- cross-posted to:
- womenby@hexbear.net
- cross-posted to:
- womenby@hexbear.net
**Crossposter’s note: I was working on a discussion post with excerpts, but this is a really good thread I don’t want to split the discussion. Please just participate in the original instead. **
cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/3652499
thanks to @iridaniotter@hexbear.net for telling me abt this essay! its been posted on HB before, but not in a while.
read feminist theory you libs! uphold TC69 thought!
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The only comment that should be here (read the body): the essay rules. Read it (please)!
Choice quotes for anyone who doubts the value of reading it and needs a lil push:
So where does gender’s material base lie? Gender is produced primarily by the division of reproductive labor. Reproductive labor is any labor that helps to produce the next generation, including sex, birth, childcare, and homemaking, and gender is defined by how this labor is divided up, with the different genders being distinct classes which are expected to perform specific sorts of tasks regarding reproductive labor.
Since gender is an expression of these relations of production and not of biology, where does that leave sex? Some pseudomarxists claim sex forms the material base of gender, but this is a laughable understanding of historical materialism which centers biology before relations of production. Biology influences our reality, but our social systems find their basis in our material conditions.
Gender is the earliest class systems and, as a result, it precedes the state, even in its earliest most basic form. This means that, unlike capitalism, race, neuronormativity, and the various other class systems, the state is not the primary means by which gender is imposed upon people.
Sexual violence fills the role among women and queer people that police violence fills among many others.
But these are systems, not a system, and the modern gender binary has been enforced on almost the whole world. Some different gender class systems still exist, but, by and large, the advent of the liberal social order as a global social order rather than a regional one has produced a single gender system which all other systems are seen as perversions of. Other gender systems today serve as hold outs within a larger global system.
These are but a small amount of the really important bits that serve as a preface for the larger point. Trust me, trust ZL, and the trust the Hexbear that believes in you: read the whole thing. It’s educational. Eat those veggies.