August 18, 2005
Hennessy, Rosemary. Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Hennessy’s objective is to converse with and argue for a materialist feminism that is rooted in rigorous theoretical inquiry and that also addresses the material inequality necessitating feminist movements. She chooses the term “materialist feminism” instead of “Marxist feminism” because the latter ignores the sexual division of labor. Hennessy explains “materialism” to mean “material life in the form of human activity” (37), and she correspondingly expands her definition of “feminism” to include the ways this material life is played out along the “multiple axes of race, class, gender, and sexuality” (xv). Wary of the conservative strain she detects in some postmodern critique and multiculturalism in the academy, Hennessy argues for a Gramscian-informed, post-Althusserian “Global Analytic” and an understanding of discourse as an ideology that can be counterhegemonically mobilized for a feminist politics. While ideology is a naturalizing practice that makes things “the way they are,” it is also “never dominates without contradiction” (76). In this way, the “other” is never outside discourse/ideology, but is instead “immanent in the texts of culture”—the products of the ideology itself (87). Rather than merely celebrate “difference” uncritically—as does multicultural education—or analyze “the self as a subject-in-difference”—as does postmodern theory, the more avant-garde version of multiculturalism—these discourses would better serve their own political projects if they were to move beyond subversive critique of a monolithic, Eurocentric subject, to an interrogation of the ways “difference organizes knowledge and how this organization is in turn imbricated in larger social structures” (10). Uncritical subversion, Hennessy implies, can be far too easily subsumed for conservative ends. By addressing material social relations, however, feminism can perform a kind of symptomatic reading and historicize culture strategically by locating and troubling the “gaps in narrative coherence” (xvii). It is by challenging the very notion of a totalizing power and through the “ongoing double-move between solidarity and critique” that materialism feminism can effect political change (xviii).