Unit 5: The Commodification of the Female: Labour and Sex

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Unit 5 The Commodification of the Female Labour
and Sex

• Reading Davis and Morgan in RWL, 221-236
  237-260
• The female body becomes, as Susan Bordo notes,
  both a text of culture and a site of social
  control. (The Body and the Reproduction of
  Femininity A Feminist Appropriation of Michel
  Foucault in Jagar and Bordo Gender/Body/Knowledge
  Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing.)

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1. Introduction Theoretical Engagements with
Womens Work

• From a Marxist theoretical base
• issues related to postcolonial analysis-
  gender/race/class (Davis)

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1. Introduction Theoretical Engagements with
Womens Work

• in capitalism unpaid domestic labour (private)
  sphere
• ensures paid labour in the public
• both private and public labour are interrelated
  and therefore Marxist analysis needs to engage
  both
• de-mystifies unpaid domestic ideology - unpaid
  domestic labour-- labour of love

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1. Introduction Theoretical Engagements with
Womens Work

• three key effects in capitalism re unpaid
  domestic labour
• 1. women economically upon men
• 2. domestic labour is unpaid it is devalued -
  connected to women
• womens labour devalued - women paid less
• 3. Double duty

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1.2 Ideology of Motherhood

• mystified to appear natural
• white, western, elite, christian
• category marked by class, race, sexuality and
  ability/disability
• any other location falls short - the bad mother
• judgment on women as bad mothers via ideology
  of motherhood

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1.2 Ideology of Motherhood

• influence of 1920s eugenics clear in court system
• disciplining women

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2. Kinship and the Exchange of Women

• Gayle Rubin
• Marx, Levi-Strauss, and Freud
• Symbolic
• Female and male sign in social systems
• Male-female difference

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2. 1 Marx

• Appropriation of female labour
• Reproductive labour and labour toward continuance
  of species
• Neutralize potential power and control

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2..2 Claude Levi-Strauss

• Kinship systems
• Made up of categories and statuses
• Act as Idiom of social interaction
• Kinship and language - the human
• Significant elements Gift and sexual taboo
  (incest)
• Relations based on exchange
• Marriage and women

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2.2 Claude Levi-Strauss

• Incest taboos ensure exogamy
• Exogamy and alliance
• Exchange relations
• Men (male) as givers and receivers
• Women (female) as given
• Women outside of social relations the other

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2.2 Claude Levi-Strauss

• Womens oppression established and enacted in
  kinship relations
• Analysis of oppression not in biology but social
  relations
• Why women and not men?
• Logical structure underneath kinship

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2.2 Claude Levi-Strauss

• Social organization of sex rests upon
• 1. Gender
• 2. obligatory heterosexuality
• 3. restraint of female sexuality
• Gender underlies sex - difference signed (given
  meaning)
• Gender identity suppression of natural
  similarities
• Sex difference underscored
• Heterosexuality controlled

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2.2 Claude Levi-Strauss

• Female sexuality constrained in asymmetrical
  sexual relations
• Through social relations human sexual relations
  organized

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2.3 Sigmund Freud

• Sexual development in children
• Learned sex/gender identity
• Mystification - sex seen to be in nature
• Phallus as masculine power
• Phallus as lack