A French Materialist and Decolonial Perspective on Marxist-Feminist Theories and Struggles Today

Abstract

This short commentary is part of a book symposium about Marxist-Feminist Theories and Struggles Today: Essential Writings on Intersectionality, Labour and Ecofeminism, edited by Khayaat Fakier, Diana Mulinari, and Nora Räthzel. It discusses certain chapters from a French materialist lesbian feminist perspective, as well as from a decolonial feminist perspective. Introducing Colette Guillaumin’s sexage proposal and referring to Monique Wittig’s analysis of the heterosexualization of women and of the “straight mind,” the essay recalls the importance of Black feminists in the United States and elsewhere and proposes a theory of the interlocking social-structural relations of sex, race, and class as complementary elements moving toward a renewal of Marxist-feminist reflections from a historical perspective that also accounts for the colonial roots of today’s discussions on care and reproductive labor.

Key Words:

• Decolonial Feminism
• Collette Guillaumin
• Intersectionality
• Marxist Feminism
• Materialist Feminism

Notes

1 “Défis et analyse du Féminisme Contemporain III, MarxFem 2021,” YouTube, 23 December 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMmqBjhx24I.

2 Abya Yala is the name the indigenous Kuna give to their land, a name that many decolonial activists from Latin America and the Caribbean have chosen to apply to their continent in the last decade.

3 This trend developed around the French journal Questions Féministes in 1978–80. The main texts were rapidly translated and published in the journal Feminist Issues out of the University of California Berkeley. For a brilliant presentation of the four feminist trends that appeared in the 1980s, combining “radical” and “Marxist” perspectives, see Juteau and Laurin (1988). For some useful definitions of various feminist and lesbian trends, see Winter (2016).

4 Some years ago, both Cynthia Cockburn (who passed away in 2019) and Nira Yuval Davis (another contributor to the present book) honored CEDREF’s seminar at the University of Paris Diderot with their own contributions.

5 In French, the concept of sexage echoes servage (serfdom) and esclavage (slavery).