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Martha A. Gimenez Biography

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“Underlying phenomena such as the ‘feminisation’, ‘masculinisation’ and ‘juvenilisation’ of poverty, and other identity ways to describe segments of the poverty population such as the poverty of the elderly, or the ‘feminisation of the proletariat’, the ‘feminisation of migration’, or the disproportionate poverty of racial and ethnic minorities, is the impoverishment the working class, the deterioration in the working class’s standard of living and family stability. Consequently, while policies targeted at different poverty populations are important to help and improve the lives of those who are already poor, it must also be recognised that poverty is not uniquely a women’s issue, or a men’s issue, and so forth: poverty is a class issue which can, at best, be ameliorated – not resolved because it is endemic to the capitalist mode of production – through labour’s collective action, through unionisation and struggles for job training and job creation aimed at creating employment for manual, skilled and unskilled labour, in addition to programmes intended to enhance the health and educational opportunities for everyone, regardless of gender, race or ethnicity.”

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Book:Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays
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“To learn how people describe their understanding of their lives is very illuminating, for ‘ideas are the conscious expression – real or illusory – of (our) actual relations and activities’, because ‘social existence determines consciousness’ [Marx]. Given that our existence is shaped by the capitalist mode of production, experience, to be fully understood in its broader social and political implications, has to be situated in the context of the capitalist forces and relations that produce it. Experience in itself, however, is suspect because, dialectically, it is a unity of opposites; it is unique, personal, insightful and revealing, and, at the same time, thoroughly social, partial, mystifying, itself the product of historical forces about which individuals may know little or nothing about. Given the emancipatory goals of the RGC [race-gender-class] perspective, it is through the analytical tools of Marxist theory that it can move forward, beyond the impasse revealed by the constant reiteration of variations on the ‘interlocking’ metaphor.”

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Book:Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays
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“The key theoretical and political question is not, therefore, how class (in the Marxist sense) ‘intersects’ with the various identities where individuals are presumably located, but how to differentiate between the effects of capitalist class power upon large and heterogeneous (in terms of identity) sectors of the working class, and the effects of identity-based interactions and conflicts within those sectors.”

ClassIdentityIntersectionalityIntersectional Feminism
Book:Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays
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“...today class has been reduced to another ‘ism’; i.e. to another form oppression which, together with gender and race, integrate a sort of mantra, something that everyone ought to include in theorising and research, though, to my knowledge, theorising about it remains at the level of metaphors (e.g. interweaving, interaction, interconnection, etc.)”

ClassIntersectionalityClassism
Book:Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays
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“To be critical of pronatalism is not equivalent to condemning parenthood; it is to shed light on its prescriptive nature and propose that it would be socially and ecologically desirable that parenthood cease to be considered as a natural instinct and/or a religious or a social duty. The ‘biological clock’ that some women claim to hear ticking is also a ‘social clock’ reminding them that whatever else may be going on in their lives, motherhood is their destiny, the road to social acceptance and integration. It is because parenthood is not a natural instinct, but socially and prescriptively imposed, that many people unsuited for family formation bear or adopt children; domestic violence and child abuse result from the often deadly interaction between sexual inequality and pronatalism. Today, pronatalist ideologies and social pressures continue to curtail women’s opportunities and ability to shape their future, and place them in a disadvantaged position relative to men, thus sustaining the inequality between men and women despite considerable gains in sexual liberation, civil rights, and economic opportunities for women.”

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Book:Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays
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“Denial of the fundamental role of class relations and struggles in the production of oppression and inequality defines intersectionality’s macro-level assumptions about the relationship among its key elements. Regardless of the politicised vocabulary, i.e. references in the intersectionality literature to imperialism, capitalism, neoliberalism, class, and so on, intersectionality – like the RGC perspective that preceded it – is an abstract analytical framework which, like sociology, approaches the study of social phenomena ahistorically, i.e. in abstraction from their capitalist conditions of possibility”

IntersectionalityIntersectional FeminismIntersectionalism
Book:Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays
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“It should then be clear that it is not the power of working-class men (or women’s reproductive roles) that keeps women as the primary agents of reproduction within working-class households nor is it the power of men that creates segregated labour markets and other barriers to equality between the sexes. It is the power of capital which establishes structural limitations to the possible ways in which the propertyless class can have access to the conditions necessary for its daily and generational reproduction and it is the relative powerlessness of working-class men and women as individuals struggling for survival that forces them into these relations of reproduction which are both relations of cooperation and unequal relations of personal economic dependence. The contradiction between capital and labour, between production and reproduction, and the protracted class struggle thereby generated are the determinants of the contradictory nature of the relations between working-class men and women. The mode of reproducing labour power can thus be accurately understood as a unity of opposites, where bonds of cooperation and solidarity are also bonds of dependency grounded in the set of structural possibilities open to male and female members of the working class under capitalist conditions.”

FeminismHouseholdSocial ReproductionMale PowerMode Of ReproductionWorking Class Household
Author:Martha A. Gimenez
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“But just as the material necessity to produce the means of production and subsistence does not determine the historically specific social relations in which they are produced, the biology of procreation does not determine the mode of reproduction, i.e. social relations in which children are born and raised, although it imposes limits on their variations. (,,,) this family form [nuclear family unit of parents and children] is prevalent in capitalist societies; it is not, however, universal because those functions can be fulfilled within a variety of social arrangements”

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Book:Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays
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