Alienation, estrangement, and the politics of “free individuality” in two feminist science fictions: A Marxist feminist analysis

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Notes

1. My discussions of Marxist theory, both here and throughout this essay, will rely primarily on readings of the translated works of Marx himself – in this way, I hope to respond constructively to Gayatri Spivak's suggestion that scholars, feminist and otherwise, would do well to “make time again to look at Marx” (1990: 162), not as a means of “getting beyond Marx,” but rather as a means of discovering anew Marx's radical polyvocality.

2. In her study on masculinity and culture, Male Subjectivity at the Margins, Kaja Silverman points out that “The male subject's aspirations to mastery and sufficiency are undermined from many directions – by the law of language, which founds subjectivity on a void; by the castration crisis; by sexual, economic, and racial oppression; and by the traumatically unassailable nature of certain historical events” (52). In the case that I describe here, that of the worker, the male subject is feminized by “economic oppression,” his position within the labor market. I will return to this observation when I discuss the character of Paolo, a teenaged minority male worker in Griffith's Slow River.

3. Victor Zitta, in his 1964 study Georg Lukács' Marxism: A Study in Utopia and Ideology, writes: “It was and still is customary to distinguish between two periods in the intellectual life of Karl Marx: the young and rather messianically oriented pre-manifesto Marx (1842–1848), … is distinguished from the mature and post-revolutionary Marx (1849–1883), the strictly ‘scientifically’ oriented economist, sociologist, and social historian of capitalism” (119). Other writers, such as Ollman, Mandel, Mészáros, and Oishi, have questioned the sharpness of this division, but this does not preclude an evolution of the kind I discuss here.

4. Published in English as an appendix to Ben Fowkes's translation of Capital, Vol. I (Marx 1990).

5. I am indebted to Darko Suvin for his insights on reading this passage.

6. Paolo's recognition that his anger towards women as usurpers of power in the labor market is misplaced bears a meaningful relationship to current trends in the gendered division of the global marketplace. For, although it may appear initially that women are usurping men's place in the labor market, the reality of the situation is more complicated. Jacky Brine points out (1999: 39), citing a 1992 report on Women in Europe, that “the service sector, usually dependent on women's part-time, low-skilled, ‘flexible’ labour, has increased, particularly in Europe, the US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. … This trend in which the gap between the economic activity of men and women is, allegedly, narrowing, is often referred to as the ‘feminization’ of the labour market. However, … this process is far less a result of women taking men's jobs than of increased job-creation in traditionally female sectors combined with the lower labour costs involved in employing women.” The resulting “apparent increase in women's employment and decrease in male employment has nevertheless barely touched the occupational gendered segregation of the labour market or its more contentious hierarchical segregation” (39).

7. Which I review elsewhere in this issue.