Feminism K vs Marx Affs - Michigan 2024 KLAB

Feminism K vs. Marxism Affs
UMich K Lab 2024
1NC SHELL
1NC - FEM K
Marxism’s project is a patriarchal politics of distraction one that subsumes the struggles of gender at best, marking them as counterproductive at worst.
Rao and Akram-Lodhi ’21 [Smriti Rao, Professor of Economics at Assumption University; A Haroon Akram-Lodhi, Professor, Department of International Development Studies at Trent University; “Feminist political economy” in “The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Economics”, Part I, Chapter 3, pp. 34-42; Routledge; doi.org/10.4324/9780429020612; accessed via University of Michigan Libraries, 07-13-2024] dliang
The feminist critique of Marx’s political economy
There are several notable problems with Marx’s analysis from a feminist perspective. First, Marx had a limited interest in the two-way relation between changing forms of accumulation and gendered power relations. Second, Marx never explored the production of labor power itself. For Marx, the term ‘social reproduction’ referred to the entire complex of social, cultural and political processes required to reproduce capital-labor relations. This definition, however, omitted the labor of life-making required to produce and sustain the labor force, despite such labor being a vital condition of existence for capitalism. In most parts of the world it is women and girls who perform this labor, much of it unpaid. But Marxism was a theory of ‘empty places’ with no explanation of why it was indeed women who performed the bulk of this work (Hartmann 1979). The omission of women’s unpaid labor from Marxist analysis meant that Marxists had little analysis or critique of the gender division of labor (Molyneux 1979).
Second-wave Feminism and Marxism
Early Marxist-feminists expanded the definition of social reproduction to include i) the daily sustenance of the workers ii) the inter-generational reproduction of the labor force, including biological reproduction and the care of dependents iii) the work involved in transmitting the norms, culture, and skills required to reproduce workers as a class (Beneria 1979; Moos, this volume). One of the most important contributions of feminist political economy is to fill the gap left by nineteenth and twentieth century Marxism’s unwillingness to grapple with the details and dynamics of social reproduction and its links to production.
As participants in the social movements of the 1960s, women who brought feminist questions into Marxism found some initial answers in the works of Engels (Vogel 2013). Engels (1978) argued that every economic system had to have counterpart institutions of reproduction that needed to be examined from a materialist perspective. He argued that the origins of gender inequality and male control over women’s reproductive powers under capitalism lay in the establishment of the institution of private property. However, since the proletariat were effectively property-less under capitalism, proletarian women would come to achieve equality with men, which would become universal for all women, with the establishment of socialism and the abolition of private property.
Unfortunately, within the working class and in the socialist countries of the 20th century, gender inequalities in wages and access to political power persisted, convincing feminists that the success of the socialist project would not automatically end the oppression of women (Molyneux 1979). Yet when feminists raised questions about the unequal distribution of power by gender, most Marxists dismissed these questions as trivial, as a secondary contradiction (when compared to class conflict), or as dangerous, because they had the potential to divide the working class (Beechey 1987).
The standard Marxist explanation for the persistence of discrimination against women was that it helped capitalists to push down average wage rates for the working class as a whole and was thus functional for capital. But this analysis seemed to subsume gender inequality under class inequality and, as radical feminists argued, take the onus off men as a group by emphasizing the antagonism with capital (Barrett 1980).
One alternative for feminists trying to reconcile Marxism with feminism was to see patriarchy and capitalism as two equally important but different modes of production, in what came to be known as the “dual systems” approach (Hartmann 1979). However, given the variations in the forms of gender inequality experienced by women across the world, feminists of color in the global South and North found the positing of a monolithic patriarchal system problematic (Beneria and Sen 1981; Davis 1981). Specifying the internal dynamics of such a patriarchal mode of production proved difficult, and laying out a systematic relationship between the patriarchal and capitalist modes of production proved to be even more challenging (Rowbotham 1981; Beechey 1987).
A second stream of feminist theorizing in the 1970s focused more narrowly on unpaid domestic labor and its relationship with what Marxists called “productive labor,” defined as being productive of surplus (Himmelweit and Mohun 1977). Since the VLP presumes production of goods and services by unpaid domestic labor, feminists argued that domestic labor is also productive of surplus and deserving of a wage (Dalla Costa and James 1972). Those who performed this labor were seen as super-exploited by capital or by the (male) heads of their households (Dalla Costa and James 1972; Folbre 1982; Cohen 2018). Most feminist political economists today do not see unpaid domestic labor as directly productive of surplus but rather as indirectly subsidizing capital (Vogel 2013), or as a form of accumulation by appropriation (Moore 2017).
One of the major weaknesses of the domestic labor debate was that it remained limited to heterosexual, (nuclear) kin-based, white middle class households in the global North, even as evidence mounted that most households in the world look quite different (Whitehead 1984). By the 1980s, these difficulties, the relative indifference to feminist issues on the part of the largely male Marxist community, as well as the decline in left social movements and analyses more generally, pushed many of the participants in these debates away from Marxist-feminist analyses (Luxton 2006). However, the dual systems and domestic labor debates laid the foundations for the rich empirical work on unpaid labor, care work, and time-use that has now become central to feminist economics (Moos, this volume).
Hegemonic masculinity reinforces the alienation of feminine-labeled traits and rationality, which inevitably produces endless structural violence and conflict.
Sjoberg 13 (Laura, associate professor of Political Science @ University of Florida, University of Chicago; Ph.D., University of Southern California School of International Relations; J.D. Boston College Law School, “Relations International and War(s),” Gendered Lenses Look at War(s), online book, CMR)
Rationality in Interaction This skew is particularly evident in the assumption of rationality." The rationality assumption implies that the knower/actor can separate himself/herself from the “other” in interactions with that other. Feminists have argued that knowledge is always perspectival and political; therefore, states and their leaders’ decisions about how to interact with others are not rational, but informed by their situational and political biases. In this view, the rationality assumption may be seen as at once itself a political bias and obscuring other political biases. As Naomi Scheman argues, perceived rational cost-benefit analysis about war-making and war-fighting should “always be seen as especially problematical when... constructed only by those in positions of privilege... [which provide] only distorted views about the world.”78 In this view, rational calculation is not an objective, attainable, and desirable end, but a partial representation of both interest and actors’ representation of those interests. In this way, through gender lenses, rationality has been seen as importantly incomplete, leaving out significant (if not the most significant) factors that go into decision-making.79 In addition to understanding the rationality assumption as partial (and therefore unrepresentative), feminist research has pointed out links between rationality and mascuIinism.8° As Karen Jones notes, advocates of rationality as a guide for interstate interactions“ assume: 1. Available... conceptions of rationality and reason represent genuinely human norms and ideals; 2. The list of norms and ideals contained within available conceptions of rationality and reason are sufficiently complete; and 3. The external normative functions assigned to reason and rationality are unproblematic.82 Looking through gender lenses shows problems with each of these assumptions. Feminists have argued that “the identity of the modern subject-in models of human nature, citizenship, the rational actor, the knowing subject, economic man, and political agency-is not gender-neutral but masculine (and typically European and heterosexua|).”83 This impacts not only how we see the rational subject, but how we predict and understand his decisions, at the state level as well as at the individual level. According to Margaret Atherton, the possibility of rationality has “been used in a disturbing fashion to mark a gender distinction. We have, for example, on the one hand, the man of reason, and, on the other, the woman of passion.”84 In rationality assumptions, traits associated with masculinity are normalized and traits associated with femininity are excluded. The impact is compounded because (masculinized) rationality and its (feminized) alternatives are not on equal playing fields. As a result, Karen Jones notes that “women’s assumed deficiency in rationality” has been used to exclude both women and knowledge associated with femininity from accepted views of the world.85 The alleged gender neutrality of rationality, then, “is often a covert form of privileging maleness”85 and omission of “what has traditionally counted as ‘feminine.’”87 Still, adding women and values associated with femininity to current concepts of rationality is unlikely to create a gender-neutral concept of rationality.88 This is because, epistemologically, the sovereign rational subject constructs artificial gendered boundaries between rationality and emotion, male and female, and knower and known.89 Among states, those boundaries are not benign. Instead, they breed competition and domination that inspire and foster war(s) and conflict(s).90 This competition frequently relies on contrasting the state’s own masculinity to the enemy’s (actual or perceived) femininity. This cycle of genderings is not a series of events but a social continuum. In these gendered relationships, as Zillah Eisenstein argues, “gender differentiation will be mobilized for war and peace,” especially moving forward into the age of an American empire focused on manliness.9‘ Feminists have long argued that competitions between hegemonic masculinities and subordinate masculinities play a role in causing war(s).92 Hidden beneath the assumed independence, rationality, and unity of state interaction leading to war are gendered interstate interactions that cause, constitute, and relate to war and wars. Feminist scholars have recognized the extent to which the preeminence of masculine values dominates (particularly conflictual) accounts of interstate interactions, wherein “rational” interactions often become “a self-reproducing discourse of fear, suspicion, anticipated violence, and violence” in which “force is used to checkmate force.”93 Interstate interactions leading to wars often show the gendered nature of war narratives, war logics, and war languages, which produce (and reproduce) gendered cycles of violence.
The alternative is to reject the universalizing discourses of anti-capitalism through feminist discourse analysis
Griffin, 2015. (Penny, Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of New South Wales, Australia. “crisis, austerity and gendered governance: a feminist perspective,” in feminist review 109: 49-72, spp)
Adding to this extensive body of feminist literature, this paper interrogates crisis governance as discursively gendered, and the effects of this. A discursive approach is significant because it does not assume, as per liberal approaches, a foundational economic rationality to economic strategy, or, as per Marxism, the central truth of class struggle as universal. A discursive approach that centralises gender in understanding the reproduction of crisis governance discourses under- stands governance and its outcomes as a complex amalgamation of meaning and practice, founded by and reproduced through culturally produced and pervasively gendered ideas, assumptions and values about the world. A commitment to non- essentialism challenges, at fundamental and unsettling levels, some of the core categories of conventional forms of analysis. This contrasts with mainstream (international political economy) scholarship’s framing of human behaviour in terms of faceless, desocialised units of analysis and its reproduction of a model of society as a self-regulating machine explainable by scientific laws adapted from modern philosophy and Newtonian science. It also contrasts with critical scholar- ship’s preference for the Marxist view of economic relations as (pre)determined by the nature of class struggle. While some materialist (feminist) approaches articulate women’s disprivilege as a historical constant and something of a cultural given, discourse analysis of gendered governance, instead, understands privilege, discrimination and inequality as socially, and culturally, produced and variable across time and place, resisting the rooting of economic relations in class relations and showing a greater interest in the gendered cultural practices (including gendered recruitment and promotion practices, discriminatory forms of lending, gendered assessments of credit worthiness and so on) that enable the reproduction of gendered power in the global political economy. A discursive approach to gender and governance necessitates the analysis of norms and standards in the global political economy that many hold to be true, essential and universal, but a committed critique of which reveals as power-laden, regulatory and highly restrictive identity categories (Griffin, 2009: 1). Rather than positing the primacy of ‘the economic’, which swallows whole concepts such as culture, gender, race, production, consumption and representation, this paper looks to the cultural conditions of embodiments of capitalism, specifically neo- liberal global governance and the discourses of governance that neo-liberalism reproduces. To be sure, these discourses emanate from various and diverse actors, institutions, organisations and initiatives, including individual (state) governments and groupings of these (such as the G7 and G10); supra-national bureaucracies such as the European Union (EU); intergovernmental organisations such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the UN; non-governmental organisations such as the World Economic Forum (WEF); and private financial governance initiatives (which are not available for public scrutiny) such as those instituted by the Bank for International Settlements and the International Organization of Securities Commissions. By asking us to confront in quite radical and imaginative ways how we know what we think we know and thus what we exclude from our analyses, a discursive research strategy is always strongly political.
LINKS
L/ Public Domain
The expansion of the public domain isn’t the radical strategy they think it is and serves to instead reinforce Western epistemologies and hierarchies of power.
Foster ’10 [Laura A. Foster, assistant professor of gender studies and affiliate faculty of the Maurer School of Law at Indiana University; “Situating Feminisms, Patent Law, and the Public Domain”; posted 05-04-2010, revised 05-25-2014; Columbia Journal of Gender and Law, vol. 20, 2011, pp. 261-347; https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1587863; accessed 07-19-2024] dliang
This scholarship contributes valuable insights into how patent law curtails the flow of scientific information. The values of openness are important; a culture of openness and sharing facilitates exciting scientific discoveries. An ethic of openness within patent law and the public domain also supports the free flow of scientific information to marginalized communities. In other words, values of openness facilitate access. Patent laws can be relaxed to make medicines open and freely accessible to the poor globally.52 Scholarship in this area though is limited. One shortcoming comes from the constraints of law itself, as jurisprudential concepts of the public domain stem from legal cases.53 A more alarming limitation, however, is its unwillingness to thoroughly recognize systems of power and inequality.
Scholarship in this area assumes a nonhierarchical public domain and culture of science where an ethos of sharing and openness extends to all. On the contrary, feminist science studies scholars have produced valuable work challenging science by examining gendered power relations embedded within science and scientific knowledge production. For instance, scientific practices of sharing and collaboration have not always been extended to or benefited women, particularly women of color and lesbian women.54 Female scientists have been denied access to the scientific professions.55 Science has violently exploited indigenous peoples, their knowledge, and their lands.56 And scientific method itself is grounded within masculine theories of objectivity and rationality.57 In other words, values of sharing and openness within science have not benefited everyone equally.
One may argue that an ethic of open access that shapes an open public domain relates directly to relational feminism because it challenges liberal ideals of property and creativity by enabling collaboration and relationship building.58 This may apply to the context of copyright more easily than with patent law. With a feminist post-colonial reading in mind, I contend that open access models (e.g. creative science commons) present a narrow challenge to liberal notions of property and inventorship. Such models might incite collaboration and the sharing of scientific data by placing scientific materials in the public domain. Yet, they are meant to encourage a particular type of scientific and technological creativity, which is grounded in epistemologies of western science. Commercial scientists, university researchers, and do-it-yourself biologists may now be able to access scientific materials more freely, but the sharing of information fails to produce new visions of collaboration or what a more just science might look like. The ethics of openness and sharing that are deployed are not strong enough to ask, how might scientific information be shared more broadly with the public, Indigenous peoples, and marginalized groups who might benefit from it? How could such sharing and broader collaborations generate new methods of scientific knowledge production for producing better and more sustainable scientific practices so that more people could flourish? Theorizing of an open public domain fails to deliver on its challenge to inventorship and property because it reinforces models of western scientific knowledge production. More people might be able to access and share scientific information and materials, but the same narrow regimes of science are being produced. Thus, an open public domain might appear at first glance to disrupt norms of property and inventorship, but a post-colonial feminist reading reveals its limited scop

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