La fem ir shell

Post-Coloniality

Far left and post-colonial movements abandon the subaltern woman – they neglect institutions which reveal the patriarchal frame that drives the episteme of coloniality – an injection of feminism can reconcile de-colonial movements with the state

Klubock 1, Thomas Miller, “Writing the History of Women and Gender in Twentieth-Century Chile”, Hispanic American Historical Review, 81:3-4, August-November 2001, pp. 493-518 (Article)

Elizabeth Quay Hutchison’s work also reflects the influence of Foucault in its focus on the history of discourses about women workers and more general systems of knowledge about women and sexuality produced during the early twentieth century. Yet, like Rosemblatt, Zárate, and others, Hutchison also employs a feminist analysis, derived from the work of Scott, to analyze how the politics of social reform, labor, and the Left were shaped by gender ideolo- gies. Hutchison’s study of gender and the social reform in early-twentieth-century Chile follows Kirkwood’s rethinking of the history of the class-based movements of the Left from the perspective of gender and Scott’s by now well-known claim that “gender constructs politics and politics constructs gender,” as well as Scott’s searing critique of labor history for ignoring women and the gendered historical constitution of the male working-class subject.28 Hutchison is interested in revising the political history of the first decades of the century by exposing the centrality of gender ideologies and hierarchies in debates about women’s work and women workers to the politics of the labor movement and the discussions of leftists, elites, social reformers, feminists, educators, industrialists, and legislators. Thus, in the article for this special issue she shows that, despite the shift from an early discursive construction of women as agents of both class and human emancipation to a more pessimistic portrayal of women as backward and Catholic, concern with women and sexu- ality was a central element of anarchist rhetoric.29 Hutchison recovers strands of feminist thought in early working-class and leftist politics that critiqued both the class exploitation of women workers and the more general sexual sub- jugation of women and demonstrates how during the 1920s, as in the case of the anarchists, this “worker-feminism” was ultimately marginalized and sup- pressed. Hutchison shows that the politics of the early labor movement were defined by the commitment of socialists, anarchists, and labor militants to a gender division of labor that relegated women to the domestic sphere and defined wage-labor as a masculine domain. Male leftists and labor activists employed the trope of the vicitimized woman worker to exclude women from the labor market and assert their own prerogatives to protect and control women’s labor and sexuality. Similarly mobilized by the image of the sexual and social danger of women’s work, industrialists, elite women, and legislators sought to implement social reforms designed to protect women workers while¶ establishing a gender-segregated labor market. Vocational schools and Cath- olic worker cooperatives and unions were organized to moralize working women, train them in domestic duties, offset the perceived corrupting influ- ence of wage labor, and counter labor radicalism. The first legislative debates to promote the social reforms that would be the foundation of the welfare state engineered by the popular fronts were sparked by efforts to protect women workers. This legislation reduced women’s workforce possibilities and consolidated men’s positions as wage laborers and heads of households. These feminist histories of the politics of social reform, inspired by Fou- cault’s and Scott’s redirection of gender history to the realm of representation, move away from women’s history and social history “from below” to histories of politics that focus on the ways in which gender ideology shapes cultural and political discourses and state policies and, by inference, structures the experi- ence and positions the subjectivities of subaltern men and women. Rosem- blatt’s and Hutchison’s examination of the discursive and ideological processes that accompany state formation and constitute the regulation of gender and sexuality render both the category of “women” and subaltern experience and agency historically contingent and constructed. They insightfully demonstrate how the establishment of a sexual division of labor and gendered social hierar- chy were central to the processes of state formation during the first half of the twentieth century. While these state-centered analyses reach down to interme- diary actors like union leaders, political activists, professionals, and social reformers, the ways in which women (and men) negotiated the terrain of patri- archy and gender ideology at the level of the day-to-day is less visible. The focus on the importance of gender to the politics of social reform, the Left, and the labor movement leads to analysis of the political rhetoric, and ideolo- gies of party and union leaderships and away from histories below of the everyday lifeways, social practices, and cultural worlds of subaltern women, the main concern of the social-historical literature. As recent histories of state formation have underlined, the hegemony of the state and elites is contingent on their ability to absorb and reshape popular cultures and forms of sociability. This raises the question of the capacity of the state, employers, and private welfare organizations to control “popular” prac- tices and identities around gender and sexuality. An analysis of the hegemony of gender ideologies of female domesticity, for example, would require a sense of the popular cultural worlds of gender and sexuality that the state incorpo- rated, appropriated, and repressed.30 Where social histories from below have¶ tended to neglect the role of the state, the church, the professions, and para- state institutions like hospitals and charities in defining the terms of gender identities and relations, histories of politics and the state have tended to slight the relationship between popular cultural understandings and social practices of gender and sexuality and state projects of reform and regulation. A resolution of this tension between gendered analyses of politics and state formation and social histories of subaltern men and women might be found in the reintroduction of feminist theories of patriarchy and sexuality. If, as for Joan Scott, gender is a form of representing or signifying power rela- tions, the set of ideas that create cultural norms around sexual difference, how do we also understand gender as the historical construction of material social hierarchies? To write about gender as a cause of inequalities between men and women, as a force or ideology that explains inequality between men and women, approaches a tautology in which gender inequality is produced by gender which is, in turn, a product of gender inequality. Gender then appears as an abstract, almost transhistorical, concept, as an ideology or semiotic sys- tem producing social inequality with a historical dynamism and logic of its own. Its material historical origins, the conditions of its production, are left unexplained. A theorization of patriarchy would prompt a historical reconsideration of the nature of men’s subjugation of women. In much of the history of women and gender in Chile, the focus has been on women’s work, the structure of the labor market, and the politics of the labor movement, perhaps because as a his- toriographical project Chilean women’s/gender history has focused on rewrit- ing earlier marxist historical narratives of the Left and labor, which fore- grounded the politics of production. In these histories, gender inequality in and outside the home is rooted in the exclusion of women from the labor mar- ket, the labor movement, and leftist politics. Similarly, in recovering moments of “progressive” feminism, historians have focused on those movements that both critique the exploitation of women as workers and challenge the sexual division of labor and gender ideology of female domesticity. The gender ideol- ogy that defines women’s appropriate activities as domestic, undervalues their labor as unskilled, nonproductive, or secondary, and limits their possibilities for wage-work may be at the heart of women’s political, social, and economic subordination to men, but, as Heidi Tinsman has argued, why this gender ide- ology has operated in different historical contexts still needs to be explained. A¶ simple focus on production and the division of labor, as in marxist-feminist attempts to unite class and gender analysis, ignores the ways in which patri- archy is rooted in forms of social power and social contests around sexuality and reproduction.