Marxist Feminism/Feminist Marxism?!?!?!

I have to fill in columns on each of the headings SEPARATELY i.e. what their aims are etc.

I cannot find any information which shows that they are separate at all, but my teacher is insisting they are two different things..

anyone got any idea what the difference is?

Thanks

xxx

Reply 1

Toastie_

I couldn't find anything, if you type it into google either way the wikipedia page is the same and they all come up as Marxist feminism...

I don't think they are different, but what do I know :wink:

Reply 2

turkishprincess

Exactly what I did!! Google thinks they're the same no matter how I phrase it, textbooks only show one..

I'm just going to assume my teacher was wrong

Thanks for your help :smile:

xxx

Reply 3

adelante

I don't know what your tutor wants you to do here. Although you could argue that there is a difference between Marxist-Feminism and Feminist Marxism it's a very pedantic question and not very helpful. If you were asked the difference between socialist-feminism and Marxist-Feminism then there is a slight difference.

For sociology A2 you need to know the difference between Liberal, Marxist, Radical and Post-Feminism. And you then need to know how to apply each of these to other areas of sociology. That's what's important.

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Reply 4

Chris.Livesey

adelante is right in the sense that the distinction between the two is unlikely to be needed or helpful at A-level so I wouldn’t worry overmuch about it.

However, if you need to satisfy your teacher’s insistence that the distinction is important then the basis of Feminist-Marxism is an attempt to use the tools of Marxist analysis (class conflict, exploitation, domination, subordination etc.) as part of an explicit analysis of gender relationships. In Marxist-Feminism this tends to get a little lost in the sense that gender relationships tend to be seen as secondary / subordinate to class relationships.

In addition, Feminist-Marxism wants to focus on / bring further into the equation various forms of “non-productive” labour (both goods and services) performed mainly by women – through things like pregnancy, child-rearing, housework, subsistence work and so forth. These are usually subsumed into the general Marxist-Feminist “productive labour / exploitation” argument and, in such cases, get a little lost in the overall debate about the nature of “productive labour” (i.e. labour historically performed by men for money under capitalism). At A-level you often see this argument reduced to a “functional for men” analysis – capitalists exploit (male) employees who are then “forced” to exploit female partners within the family.

In basic terms, therefore, Feminist-Marxists place a stronger focus on gender relationships within capitalism, seeing the former as exploitative in their own right as a sub-division of capitalist forms of exploitation.