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Mitchell’s project, continued in her influential Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974) and Women: The Longest Revolution (1984), which reprints her 1966 essay alongside exemplary studies of literary texts, has been to inflect feminist politics with insights from Marxism and psychoanalysis. Initially trained as a literary scholar, Mitchell focuses on questions concerning the family and child rearing by means of a feminist critique of psychoanalytic theories of sexual development largely based upon a literary-critical examination of texts within the Freudian and Marxist canons. The significance of Juliet Mitchell‘s work for feminist literary theory is indirect yet fundamental. Materialist feminist literary critics focus instead on key problems in language, history, ideology, determination, subjectivity, and agency from the basic perspective of a critique of the gendered character of class and race relations under international capitalism. The importance of these critical positions and developments for feminist literary theory and criticism arises from their foundations in political theory, psychoanalysis, and sociology rather than from traditional literary concerns with questions of canon, form, genre, author, and oeuvre.
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The situation differs in the United States, where, largely working outside the pressures of party politics but constrained by the memory of Joseph McCarthy, feminists as diverse as Lise Vogel, Zillah Eisenstein, Nancy Hartsock, and Donna Haraway identify themselves as “socialist feminists,” thereby distinguishing their work from that of radical and liberal feminists, who contend that women’s oppression will end with the achievement of women’s power, or women’s equality, within existing capitalist societies, positions strangely like the traditional Marxist view that women’s oppression would end once women entered into production. These differences should be understood as both intellectual and representative of a specific context of partisan disputes within the British Left. journal m/f (1978-86), Parveen Adams and Elizabeth Cowie adopt a more extreme position, stating, “As socialistfeminists we were opposed to the much discussed union of Marxism and feminism” and sought instead “to problématisé the notion of sexual difference itself” through a fundamental critique of psychoanalytic categories (3). In their editorial to the final issue of the important U.K. Michèle Barrett’s highly influential Women’s Oppression Today (1980) insists that the way forward for feminists will necessarily involve direct engagement with and transformation of Marxist class analysis.
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In the United Kingdom, Juliet Mitchell’s groundbreaking essay “Women: The Longest Revolution” (1966), which she expanded to book length in Woman’s Estate (1971), initiated the revision of traditional Marxist accounts by analyzing the position of women in terms not only of relations of production and private property but also of psychoanalytically based theories of sexuality and gender. The very term “materialist feminisms” proves contentious, since there has been little general consensus whether women’s interests can, or indeed should, be addressed in terms of traditional socialist and Marxist formulas.
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Conversations and disagreements among English-language writers framing a materialist feminist analysis in the United States and the United Kingdom sometimes acknowledge the influence of French feminists such as Christine Delphy and Monique Wittig but have yet to engage fully with the critiques of Marxist theory being constructed by feminists working in other international locations. In keeping with subsequent developments within the women’s movement, the materialist feminist problematic has extended to questions of race nationality or ethnicity lesbianism and sexuality cultural identity, including religion and the very definition of power. Early work on this projected alliance directed itself, not to questions of literary criticism and theory, but to the problem of bringing feminist questions of gender and sexuality into some form of strategic dialogue with class analysis. By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on NovemĪlthough feminists and socialists have engaged in continuous conversations since the nineteenth century, those crosscurrents within literary theory that might be designated “materialist feminisms” have their origins in the late 1960s with various attempts to synthesize feminist politics with Marxist analyses.