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The Ouroboros of Western Feminism: Proletarian Feminism and Transmisogynoir
🕑 Added 2022-05-14 03:44:03 +0000 UTCWhen reading Lenin, perhaps more than anything, the sentiment expressed from him that stands with me the most clearly is aptly summarized by his statement that “it is therefore our duty, if we wish to remain socialists to go down lower and deeper, to the real masses; this is the whole meaning and the whole purport of the struggle against opportunism.” Within the context of this statement, Lenin is referring to proletarians within the Western European socialist bloc, and is thus chastising those who appeal to the interest of privileged proletarians who have taken upon the ideology of the bourgeoisie to maintain their privileges at the expense of the interests of the least privileged proletarians. From this, the general lesson I have internalized is that the betrayal of those at the lowest and deepest social rungs of society, the real masses, means to betray revolution itself. What, therefore, does it mean for the Left at large to lack a coherent feminist framework for analyzing transmisogynoir? Thus far, I’ve mainly focused my development of Black Materialist Transfeminism on delineating the failures of specifically academic feminism’ failures to sufficiently address transmisogynoir, however here I will trace the relationship between the Left—more specifically, Marxism and its various proximate terrains—and feminism, as well as attempt to resolve some of the more blatant contradictions that have plagued previous attempts to bring them in concert.
To begin, it is of course necessary to clarify precisely who it is that qualifies as the lowest and deepest masses. Despite this being a crucial question on the minds of some of Marxism’s “greatest thinkers”, a not-so-insignificant number of contemporary Marxists would characterize this as mere “oppression olympics”. Well, allow me to snatch the gold medal. In revisiting some of the foundations of Leninist theory, it became clear that the concept of the lowest and deepest masses is quite compatible with transmisogynoir-as-fulcrum. Contrary to surface-level engagements with both, neither are necessarily about who is “most oppressed” but rather they are about identifying the subjects whose subjugation most consistently leverages broader structures and institutions of oppression. What is also of note is that Lenin further recognizes capitalism as a world-system and therefore some of his most valuable insights came from his stances in contradistinction with that of socialist parties in Western Europe which openly embraced national chauvinism at the expense of countries that their own colonized. It is therefore such the case that when speaking of the “betraying and selling the interests of the masses”, Lenin also extended this beyond those housed within the borders of these nations.
It becomes necessary to clarify, or perhaps more accurately extend, Lenin’s observations and make them more poignant. It is actually inaccurate to speak of an amorphous “lowest and deepest” masses in reference specifically to a base of workers (or proletarians). To do so relies upon the presumption that there are two distinct groups of “privileged” workers and “non-privileged” workers, which betrays the reality that even amongst these groups exists stratification. Indeed, the ever-growing body of works, from that of Cedric Robinson to Frantz Fanon to Sylvia Wynter continuously reaffirm the obfuscation inherent in the universalization of the category “proletariat”. Laced within the continuous appeal to this category is the eschatological reverence of the supposed saviors of mankind, the proletariat, who represent the true Will of “the masses”. While Lenin could correctly identify the social-chauvinistic tendencies of the Western European proletariat (we could take up his decision to culminate these into “Kautskyism”), he failed to consider that this was a logical, and necessary, outgrowth from the equivocation of the proletariat and Progress. The mythology of History’s march towards Progress culminating in the creation of the proletariat and the expulsion of Black Africa from History can only ever serve as self-righteous justification to treat the enslaved and colonized Black “masses” as cannon fodder.
For a number of communists, proletarianization of the colonized, whether said colonies be internal or external, is not given its proper study. Specifically, there is a presumption that proletarianization within these conditions necessarily mirror those of the metropole.
Within the metropole, proletarianization served the interests of an emerging capitalist class that sought to finally disentangle themselves from the monarchy to whom they were forced to pay regular tribute to which therefore restricted their capacity to expand their wealth to previously untold heights. In order to do this, the commons had to be dismantled and once laborers were thrust from the land they worked and forced into wage labor, property relations could therefore be formed that enabled economic forces to be able to perform functionally independently from those political. The notable features of this process of proletarianization was replicated outside of Western Europe, however to distinctly different ends within the (settler)colonies. For example, within North America, settlements were constructed according to the same logic of enclosure, however the Native was not dispossessed of land for the purpose of turning them into proletarians, but rather to annihilate them from the land. Capitalism required expansion, and that land be “made useful” and therefore the Natives were in the way. It is also the case that in certain instances, Natives were incorporated into these settlements, however as materialists, we should not strip these cases from their broader context. These instances of integration/assimilation were not principally in service of of creating a proletarian strata of Natives, but rather to solidify the World-building of the West, its mythos of civilization, the concept of the Heathen, and most importantly, preclude those deemed Black from the category of the Human. In short, the primary contradiction for the Native became the dispossession of Land and the supplanting of their epistemic relationships to it with that of the Settler.
This is, of course, to speak of the experience of the nonblack Native. The Black Native, those Indigenous to Africa, were also dispossessed of land, however their existence would be delegated to being strictly a source of slave labor. They did not become a mere part of Nature but rather reduced to extensions of the will of those who carved up the continent and enslaved them. The wealth obtained from this labor permitted for the expansion of wealth in the emerging capitalist class and chartered colonial relations that would become standard across the world. In spite of constructing a new World upon the labor of enslaved Black Africans, the West would conflate the interests of “labor” with that of the proletarian. In contradistinction to the dispossession of the land of the proletarian, Western nations vampirically drained Africa of its wealth, barring any instance of the economy disentangling itself from the political sphere, rising above it, and ultimately bringing it to heel. Rather, the political and economic only became more intertwined as local economies were disrupted by the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and those who occupied certain privileged positions solidified their power through satisfying the avaricious demands of the West.
These economic and political relations continue to this day in the form of neocolonialism, and it could hardly be said that Black people’s relationship to the category “proletarian” has changed in any meaningful way. Consequently, the development of Black Radical Theory has been a project in no small part dedicated to dismantling the metaphysical presumptions of Womb Theory. Indeed, the non-event of “emancipation” from slavery did not address the devastating effects of slavery upon local economies nor did it rectify the reality of the consequent construction of infrastructures that prioritized the capture and export of slaves as a result of said destablization of economies. In a cruel irony one would only find in such a World inaugurated via Black enslavement, the West’s ostensible pursuit to end the slave trade devastated numerous economies on the continent. This coincided with and was presented as justification for the onset of the Scramble of Africa in the late 19th century which marked the era of capitalist-imperialism described by Lenin. Because chattel-slavery proper was replaced by a new colonial relationship which merely transmorgrified it into a more conspicuous form, the slave plantation was given new life and expanded further to infect with its tendrils every corner of the planet. There became incentive for finance capital to take the reins and the export of capital to take advantage of new markets drastically increased. What is crucial to understand about this is that while proletarianization within colonized Africa accompanied this export of capital, this was, again, not an end goal such that a new ruling class emerged from accumulating enough wealth to overtake the power of the political sphere. Quite the opposite, in fact, the purpose of the ruling economic class under colonial conditions is to be wholly subservient to specific political interests which are themselves extensions of the economic interests of the metropolis. Should there be any attempt to break with these political interests, the subaltern are met with warfare, both economic and physical, to return them to submission.
It is for these reasons that Fanon in Wretched of the Earth identifies the proletariat within colonized Africa as a privileged strata, outright stating that the greatest mistake of radical political parties is “to address first and foremost the most politically conscious elements: the urban proletariat, the small tradesmen and the civil servants, i.e., a tiny section of the population which represents barely more than one percent.” He continues:
“[A]lthough this proletariat understood the party propaganda and read its publications, it was much less prepared to respond to any slogans taking up the unrelenting struggle for national liberation. It has been said many times that in colonial territories the proletariat is the kernel of the colonized people most pampered by the colonial regime. The embryonic urban proletariat is relatively privileged. In the capitalist countries, the proletariat has nothing to lose and possibly everything to gain. In the colonized countries, the proletariat has everything to lose. It represents in fact that fraction of the colonized who are indispensable for running the colonial machine: tram drivers, taxi drivers, miners, dockers, interpreters, and nurses, etc. These elements make up the most loyal clientele of the nationalist parties and by the privileged position they occupy in the colonial system represent the "bourgeois" fraction of the colonized population.”
Within this context, rather than the proletariat, Fanon argues that the strata most accurately fitting the descriptor of “revolutionary” are the peasantry and the lumpenproletariat. More specifically, Fanon argues that it is the peasantry which fits this role among the colonized in contradistinction to within the “industrialized” world because within the latter, the peasantry is more individualistic and less organized, whereas within the former, it is the urban proletariat that is the more individualistic and self-serving. Further, while the urban proletariat is more “politically conscious” within both contexts, in the colony, they use this political consciousness to self-serving ends that strictly uphold their privileged status at the direct expense of the peasantry.
At this point, perhaps the question has arised of the direct relevance of this to the overarching question of the issues of understanding transmisogynoir among communists within the US. In order to properly understand transmisogynoir, one has to understand the particular class experience and positionality of Black TMA people. This of course requires an understanding of the positionality of New Afrikans generally, and thus Fanon’s insight becomes invaluable. It is of course true that this insight must be molded to fit the particularities of the New Afrikan internal colony, however this does not mean that they are wholly inapplicable. Such an insight is not even as novel as one would initially believe, as Huey P. Newton would also recognize the potential of the lumpenproletariat within the US. Newton’s recognition has of course been met with criticism, much of which ultimately boils down to accusations of “revisionism” of Marxism. However it is also the case that Newton remains an iconographic figure among the US Left and Fanon’s theoretical contributions to a large degree also has sizable prestige. What is striking about this are the attempts to square a supposed dedication to avoiding revisionism, or in other words, maintain a “purity” of Marxism, while attempting to uphold these contributions. For the most part, it would seem that the attempts at reconciliation amount to a simple “they were wrong about some things, but right about others”, and these things that are “wrong” are those that communists generally would find difficulty in attempting said reconciliation. What is not understood however is that these conflicting points between “traditional” Marxism and the insights of Newton and Fanon are in truth conflicting points between understandings of class and race (particularly Blackness).
Cedric Robinson becomes crucial in tying together the threads of this relationship through his framework of racial capitalism. Contrary to popular conception, racial capitalism is not merely the observation that racism is inherent to capitalism or even simply that slavery provided the necessary wealth for capitalism to emerge. Rather, Robinson’s key insight is that the impetus for capitalism in its inherently racialized form was the logical result from already existing and developing proto-racialization. Despite this fact, Marxism’s engagement with race, beginning with Marx and Engels themselves, was extremely rudimentary until both were addressed through the theoretical contributions of some belonging to the Black Radical Tradition. Of course, in their infancy these contributions were not perfect, with many of them being filtered through a restricted (Marxist)-Leninist framing. Still, the general trajectory demonstrated that this Black Radical Tradition could not in the last be restricted to the epistime of Euromodernity, including Marxism. Further, while it is the case that the Communist movement’s relationship with the Black Radical Tradition was initially favorable for the latter in terms of material support, eventually the former steered the latter in the direction of a theoretical wall. Unsurprisingly then, those Black theorists who did not sit comfortably within the Marxist sphere served as the bulwark that prevented this theoretical wall from being hit.
Race remains relevant to Black people because per Wynter, it is an autopoetic process utilized to construct and uphold the hegemony of Man 2 following its transmogrification from Man 1. This understanding stands in contrast to the deterministic impulses that plagues much of Marxism and communist conceptions of class generally and its relationship with race in particular. It is for this reason, Stuart Hall so concisely stated “Race is the modality in which class is lived [and] is also the medium in which class relations are experienced” (1978, 394). Indeed, for Hall, “black labor” itself functions as a “class fraction” which has particular class relations which “function as race relations”. This therefore echoes Fanon’s own declarative statement that in “the immediacies of the colonial context [...] you are rich because you are white [and] you are white because you are rich” (5). This statement is often misinterpreted, often deliberately, and reduced into a simplistic claim that every person who is white will be rich and every person who is rich will be white. In reality, Fanon is speaking of the general economic structure which is constructed around race. In other words, race is not simply a fictional invention of the bourgeoisie to “divide the working class/proletariat”, rather, the working class emerges with this division already pre-existing on the basis of race.
Thus far, by not specifically addressing gender, I’ve simplified this class/race relationship to outline the general foundation for my argument for why thus far there is no single feminist framework from communists that can properly address transmisogynoir. This is possible because as Wynter correctly states, both race and gender function as genres of human, with Man embodying its most overdetermined form. This is also why Robin D.G. Kelley slightly amends Stuart Hall’s position and argues “Race and gender are not incidental or accidental features of the global capitalist order, they are constitutive. Capitalism emerged as a racial and gendered regime [...] Race, and I would add gender, are modalities in which class is lived.”
Thus while race and gender are not synonymous, they both move in tandem to serve the function of ordering the various “kinds” of the human and this is facilitated through the counter-balance of ontogeny and sociogeny. This counter-balance culminates in the Western/European conception of being human Wynter denotes as “bio-economic”, whereby the human is constricted according to and determined by nature/biology and the market. Because of this, the naturalization of the positioning of Black people within colonialism/capitalist-imperialism occurs, and this color-line is drawn utilizing gender.
The question now becomes whether it is possible to reconcile this framework with contemporary attempts to bring Marxism/Communism and feminism in conversation with one another. To me, it is blatantly clear that it is not. What specifically sparked me to write this brief essay on this topic is the most recent attempt at this, proletarian feminism. Prior to beginning this essay, I’ve fluctuated between whether or not to write something addressing radical feminism. While I may still end up doing so, I feel that for the time being, my article For Those Seeking or in Flight is sufficient. Proletarian feminism however—and for clarity’s sake I will be restricting this to it’s utilization within North America—presents the unique problem of attempting to sneak radical feminism’s antiBlack and, especially, transmisogynoiristic presumptions about gender into communist theorization.
I have clarified that my principle issue with proletarian feminism is its expression within North America (we could further restrict this analysis to the US) because it is of significance that this framework was not developed within the imperial core. Proletarian feminism derives from the work Philosophical Trends in the Feminist Movement by Anuradha Ghandy, however it should be noted that it would be unfair to lay the credit of its development squarely at her feet. Indeed, India has a powerful communist, specifically Maoist, movement that also shares common ground with it’s active feminist movement that seeks to not only dismantle patriarchy, but the caste system as well. Consequently, it would be more accurate to place Anuradha Ghandy within a sphere of common ground between these two movements and therefore emphasize that she owes a great deal to these grassroots movements that involve a broad swathe of India’s masses. Philosophical Trends itself is very much a serviceable summary of the various feminist frameworks that have emerged from the West and Anuradha makes poignant critiques of both bioessentialism/bioreductivism as well as the trend of universalizing the experience of (cis) white women. Therefore, while it is the case that she never mentions something such as “proletarian feminism,” it is not unreasonable to suggest that her critiques as well as her own theoretical insights could be consolidated and synthesized into a distinct feminist framework in and of itself. What I do find unreasonable however, is the implication of its supposed universal applicability.
I find this baffling because, again, Anuradha seems to be keenly aware of the fundamental flaws of attempting to universalize the experience of “womanhood”, and while she does not make this point, I find no reason why this would extend to “proletarian womanhood”. Anuradha herself makes note of, for example, the ways in which Black women performed household labor for white households in the place of white women as well as the ways in which centering the oppression of women on the experience of said white women being barred from the labor force is inherently limiting. What is often missed from this point however is that this racial fracture among women is interminably bound with a class fracture. That is to say, “women’s labor” becomes a fundamental misnomer within this context.
Of course, this criticism faces the issue of being restricted to the experience and concerns of specifically cis Black women. Black trans women are even further abandoned to the theoretical void, and one need only read the essay “What is Proletarian Feminism?” to witness this. This essay begins with a disclaimer/preface which proudly declares “while we do not mention trans women as separate subjects, when we say women in this article, we are including trans women as the issues we touch upon are common to all proletarian women”. Once again the language of “inclusion” rears its unwanted head. In a move laced with irony, a feminism that purports to put the “proletarian woman” first repackages the very same position and arguments of the bourgeois academy. To be sure, beyond the flowery language which culminates in the declaration “trans women are women”, we find another attempt to justify a specific feminist interpretation of patriarchy which is firmly cisheterosexist. This therefore makes the essay’s statement that it is necessary to create a separate discussion on “Queer Maoism” which specifically names the experience of trans* people an absurd one, as any feminist analysis which is grounded in the claim that it can be developed in any capacity while failing to specifically name this experience can never be “queer”.
A recognition of this would run afoul of the desire to create a universal experience of patriarchy, and this is all but admitted via the article’s claim that Ghandy “failed to fully flesh out the theoretical and practical universalities of a universal proletarian feminism”. This of course begs the question of whether such a thing is even desirable for those at the furthest margins and those embodying the positionality of the lowest, deepest masses. Ironically, reading this article generated a greater deal of appreciation for Ghandy’s writing, as she specifically names the interjection of Black feminists, in particular describing the particulariaties of Black gender as a consequence of the enslavement of Black Africans. In contrast, the maosoleum article leaves Black women out of the equation except in the case of lumping us together with “non-white” people generally to make a point against sex work, pornography, etc. This refusal to recognize the distinctive positionality of those who are both Black and trans has broader ramifications for the understanding of gender of Maoists and communists generally who embrace proletarian feminism within the West.
One foundational presumption within the Western mythos that was integrated into various socialist tendencies is that Black Africa can be properly disentangled from History itself. This is embodied in, for example, the conception of the “Asiatiac mode of production”, within which pre-colonial Africa is crudely pieced into. This is of course necessary if one has the desire to collapse all that exists outside of Euromodernity into one sphere with broadly shared relations of gender from which Europe therefore “developed” from. However this is nothing more than a clever metaepistemological sleight-of-hand, as the thing that distinguishes these two spheres is that Euromodernity has its own self-”understanding” which places itself above all others. Because capitalism is properly described as a particular mode of production developed in Europe that accompanied the development and solidification of particular gender relations, it must therefore be the case that pre-capitalist societies can be properly described as having particular modes of production that themselves are accompanied by the presence of particular gender relations—so the story goes. The initial conception of this as presented by Marx and, most notably, Engels, comes with its own issues however these issues are tempered to some degree with a restricted conception of patriarchy.
“Patriarchy” as utilized by Marx and Engels refers to its original conception as a familial relation, and as primarily a result of second-wave feminism, this transformed into a broader set of relations whereby men wield power over women through various social systems. This disconnect has significant ramifications for contemporary attempts to bridge Marxism and feminism, particularly because Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State describes broad social systems that were eventually incorporated and further developed into what “patriarchy” would eventually become. For those Maoists who reject feminism itself as a bourgeois frameowork which rejects the importance of a class-based analysis and therefore class struggle, the contemporary conception of patriarchy is read as justification for this line of thinking, as patriarchy is traced as the principle origin of women’s oppression and not class stratification. This anti-feminist position is an absurd one to hold and I do not believe it worth dedicating any substantial time towards addressing in depth; it is also the case that the generally speaking, Western proletraian feminists’ engagement with the framework of patriarchy being of any sort of an uncritical nature presents fundamental contradictions that must be resolved. On a surface level, patriarchy is incredibly convenient because its characterization as something that encompasses broad social systems can be utilized to bolster specific Euromodern claims to universality, including much of Marxist thought. However this convenience necessitates it being the case that these claims to universality be justified, and it is here that the cracks begin to become apparent.
It may come as a surprise to some that I do not necessarily dislike Engel’s Origin — if anything, I dislike the ways in which it is stripped of context to make wider arguments that do not hold up to scrutiny but which nevertheless persist through pervasive dogmatism amongst many Marxists. For example, when radical feminists attempting to infiltrate communist feminist discussions reference Engels as an authoritative source, they point to the ways in which he discusses the place of reproduction (i.e. “propagation of the species”) in the development of relations which result in the oppression of women and argue that he is placing the control of women’s (read: cis women) “reproductive capacities” as the basis for patriarchy. Again though, when Engels speaks of patriarchy, he is referencing the familial structure, not a broader set of social systems where men dominate women. In other words, while it is true that Engels identifies the “propagation of the species” as one of the two facets of human activity which determines social organization, the transformation of the family itself and its domination by property is what is being identified as “patriarchy”. Therefore, within this analysis, cis women’s oppression becomes identifiable, in the last, with the transformation of the family into an economic unit which requires the subjugation of the “reproductive capacities” of humanity itself. Engels himself is not free of blame for the ways in which this text is appropriated for such obfuscatory ends, as his argument is fundamentally limited through its restricted scope of gender expanses that are not taken into consideration by the anthropological study he relies upon. It becomes the case therefore that, regardless of whether it was intended to be so, sweeping claims about patriarchy’s supposed universality are made utilizing it.
Proletarian feminists within the West who would like to imagine themselves to be deserving of camaraderie with Black trans women/transfems upend any potential for this through various attempts at playing “both sides” through attempting to appeal to us and radical feminists. While the maosoleum article itself does not explicitly do this, some such as J. Moufawad-Paul are more explicit in stating that there are insights made by radical feminism that are worthy of learning from. What amuses me is that when it comes to critiques of the flaws of radical feminism, there clearly is a fairly substantial (though not entirely complete) untangling of its foundational presumptions which lead to these flaws. When it comes to its supposed useful aspects, this sort of rigor is noticeably abandoned. Instead, we are left with a simple “radical feminism has the right idea on sex work”. What baffles me about this is the assumption that an attempt to square the idea that radical feminism bears an inherent epistemic problem with regards to transphobia and yet simultaneously has a correct analysis on sex work bears no interrogation nor justification. For example, JMP acknowledges penning a blog post writing favorably of Andrea Dworkin, citing the primary reasons for this as being her “analysis of pornography and intercourse that possessed the germ of a thorough materialist analysis” while also stating that he “was also uncomfortable with the context in which this analysis developed.” JMP, as someone who is not a Black TMA person — specifically a cishet white man — completely misses the callousness of characterizing something that has violent ramifications principally against Black TMA people as being “uncomfortable” to him.
While I do not wish to sidetrack this essay into a thorough analysis of sex work itself, sex work must be touched upon precisely because for proletarian feminists in the West, it is clear that this subject serves as the embodiment of the nexus of their views and understanding of (anti)Blackness and trans*. In place of a coherent and comprehensive analysis of both, sex work permits them to advance the cause of the universalization of Euromodernity’s epistemology. Dworkin being looked upon favorably within this context becomes appropriate, but for reasons not to their benefit. As with Dworkin’s contemporaries during the peak of her prominence, Dworkin made great use of the ruse of analogy to project the particular posionality of the Slave onto the white-woman-Other and then universalize this experience. Through this, the cis white woman was transmorgrified into the ideal subject of study for the oppression of women, including when it came to pornography. In the absence of this cynical enjoyment of the Black flesh for Dworkin’s analysis, the brazen absurdity of speaking of a general “male sexual desire” that stands in firm contradistinction to a “female sexual desire” would be unmistakable. At some level, Dworkin recognizes this and attempts to pave over this concern through her own rather paltry acknowledgements of the distinct experience of racialized sexualization, however this hardly amounts to anything approaching the theoretical weight of a critique of pornography from, for example, the likes of Hortense Spillers or Patricia Hill Collins. While I have some pointed critiques of their respective analyses of pornography, what is clear from said analyses and the responses from other Black feminists is that the attempts from Dworkin, MacKinnon, and the like, to treat the experience of Black cis women and white cis women within pornography as differences in degrees rather than differences in kind is not only incorrect, but founded in antiBlackness.
JMP’s recognition of Dworkin’s capitulation to transphobia when it suited her reaches the level of insulting in light of the simultaneous dishonesty of attempting to detach this from her arguments concerning pornography. This is especially true because Dworkin all-but explicitly dissociated trans women from “womanhood” in a 1984 Indianapolis ordinance she drafted with MacKinnon wherein they defined ponography as “the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women, whether in pictures or in words” and then clarify “the use of men, children, or transsexuals in the place of women is also pornography for purposes of this law.” To understand the full scope of the vile nature of this, Dworkin herself argues that “the heart of sex
oppression [is] the use of women as pornography, pornography as what women are.” In sum, for Dworkin, the experience of women stems from sex oppression which itself is constituted by cis women both being embodied and utilized as pornography, and any experience of suffering within the very same structures that affect them by those who Dworkin decides are not women does not indicate an experience of womanhood, but at best places them in proximity to women. This is, of course, a transmisogynistic sentiment I critiqued in For Those Seeking or in Flight and identified across the “political spectrum”, from those reactionarity such as Dave Chappelle and those ostensibly feminist such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Dworkin finds common ground in agreement that there is a “true” or “genuine” experience of womanhood that trans women can only approximate — something I dub “cis approximation” — and this is something that only becomes possible through medical/surgical transition (thus, prior to this state, trans women merely have a “male experience”). Dworkin would therefore like to have her cake and eat it too, wherein she claims to reject a bioreductive understanding of women’s oppression and yet mysteriously chastises “male desire” and ties it to the lack of a womb and the possession of a penis:
“The fathers, wombless perpetuators of their own image, know themselves; that is, they know that they are dangerous, purveyors of raw violence and constant death. They know that male desire is the stuff of murder, not love. They know that male eroticism, atrophied in the mummified penis, is sadistic; that the penis itself is as they have named it, a knife, a sword, a
weapon. They know too that the sexual aggression of men against each other, especially sons against fathers, once let loose would destroy them.”
The supposedly ubiquitous understanding that “sexually explicit subordination” is the role of the “female” at the hands of the “male” belies the violent subjugation, including that of a sexual nature, of African gender expansivity—including African masculinities and manhoods.Within the particular context of pornography, “interracial” porn is not only incredibly popular but demonstrably overrepresented specifically by “Black male/white female”. The recognition of the especially violent experience of Black cis women within porn by the likes of Dworkin and MacKinnon does not actually indicate any sort of fundamental grasp of the precarity of Black gender. The portrayal of roles within porn that are of a racially sexualized nature cannot be disentangled from their broader contexts of social positionality; this is something that these two ostensibly accept, and yet they ascribe social power based on portrayal stripped of these contexts. For the “Black male/white female” IR dynamic, it’s of course the case that the imago of the “bestial and sexually voracious Black male” is utilized, however this portrayal is always in concert with hegemonic masculinity which renders Black men sexually subordinate. The purpose of this dynamic is not to justify the sexual violation and subortination of white women to Black men, as Dworkin’s analysis requires us to accept, it is instead to exploit the fungibility of Black flesh and permit cishet white men the fantansy of being able to fuck as “beasts”. Dworkin’s analysis cannot permit her to recognize this facet of this particular dynamic of pornography and this is leveraged through transmisogynoir, as the convenient category of “male desire” as an extension of the penis places trans women as always in a position of power within pornography except in the instances of where we are the “fuckee” instead of the “fucker”. The implications of this for Black cis women means that through the dissociation of their portrayal within pornography from broader social contexts of misogynoir, Dworkin’s analysis completely misses that their sexual subordination is flipped on its head when paired with cis white men, as the imago of the “Black female” being sexually insatiable compromises their capacity to consent in the eyes of the Law.
To avoid this becoming a departure into an analysis of radical feminism itself, my purpose for this discussion is both to demonstrate what an actual materialist analysis of gender looks like as well as trace the reasoning for my belief that much of what undergirds Western prolefems’ dedication to proletarian feminism has to do with a desire to simply self-justify already held beliefs about particular subjects—most notably sex work, pornography, etc. The intrigue of Western prolefems in Dworkin and the like while simultaneously offering up a strong rejection of analyses of power from the likes of, for example, Foucalt, initially appears contradictory but becomes logical from the perspective that by any means necessary certain specific views around sexuality must be maintained. What I hope is clear at this point is that this comes at the expense of developing coherent, in-depth analysis of the positionality of Black TMA people. What bridges the two is a fixation on insisting on universalizations when they are not justified on the basis of a particular subject which requires African gender expansivity to be delegated to the realm of the unthought.
The junction of these two beliefs lies in Euromodernity’s claim that the human is bio-economic in nature as opposed to being bio-mythic as Wynter argues. The functional consequence of this, regardless of the insistence of individual Western prolefems, is that the generalized subject of study for patriarchy is one who is of a particular position within the construction of “biological sex” (i.e. a “sex-class”) and the generalized subject of study for communism is the proletariat. The conjoining of these two in this manner commits the errors Fanon and Wynter critiqued and identified as a source of alienation for those of Black African descent experiencing slavery and colonial subjugation. Fanon identifies a disconnect between ontogeny and sociogeny as the source of this alienation (see also: Du Bois’s double consciousness). Wynter’s further clarification that “in the case of our own culture, Black skins wear white masks, being but a special case of the fact that all humans wear cultural masks” offers a crucial counter-narrative embedded within Euromodernity which detaches Black Africa from history. The tendency among Marxists to identify class struggle as the motive force of history paired with the need to identify universal qualities of patriarchy reproduces this alienation.
As the maosoleum article argues, “patriarchal oppression is [...] an intrinsic part of any class society regardless of mode of production.” Paired with the incomplete picture Marx and Engels had of Africa, it is tempting to conclude 1) pre-colonial Africa lacked any class antagonism and 2) it is for this reason, patriarchy was absent in pre-colonial Africa. The question becomes, can it be properly claimed that pre-colonial Africa was classless? The answer to this question is an incredibly difficult one to parse based on the questionable limits of the applicability of the concept “mode of production” to non-Western social formations, particularly within Africa. Despite the scarcity of writings from Marx and Engels on Africa, both recognized, to some degree, the complex nature of various social formations on the continent. While I disagree with claims that they overtly agreed with Hegel’s characterization of Africa as non-historical and static, it’s also the case that social relations among African societies did not really factor into a broad understanding of mode of production that could adequately be used in service of analyzing these relations. We of course have descriptions from Marx identifying the primary two parts of the mode of production as being the means of production and the relations of production, however these on their own do not necessarily contribute to insight of the social relations of a given society which operates quite distinctly from that of bourgeois-capitalist society.
It isn’t necessarily the case that“mode of production” carries no potential to offer clarification for such societies. However it is of consequence that various attempts from Marxist academics when attempting to study these societies, consistently run into the problem of how to properly define and therefore apply it. Furthermore, the elements that make up the mode of production themselves lose their clarity when applied from the specific contexts Marx studied to define them. For example, when dealing with the question of surplus, could it be the case that in the extraction of surplus through extra-economic means that we find in pre-capitalist societies, this leads to a misrecognition of these societies as “classless”? Such extra-economic surplus extraction in contrast to capitalism’s process of direct extraction in a “purely” economic form is much more difficult to navigate and trace, particularly in societies where kinship structures predominantly inform relations of production. Further, because such kinship structures provide, to some degree, an impediment to the vast increasingly concentrated accumulation of wealth we find in capitalism, it becomes difficult to determine commonalities in the economic laws of motion of these societies without extremely complex statistical analyses that employ the aid of computers.
All of this is to say that with complications of the question of class in pre-colonial Africa from the Marxist perspective comes complications of the question of gender. Specifically, if we are to recognize the link between patriarchy and class society and there existed gender expansivity in pre-colonial Africa while not being properly described as classless, the thesis surrounding patriarchy and its development with class society becomes troubled to say the least. Further, it is clear that while the Western epistime’s conception of gender is not universal, it believes itself to be so and this is reflected in even feminism birthed within it which ostensibly exists to fight against its patriarchal nature. In other words, feminism within the West is very much largely constructed upon the premise that it’s particular configurations of gender are to be found in every society at every period. Consequently, it is supposedly the case that where gender exists, there is a woman/man binary where women are dominated by men. Because this requires an “essence”, so to speak, of womanhood that cuts across all other positionalities, escaping biological reductionism becomes nigh-impossible.
It is here that we can begin to place “patriarchy” itself under the microscope and identify the cracks within; like a diamond, what appears to be a pristine, perfectly stable structure of framework in reality is not so uniform—and in fact, contains a multitude of weaknesses that once identified and struck, easily cuts straight through it and shatters it. Patriarchy’s ubiquitous existence within feminism since the movement’s second-wave disguises the rather substantial shift in conceiving gender oppresion that developed towards the end of and immediately after the end of this wave. These developments are what are typically targeted by proletarian feminists and many within the M-L(M) mileu generally as being “idealist”, with all of the various distinct modes of thinking grouped within the general label of “queer theory”. What is perhaps most ironic is the often-accompanying charge of these developments also being ascribed the label of being “Western bourgeois academic theory” when, at their core, said developments principally are a response to the foundational premises which have sustained Western feminist academic thought—including second-wave feminism from which these communists have been significantly influenced by. It therefore becomes an untenable position to maintain that the position proletarian feminists hold is of a dichotomous nature, almost of a manichean sorts, with that of Western bourgeois feminism—whereas in truth, the ways in which they appeal to the concept of patriarchy is a vestige of a particular feminist schema which compels us to conceptualize it as a distinct, autonomous structure. This is, of course, the proposed conceptual gap between radical feminism and proletarian feminism, however both are laid upon the same foundation, making it quite easy to bridge the two. Proletarian feminism employs a dual systems approach, which in simple terms posits patriarchy as something not reducible to capitalism but which also cannot be disentangled entirely from it. I find it apt to apply Joan Acker’s description of one attempt to utilize a dual systems approach here, and similarly would characterize this as an analysis where “the old patriarchal images [are] still embedded in an apparently gender-neutral framework” (1989, 238). In other words, this dual systems approach does not fundamentally resolve the issue of capitalism being imagined as something gender-neutral in the first place but which on occasion finds common ground with patriarchy and therefore it becomes possible to finally understand the linkage between the two. Acker further clarifies that “the interest of maintain system boundaries between patriarchy, capitalism, and racism [...] seems to argue that certain relations are ‘gender relations’, while others are something else” and argues that instead it is more accurate to theorize from the understanding that “gender is implicated in the fundamental constitution of all social life” (238). She therefore summarizes her analytical framework as “instead of positing analytically independent structures and then looking for linkages between them, it starts from the assumption that social relations are constituted through processes in which the linkages are inbuilt.”
This is reminiscent of the developments within the theoretical backdrop of the Black Radical Tradition which I have discussed earlier in this essay. What is of particular intrigue is that though the concept of sexism was developed with the explicit intent to mirror that of racism—in particular, antiBlackness—there is a much greater persistence in advancing a reductionist world-view in the former in no small part because there are differing interests in identifying the analytical subject which helps orient one’s framework. I am speaking here of, in simple, terms “lived experience” which may provoke gasps of horror and indignation from certain proletarian feminists who would comfortably label this the realm of “idealism” while appealing to the likes of MacKinnon who wrote a white supremacist screed defending the “[cis] white woman” as the paradigm of womanhood and the experience of the oppression of woman. To be clear, there is nothing particularly shocking about her writing, as she is merely stating the quiet part out loud, that if we are to present patriarchy as a distinctive structure that merely finds common ground with capitalism, racism, etc. on occasion, then the subject(ive) lens through which we must necessarily analyze is that of the high-classed cis white woman. Of course, the common objection to this often presents itself in some form of the question “How then, do we analyze the commonalities between [cis] white and Black women on the basis of being women?” The beauty in the answer to this question lies in its simplicity: the way to analyze the commonalities between cis white and Black women is through their positionality as cis women. This does not end the discussion for everyone, as there are some who demand more, with the underlying implication that there is a shared “essence” between cis white and Black women that belies their positionality as cis women. This is because these individuals are not interested in a materialist analysis of what bell hooks refers to as white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy; rather, they are seeking a particular ontological explanation of women’s oppression that is, on a fundamental level, founded in bioreductionism.
Perhaps the most epochal defense of this attempt to codify an ontological explanation of women’s oppression is Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex which utilizes the figure of “the Other” to argue that the objectification of women mirrors that of both Black people and Jews. Fanon would eventually trouble this notion indirectly through thoroughly dismantling Sartre’s invocation of the Other to analyze racism, particularly the experience of Black people. For Fanon, the white, which also includes white women, not only represents the master, but the Other as well. For Beauvoir, she posits that white patriarchy dominates the world and that the white man is defined in positive as the white woman in the negative and from this, there is a struggle for self-recognition wherein in a dichotomy of the Self/Other, in order for man to possess this position of the Self and therefore be free, they must subjugate women, placing them in the Other. Fanon might describe this position as a designated state of inferiority, but if asked the position of the Black, he answers “A feeling of inferiority? No, a feeling of nonexistence”. In other words, whereas Beauviour argues that the white woman is the negation of the white man, the Black would occupy no position in this equation at all. While the white woman fights for equality, to become an equivalent to the white man on the scale, the Black, regardless of (non)gender, fights to exist.
To begin concluding this, I would like to circle back around to precisely why it is that Fanon identifies the peasantry/lumpen as the most revolutionary within the (Black) colonial context. Fanon argues that the lumpenproletariat’s revolutionary potential lies in it being divorced to an extent from the customs and ideological foundations that sustain Euromodernity. The lumpen, being derived from a dispossessed peasantry, still maintain some sort of connection to its Indigenous cultures and practices that run counter to this Western epistime. Fanon of course cautions that the lumpen can also be a threat if they are not properly equipped with the knowledge of understanding their positionality and can act as mercenaries, however self-serving activity betraying of the revolution is not in the least bit exclusive to them—in fact, it is the urban proletariat, the petty bourgeoisie, etc. that are more substantially inculcated with not only the drive to amass wealth, but the colonial justifications of seeking the position of Man. It therefore should, in my mind, be understood that the specific positionality of Black TMA people lends itself to be representative of the deepest, lowest masses. Black TMA people are significantly more likely to face poverty, housing insecurity, incarceration, sex trafficked, experience police brutality, etc. What is further striking is that not only is there an intimate relation between Black TMA people and the position of the lumpen and precariat, but we are positioned as the ultimate threat to the onto-metaphysical foundations of Euromodernity. We unsettle it because we are a direct tether to the African gender expanses that the West has so desperately sought to utterly stamp out and annihilate. It’s of no direct consequence to me whether Maoist militants in India or the Philippines utilize proletarian feminists for their particular conditions, but proletarian feminists in the West attempting to universalize it is something I consider nothing less than farcical.
