Subordination presents a survey of some of the most important ideas developed within feminism since the 1970s. Among the central themes addressed are: the origins of women’s subordination; the private/public split; the nature and the role of domestic labour; the impact of psychoanalysis on feminist theory; the relationship between the State and women’s subordination. One of the book’s purposes is to draw together strands of thought and debate often kept separate.
Throughout, the major theoretical developments in Britain, the United States and Australia are reviewed within a comparative perspective. Consistently, the focus of attention is on how, and how far, theorists in these countries have been able to point to ways of explaining the changing but enduring nature of sexual inequalities.
Author(s): Clare Burton
Series: (Routledge Library Editions: Feminist Theory)
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2014
Language: English
Pages: 192
Tags: Feminism, Gender Studies, Literary Theory
SUBORDINATION Feminism and Social Theory
Copyright
Subordination
Feminism and Social Theory
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgements
Technical Note
Introduction
1 Engels, the Search for Origins, and Feminist Theory
Problems of historical reconstruction
Prehistoric origins
2 Engels, Class and Women
Class and women's subordination
Lessons from classless societies
Conclusions
3 Public and Private Worlds
Radical feminism
Feminist-informed ethnography
Marxist-feminist and related approaches
The male wage labourer
Conclusions
4 Domestic Labour and the Political Economy of Women
Women as a structural group
The domestic mode of production
Domestic labour and capitalist production
Women, domestic labour and legitimation
Conclusions
5 Psychoanalysis, Masculinity/Femininity and the Family
Juliet Mitchell and psychoanalysis
Freud, Lacan and feminist theory
Conclusions
6 An Extended Theory of Social Reproduction
Feminist theory and the state
The state and biological reproduction
Education and social reproduction
Conclusions
Notes
Bibliography
Index
