Embodied Social Relations in Contemporary Marxist-Feminism and Social Reproduction Theory: A Critique

Abstract

In our contemporary moment, embodied social relations such as race, gender, and sexuality have become the categories of everyday praxis in social organization and the making of history. While marxist critique of political economy has been at the forefront of analyzing the gendered and racialized consequences of the global transformation and accumulation of capital, marxist social theory has lagged behind in examining the nature and formation of embodied social relations in their relationship to one another and to class. In the last decade, however, marxist-feminists have attempted to understand embodied social relations through a critical engagement with intersectionality. Undertaking a series of methodological close readings, this dissertation investigates these recent attempts in order to thematize, problematize, and re-envision the ways in which marxism may be brought to bear upon reckoning with embodied social relations. Part I conducts a critique of marxist-feminist critique of intersectionality, revealing that the conceptual aporias produced in this tradition of thought belong less to marxism than to the antinomies of classical sociological reason. Part II conducts a critique of social reproduction theory, which itself, in claiming to be a marxist-feminist alternative to and dialectical overcoming of intersectionality, constitutes a metacritique. I demonstrate that social reproduction theory, contrary to its self-fashioned identity as a total social theory, is a contemporary version of early socialist-feminist political economy and, thus, does not offer a substantive understanding of embodied social relations. Having discerned the shortcomings of these recent attempts, this dissertation points to alternative resources for a marxism that is capable of understanding embodied social relations in contemporary class societies, thereby producing knowledge that is necessary for social transformation.