Trans Lives Matter activists. Since feminist theory can be applied to any issue (and not just 'feminist' ones), this class offers an overview of the various schools of feminist theory. In this class, we will attempt to understand the numerous approaches that feminist theory offers as they are situated in their historical, locational, and social specificities through close readings of a wide variety of primary texts and thinkers; in other words, this is a reading-intensive class.

Affective and biological labor such as that found in call center and surrogacy work are indices of new forms of exploitation and accumulation within neoliberal globalization, but they also rearticulate a longer historical colonial division of labor. In this essay, feminist materialist scholarship provides the grounds to continue to scrutinize which kinds of exchange and subjectivity can even be represented by categories of labor. Leading to the question of what stakes are involved in asserting that gestational surrogates and others whose productivity occurs primarily through biological and affective processes are subjects of capitalist labor power. This essay argues that tracking vital energy, rather than value, as the content of what is produced and transmitted between biological and affective producers and their consumers holds on to the human vitality that Karl Marx describes as the content of value carried by the commodity and absolute use value of labor power to capitalist production, while also describing the content of these value-producing activities as greater than what can be described in terms of physical commodities and their value as represented through exchange.

In recent years, feminist scholarship on emotional labor has proliferated. I identify a related but distinct form of care labor, hermeneutic labor. Hermeneutic labor is the burdensome activity of: understanding and coherently expressing one's own feelings, desires, intentions, and movitations; discerning those of others; and inventing solutions for relational issues arising from interpersonal tensions. I argue that hermeneutic labor disproportionately falls on women's shoulders in heteropatriachal societies, especially in intimate relationships between women and men. I also suggest that some of the gendered burdens of emotional labor that feminist scholars point out would better be described as hermeneutic labor. Drawing on feminist philosophy as well as findings from social psychology and sociology, I argue that the exploitation of women's hermeneutic labor is a pervasive element of what Sandra Bartky calls the 'micropolitics' of intimate relationships. The widespread expectation that women are relationship maintenance experts, as well as the prevalence of a gendered demand-withdraw pattern of communication, leads an exploitative situation to appear natural or even desirable, even as it leads to women's dissatisfaction. This situation may be considered misogynistic in Kate Manne's sense, where misogyny is a property of social environments rather than a worldview.

Изданието помества разкази от първо лице и анализи на над тридесет жени и куиър хора, чието ежедневие и борби са резултат на конкретни властови отношения, възникнали с реставрацията на капитализма, затягането на патриархалния ред и навлизането на все по-консервативни вълни в България.

Текстовете улавят моментната  картина на положението на жените, куиър хората, феминистките и работнически мобилизации в България в края на 2018 и началото на 2019 г.

Наред с представянето на живи свидетелства за трудности и борби, те посочват възможни тълкувания на случилото се през последните няколко десетилетия у нас, които да ни помогнат да разберем по-добре процесите на насилие и експлоатация, но и отпора срещу тях днес.

За сборника:

Главен редактор: Калина Дренска

Съставителство: Калина Дренска, Рая Апостолова, Мария Иванчева, Леа Вайсова, Стоянка Eнева

Илюстрации и художник на корицата: Боряна Росса

Графичен дизайн, оформление и предпечат: Боряна Красимирова

Коректори: Камелия Ценева, Боряна Красимирова, Стойо Тетевенски, Неда Генова

Сборникът Феминистки хоризонти: насилие, труд, мобилизации е съставен и публикуван благодарение на финансовата подкрепа на Български фонд за жените (БФЖ). Продуктът не отразява становището на финансиращата организация и БФЖ не носи отговорност за съдържанието му.

Сборникът е възможен благодарение и на съдействието на колективите на Сдружение „Хладилника” (the Fridge) и списание dВерсия.

Тази книга не е предназначена за търговски цели и нейната продажба и/или препродажба е забранена.

Печатница: Дедракс, София

ISBN: 978-619-188-309-7

© ЛевФем, 2019, София

Lise Vogel's study, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Towards a Unitary Theory, argues that many socialist feminists relied on a dual-systems theory that maintains patriarchy and chauvinism as separate forms of cultural determination, without integrating them into the social totality of capitalist production and exploitation. Vogel's insight draws on earlier innovations in the Marxist tradition, most explicitly that of Louis Althusser. She argues that Althusser allowed her to break from an empirically descriptive approach to domestic labor, because his separation of Marx's conceptual insights from his empirical illustrations helped her to understand reproduction's integral role within capitalism. However, Vogel's work is also comparable to Althusser's later work on ideology. He argues that the reproduction of the conditions of production is equally important as production itself, and that ideology maintains this reproductive necessity. While he names the family as a primary apparatus of ideology, he does not dwell on its role. Nonetheless, we can see an alternative framework of social reproduction, through further engagement with the feminist reading of Althusser developed by Judith Butler. However, as Nancy Fraser points out, this risks an excessively immediate understanding of the relationship between gender ideology and the mode of production. Renewed attention to Vogel can change the way that we read the Althusserian intervention, such that social reproduction can be understood more clearly. I argue for a new conversation between social reproduction theory and queer theory, mediated by a shared inheritance from Althusser. Butler's reading contributes a theory of ideology that richly describes the experience of gender identity, while Vogel provides a more rigorous grounding in historical materialism.

《五朵金花》（王家乙，1959）通常被作为少数民族题材的喜剧与音乐风光电影探讨，本文探究其如何将社会主义背景下的性别解放与民族平等主题编织进公路叙事。将《五朵金花》作为“公路电影”研究不仅可以挑战此类型的西方中心框架，也会赋予影片新的解读视角，如位于电影核心的“社会主义道路”的时间与空间隐喻。在此过程中，民间文化尤其是民歌及当时尚属新奇的彩色摄影呈现的乐观性暗示了其社会主义现实主义风格。除了影片叙事中的旅途及社会主义的象征性“旅途”，《五朵金花》本身跨越多个国家的旅途也使其在“冷战”时期“文化外交”方面扮演了重要角色。于是，社会主义现实主义与公路电影的跨国元素相遇与重叠，创造一种旅行世界的多层次流动。

Postcolonial theory and intersectionality are the most prominent approaches in current critical social sciences. Surprisingly, both approaches have hardly talked to each other. Influenced by the German academic debate on these, I illustrate the (disconnecting g relations of both approaches and initiate a dialogue. In a first step, I focus on the work of Chandra T. Mohanty and of Kimberlé Crenshaw. While Mohanty bases her criticism on a discourse analysis of writings about 'Third-World-Women' and develops a postcolonial feminist approach, Crenshaw analyzes the intersection of gender and 'race' and criticizes the blindness of the interconnection in court decisions in the US. I demonstrate the differences and resemblances of both approaches and argue in particular that both approaches follow a constructivist methodology which creates four nodal points for the fruitful dialogue. I illustrate this by analyzing the works of Sojourner Truth and Clara Zetkin. Both feminists focus on different categories in the triangle of 'race', class and gender. Through a close reading of crucial selected works, I show that Truth perceives gender and 'race' as equivalent forms of subordination. Zetkin, however, emphasizes the hierarchical subordination by the specific class position of women. I conclude that a closer dialogue between both theoretical perspectives can help to sharpen the view on multiple discrimination and injustice in times of neoliberal capitalist hegemony.

First published in 1983, Lise Vogel’s study, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Towards a Unitary Theory, has received renewed attention since its republication last year. Vogel makes a compelling argument that many socialist feminists relied on a dual-systems theory that maintains patriarchy and chauvinism as separate instances of cultural determination, without integrating them into the social totality of capitalist production and exploitation. I argue that Vogel’s work finds a complement in earlier analyses written by the Italian autonomist feminists, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Leopoldina Fortunati. However, Vogel’s notion of value creation maintains a more traditional perspective. While she subscribes to Louis Althusser’s epistemological concepts, the Italians follow a reformulation according to the viewpoint of the worker’s experience and the notion of the “social factory”, advocated by Mario Tronti. While autonomist feminism and social reproduction theory share a commitment to understanding reproductive labor – including housework and care labor  – as indispensable elements of the mode of production, they also depart from one another on questions of interpretation and practice, particularly regarding the application of the wage relation to domestic labor.

Focusing on Soviet culture and its social ramifications both during the Soviet period and in the post-Soviet era, this book addresses important themes associated with Sovietisation and socialisation in the Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.

The book contains contributions from scholars in a variety of disciplines, and looks at topics that have been somewhat marginalised in contemporary studies of Central Asia, including education, anthropology, music, literature and poetry, film, history and state-identity construction, and social transformation. It examines how the Soviet legacy affected the development of the republics in Central Asia, and how it continues to affect the society, culture and polity of the region. Although each state in Central Asia has increasingly developed its own way, the book shows that the states have in varying degrees retained the influence of the Soviet past, or else are busily establishing new political identities in reaction to their Soviet legacy, and in doing so laying claim to, re-defining, and reinventing pre-Soviet and Soviet images and narratives.

Throwing new light and presenting alternate points of view on the question of the Soviet legacy in the Soviet Central Asian successor states, the book is of interest to academics in the field of Russian and Central Asian Studies.

The political and ideological legacy of Rosa Luxemburg has long been pondered upon by the leftist and progressive forces within India, in praxis as well as in theoretical precincts. Her incisive works around the concerns of imperialism, capitalism and nationalism have resonated with the peculiar political formations in India in many ways. However, historically she has not been as widely studied within the Indian leftist traditions as the male thinkers of her time, even when her writings reflected critically on the concerns of nationalism, imperialism and capitalism. As the organized left has been in decline over the decades, both within India and beyond, Luxemburg and her contributions further faded from public memory and interest. At a time when India is at its peak of the 'National Question' with a Hindu majoritarian party in the center, revisiting Luxemburg’s thoughts has become more important than before to offer us a possibility to think critically. In the search for a new language of socialist solidarities, this paper seeks to revisit Luxemburg 150 years after her birth against the backdrop of Indian political currents. This paper, thus, looks at the interlinked contemporary concerns of labor, caste and gender within a neoliberal economy of India through the political lens provided by Luxemburg and her ideas regarding imperialism, nationalism and capitalism.

My aim in this paper is to introduce a theory of affective labor as byproductive, a concept I develop through analysis of the phenomenology of various affective labor practices in dialogue with feminist scholarship, both on gendered and racialized labor, and on affect and emotion. I motivate my theory in the context of literature on affective and emotional labor in philosophy and the social sciences, engaging the post-Marxist literature on affective and immaterial labor and emphasizing feminist critiques. I argue that affective labor is not only the work of producing affects for others to consume or the reproductive work that rejuvenates and sustains labor power and social life, but also the work of metabolizing waste affects and affective byproducts. Thus, byproductive labor is a neologism I develop to bring into view an affective economy and indeed a political economy of affects to the side of the distinction between productive and reproductive labor in its paid and unpaid variants. I make three central claims: (1) affective labor invariably creates byproducts in the embodied subjectivity of the worker, (2) the unique kind of affective expenditure I call “byproductive” (metabolizing affective surplus, containing affective waste, and producing depleted affective agency) is a defining feature of affective labor not circumscribed by the productive-reproductive distinction, and (3) the marginalized forms of subjectivity and depleted agency constituted through the intersections of this labor with hierarchies of gender, race, and migrant status or global class are themselves byproducts of affective labor. Thus, theorizing affective labor as byproductive captures the uniqueness of affective labor and the forms of exploitation unique to it, but also explains the interaction of affective labor with forms of power that operate through subjection and marginalization.

Feminist and socialist movements both aim at emancipation yet have often been at odds. The socialist feminists of the Paris Commune provide one of the few examples in late nineteenth-century Europe of a political movement combining the two. This article offers a new interpretation of the Commune feminists, focusing on the working-class women’s organisation the Union des femmes. We highlight how the Commune feminists articulated the specific form of oppression experienced by working-class women as both women and workers, which consequently required a joint, yet differentiated, struggle to overcome. We explore three aspects of this framework. First, the Commune feminists offered a vision of the transformation of the social through reforms to girls’ education, the family and women’s work. Second, they practised a politics of coalition building by connecting their struggle with those of other oppressed groups, such as male workers, peasants and workers of other nations. Third, these ideas were instantiated in the Union des femmes’ novel proposal for women’s worker co-operatives as part of a socialist re-organisation of the economy.

In Revisiting Women’s Cinema, Lingzhen Wang ponders the roots of contemporary feminist stagnation and the limits of both commercial mainstream and elite minor cultures by turning to socialist women filmmakers in modern China. She foregrounds their sociopolitical engagements, critical interventions, and popular artistic experiments, offering a new conception of socialist and postsocialist feminisms, mainstream culture, and women’s cinema. Wang highlights the films of Wang Ping and Dong Kena in the 1950s and 1960s and Zhang Nuanxin and Huang Shuqin in the 1980s and 1990s to unveil how they have been profoundly misread through extant research paradigms entrenched in Western Cold War ideology, post-second-wave cultural feminism, and post-Mao intellectual discourses. Challenging received interpretations, she elucidates how socialist feminism and culture were conceptualized and practiced in relation to China’s search not only for national independence and economic development but also for social emancipation, proletarian culture, and socialist internationalism. Wang calls for a critical reevaluation of historical materialism, socialist feminism, and popular culture to forge an integrated emancipatory vision for future transnational feminist and cultural practices.

Feminism is a woman's rights movement that promotes the social, political and financial balance of both sexual orientations. Feminists trust in the equivalent accessibility of chances, and break even with treatment for both sexes. Feminism properly begun in nineteenth century till then woman for a considerable length of time were dealt with as inferior all around the globe. The development of feminism experienced diverse formative stages which are named as "waves". Throughout the years distinctive assortments of women's activist theory have created named as Radical Feminism, Liberal Feminism , Social Feminism , Cultural women's liberation and so on. Feminist literary criticism formally started in 1960s is a criticism that tries to delineate and break down the routes in which literature portrays male domination concerning female body by exploring the financial, social, political, and mental powers installed inside of writing. The dynamic atmosphere of May 1968 offered rise to current French feminist criticism. In America feminist criticism got a noteworthy spur from the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Twentieth-century British feminist criticism might be said to begin with Virginia Woolf .

During the 1980s, the Asociación de Mujeres de El Salvador (Association of Women of El Salvador, AMES) developed a revolutionary feminist praxis. It redefined socialist revolution to mean the overthrow of both capitalism and patriarchy, and mobilized women to shape the everyday and long-term trajectory of the revolutionary process. Composed of combatants, peasants, and militants in exile, AMES organized peasant women in the guerrilla territories in El Salvador and refugee camps in Nicaragua and Costa Rica, and coordinated solidarity work from Mexico, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and the United States. It organized in those multiple sites to expand the role of working-class and peasant women in the armed struggle for El Salvador’s national liberation. In so doing, it expanded the meaning of revolution. In this chapter I trace how a revolutionary feminist praxis – a dynamic interplay between theory and practice – emerged from the multiple sites in which AMES organized. The development of a feminist praxis within a context of armed struggle challenges prior academic accounts that have situated feminism in opposition to socialism and armed struggle.

Published in Making the Revolution: Histories of the Latin American Left:

Many treatments of the twentieth-century Latin American left assume a movement populated mainly by affluent urban youth whose naïve dreams of revolution collapsed under the weight of their own elitism, racism, sexism, and sectarian dogmas. However, this book demonstrates that the history of the left was much more diverse. Many leftists struggled against capitalism and empire while also confronting racism, patriarchy, and authoritarianism. The left's ideology and practice were often shaped by leftists from marginalized populations, from Bolivian indigenous communities in the 1920s to the revolutionary women of El Salvador's guerrilla movements in the 1980s. Through ten historical case studies of ten different countries, Making the Revolution highlights some of the most important research on the Latin American left by leading senior and up-and-coming scholars, offering a needed corrective and valuable contribution to modern Latin American history, politics, and sociology.

VIsit: https://www.cambridge.org/ve/academic/subjects/history/latin-american-history/making-revolution-histories-latin-american-left?format=PB

Resumen: El papel que algunas mujeres tuvieron en los momentos previos y posteriores a la Revolución rusa es, en muchas ocasiones, menospreciado o representado de manera puntual o anecdótica. Así, Nadezhda Krupskaya es descrita, en la mayoría de las publicaciones, tan solo como la esposa de Vladímir Ilich Uliánov-Lenin-a pesar de que tuvo un papel político muy importante en la antesala de la Revolución rusa de 1917, y posteriormente como parte del Comisariado de la Educación de la Unión Soviética, llama-do Narkomprós. Este artículo se centra en la vida y en el trabajo político de Krupskaya, para mostrar a continuación algunos de los lazos que entabló con otras tres autoras socialistas de comienzos del siglo XX: Inessa Armand, Clara Zetkin y Alexandra Kollontai. A través de la vida y obra de Krupskaya, se pre-tende ampliar el panorama con la aportación de otras autoras socialistas de la época, y mostrar el vínculo que mantenía Krupskaya con su trabajo político, pensamiento y lucha por los derechos de las mujeres trabajadoras. Por último, se reflexiona en torno a la vigencia en la actualidad del pensamiento y las reivindicaciones de este grupo de mujeres socialistas. Palabras clave: mujeres revolucionarias, feminismo y socialismo, Revolución rusa, derechos de las mujeres.