Revisiting Irigaray’s Essay “Women on the Market”

Women's Studies, 45:425–443, 2016 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0049-7878 print / 1547-7045 online DOI: 10.1080/00497878.2016.1186494 REVISITING IRIGARAY’S ESSAY “WOMEN ON THE MARKET” TEGAN ZIMMERMAN Okanagan College, Kelowna Woman is not born a commodity, but rather becomes one. This is Luce Irigaray’s argument in her 1977 essay “Women on the Market” (1997). In this work, Irigaray expands on and reinterprets Marx’s critique of the commodity in capitalism by explicating woman’s role as a commodity and the inherence of sexual difference in economic exchange. Irigaray’s engagement with Marx’s criticism of capitalism offers an insightful and invaluable analysis of women as commodities in a capitalist system. Her work is, however, insufficient for combating the proliferation of postfeminism in present-day late capitalism. In this article I take up Irigaray’s essay but adapt and update her theory to encompass and combat recent postfeminist assumptions. Her reading of Marx in terms of sexual difference is ever more meaningful for feminist theory; it can serve as a means of bridging and developing a renewed and relevant materialist feminist dialogue, particularly when extended to include the ways in which women exploit other women, often a direct result of postfeminist efforts at equality. Revisiting Irigaray’s and Marx’s critiques of the commodity in capitalism gives feminists the tools to understand the mechanisms by which capitalism and patriarchy intersect to produce simultaneously in the twenty-first century a late capitalism and a postfeminism that conceal the continuous structural subordination of women. While an extensive amount of literature both supportive and critical (Butler; Grosz; Moi; Schor; Whitford) has been written on Irigaray’s concept of sexual difference, and while there is a healthy amount of feminist critiques on Marxism (Benhabib and Cornell), insufficient scholarship exists on Irigaray’s engagement with Marx. One of the reasons feminists have not appropriated Irigaray’s work on Marx is because, as Naomi Schor argues, Marxist feminists and socialist feminists in the 1970s began shifting away from “essences”; but while Marx’s notion of humanism was reformulated for feminist purposes, Irigaray’s work was not (Schor, “Previous” 6).1 Since the 1980s, however, and the simultaneous advent of late capitalism and postfeminism, feminists have increasingly turned away from both Marx and Irigaray. This is a mistake. Marxist feminists (e.g., Catharine MacKinnon), like Irigaray, are now criticized equally for essentializing women and portraying them as victims. The result of this criticism has been a backlash against second-wave feminism, including theories of sexual difference, and a shift toward postfeminist perspectives.2 Address correspondence to Tegan Zimmerman, Okanagan College, Kelowna, BC V1Y 4X8, Canada. E-mail: tegan@ualberta.ca 1 Curiously Naomi Schor, in her outline of the reception of Irigaray’s work, makes no mention of postfeminism, nor do any of the other chapters/authors included in the book. 2 I am acutely aware of the Anglo-European focus of this article and the dangers of using a term such as postfeminism, which marginalizes the goals of transnational feminism presently active across the globe. This idea 425 426 Tegan Zimmerman Gail Finney argues that while it was coined in the early 1980s, there is little agreement about what the term postfeminism actually means: “most often the term refers to a conservative reaction against feminism, which is lambasted for its portrayal of women as victims” (123). In “Tank Girl, Postfeminist Media Manifesto,” Elyce Helford identifies postfeminism as promoting sexual freedom and “the belief that personal choices and ‘bootstrap’ efforts can bring a woman (and hence all women) empowerment and equality.” And Fien Adriaens, citing popular television examples such as Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives, suggests the critical potential of postfeminism. She writes: post feminism not only expresses a critique, it also provides and articulates alternatives by focussing (sic) on difference, anti-essentialism and hybridism, pleading for female sexual pleasure and choice, re-evaluating the tension that existed between femininity and feminism and rejecting body politics by defining the body as key signifier for women’s identities. (4) Others, including Stéphanie Genz and Amanda Lotz, support Adriaens’s reasoning that a postfeminist position is empowering for women and that the term is a celebratory one, arguing that if women have achieved gender equality, then there is no more need for feminists to fight for this equality.3 Two recent exceptions to the feminist shift away from reading Marx and Irigaray, either separately or together, are the noteworthy works of E. A. Winebaum and Alison Martin. Both authors engage Irigaray’s work on sexuate rights with Marx’s criticisms of capitalism in order to elucidate contemporary women’s roles in postfeminist/capitalist society. For example, in “Marx, Irigaray and the Politics of Reproduction,” Winebaum addresses reproduction in terms of economic parameters, referencing surrogacy and abortion and how “reproductive labor has assumed an abstract value as social labor and women around the globe are working to produce baby commodities that are entering the market along side other domestic products and imports” (99). As sexual reproduction becomes increasingly viable/buyable on the market, Winebaum argues it is necessary to rethink the socialist feminist position and emphasizes convincing reasons for returning to Irigaray’s work on sexuate rights. Martin, meanwhile, in “A European Initiative: Irigaray, Marx and Citizenship,” discusses the relevance of Irigaray’s concept of sexuate rights and a sexed definition of citizen, which—inspired by Marx—reconsiders the family in terms of civil law (22). Martin stresses the necessity for women to have political space not equal or the same as men’s but as a citizen qua woman (26). Winebaum’s and Martin’s analyses reinforce my belief, contrary to other feminist scholars, that reading Irigaray in conjunction with Marx offers a powerful counter-discourse to twenty-first-century capitalism and postfeminism. is echoed again by Françoise Lionnet who argues that in “France there is a negative view of feminism as evidenced by Elisabeth Badinter’s Fausse route in which the former women’s rights activist now accuses feminists of seeing ‘victims’ everywhere” (103). For an example of feminist criticisms of Irigaray as essentialist see the works of Monique Plaza and Christine Fauré. 3 See for instance Stéphanie Genz’s work Postfemininities in Popular Culture. and her co-authored monograph with Benjamin A. Brabon, Postfeminism: Cultural Texts and Theories, or Amanda D. Lotz’s article “Textual (Im) Possibilities in the U.S. Post-Network Era: Negotiating Production and Promotion Processes on Lifetime’s Any Day Now.” Revisiting Irigaray’s Essay “Women on the Market” 427 To reiterate, Irigaray describes woman as a commodity because she draws from Marx’s analysis of the commodity within capitalist exchange. In the twentyfirst century, both late capitalism and postfeminism suggest women are equal to men but conceal and fail to recognize woman’s permanent position as a commodity, a product of the intersection between capitalism and patriarchy. One could even argue, and Irigaray’s thinking suggests as much, that capitalism and postfeminism should be re-categorized as advanced modes of patriarchy. Understanding capitalism and postfeminism as modes of patriarchy redefines patriarchy as not only a hierarchy between the ontological sexes—men and women—but also economically as a class hierarchy. Irigaray does not endorse an equality whereby women are merely inserted into traditional men’s roles; this kind of equality only keeps women as competitive rivals and commodities in a capitalist system. Rather, Irigaray identifies the need for a radical transformation of the economy and, by extension, patriarchy itself. Though Irigaray only names men as the perpetrators of a masculine economy, in a postfeminist/capitalist era, this should include women, who are equally responsible for the continuation of a masculine economy.4 One example of the convergence between patriarchy and capitalism is Holly Madison, the former girlfriend of the American magazine publisher and founder of Playboy Enterprises, Hugh Hefner. Madison not only posed nude for Playboy on several occasions, but she also began a career on the production side and worked at the studio.5 Similarly, Hefner’s daughter, Christie Ann Hefner, is a former chairwoman and chief executive officer of Playboy Enterprises. Playboy Enterprises is an economically successful company because it functions on the commodification and objectification of women, which is now supported in late capitalism by women on the production side (positions once held by men only) who continue the same exchange of women as objects. Feminists wanting to combat the commodification of women within postfeminism/late capitalism will not find any concrete strategies by returning solely to Marx’s consideration of women. Marx wrote little on the topic of gender and sexuality other than about woman’s role in the historical context of the economy, and not, as Heidi Hartmann points out, in terms of a relation to man (3). Hartmann, the most influential feminist theorist who has attempted to supplement the gender blind spot in Marx’s work, identifies in her essay “The Unhappy Marriage Between Feminism and Marxism: Towards a More Progressive Union” how capitalism and patriarchy both oppress women. She argues that Marx’s critique of capitalism can be adapted and extended to support feminist accounts of capitalism as an oppressive and exploitive economic system. By defining woman as subordinate to man, in terms of a sexual division of labor, capitalism operates similarly to the hierarchy between man and woman in patriarchy. Hartmann’s strategy is to approach patriarchy and capitalism separately. 4 I use masculine economy and patriarchy interchangeably in describing our current economy that privileges men above women and is secured by the commodification of women. 5 Madison has recently confessed in her autobiography Down the Rabbit Hole: Curious Adventures and Cautionary Tales of a Former Playboy Bunny that in objectifying herself, she lost her self-worth and contemplated suicide. 428 Tegan Zimmerman In response to Hartmann, many feminists, including Iris Young, reject what is referred to as Hartmann’s dual systems theory. The dual systems theory treats capitalism and patriarchy as if they were unrelated systems while conceding feminists need to combat both in order to achieve equality. A dual systems theory claims that capitalism posits economic oppression while women’s oppression is attributed to patriarchy. If these two kinds of oppression, patriarchy and capitalism, have developed independently, then women need to treat them as such, and combat each separately. Hartmann does not acknowledge that sexism and capitalism share roots in patriarchy. Young, in contrast, puts forth a notion of a single and unified theory of capitalist patriarchy and elevates the category of a division of labor and in particular the gender division of labor as being equal if not more important than class. I accept Young’s analysis but feel it is important to extend her conception of a unified theory even further. Patriarchy is not a symptom of capitalism—capitalism is a subset of patriarchy, evident in the recent development of postfeminism in late capitalism.6 In contrast to Hartmann and Young, I approach the division of labor within capitalist patriarchy as informed by Irigaray’s perspective of sexual difference. This IrigarayanMarxist perspective enables an analysis of how gender and sexuality and our modern class system mutually shape and are shaped by patriarchal capital. In the twenty-first century, patriarchal capital has produced simultaneously an era of late capitalism and a postfeminist façade over the ongoing commodification and structural subordination of women. Irigaray’s concept of sexual difference challenges the subordination of women by showing how gender is inherent in theories, including Marx’s, of a division of labor, economic exchange, a labor theory of value, and matter as neutral. Irigaray interprets sexual difference as indicating ontological differences between men and women but without suggesting either sex is superior to the other. By reclaiming the female subject as different, discovering her own desires apart from man and man’s ontology, she conceives woman as “a self-defined woman who would not be satisfied with sameness, but otherness and difference would be given social and symbolic representation” (Whitford 24–25). Throughout this article I use the term sexual difference and divisions of labor in order to highlight the importance of reading Irigaray and Marx together in order to understand how sexual difference and divisions of labor are intertwined and inseparable in a capitalist/postfeminist patriarchy. Even though Irigaray does not consider woman as constituting a class because most theorists (including Marx) do not define class in terms of ontological sexual difference, her notion of sexual difference is insightful. I am not the first to suggest that feminists should rethink woman as a unified gender and a class, but rethinking women as a unified gender and class enables the reconsideration of late capitalism and postfeminism. Late capitalism and postfeminism stem from and sustain capitalist patriarchy. Theorizing woman as a unified gender and class enables women to contest late capitalism and postfeminism more easily.7 A 6 Azizah Al-Hibri similarly argues that capitalism is a mode of patriarchy and takes patriarchy as the necessary starting point for any Marxist feminist discussion. 7 See also Italian neo-Marxist literature on alternatives to capitalist life and work, for example, Silvia Federici, and the important works of Christine Delphy, such as Close to Home. Revisiting Irigaray’s Essay “Women on the Market” 429 Marxist feminist position that posits a materialist account of woman in terms of Irigaray’s concept of sexual difference and that reimagines woman as constituting a class, if only for the strategic purpose of undermining current patriarchy, is positional. A positional perspective defines patriarchy as both private and public and requires a reconstruction of values with the goal put in Marxist terms as a classless society, and for feminism an equality of sexual difference. Following this line of thinking, I first provide Irigaray’s argument in her essay in conjunction with Marx’s thinking on commodities and then discuss possibilities for how women can resist commodification, which Irigaray does not adequately provide. I put forth a Marxist feminist framework that considers woman in terms of Irigaray’s concept of sexual difference and imagines woman as constituting a class as defined by Marx in order to undermine the current postfeminist capitalist patriarchy, which operates as a gendered and classed system.8 Sexual Difference and Divisions of Labor: Patriarchy and Private Property A discussion of woman as commodity begins with Irigaray’s understanding of patriarchal societies and Marx and Engels’s definition of the commodity—as exploitation, use, exchange, and alienation (indebted to Hegel)—in Capital, The German Ideology, and the Communist Manifesto. Irigaray argues that patriarchal societies are based on a symbolic economy regulated, understood, defined, and put into place by men for men. Her ontology can be understood in economic terms of the Greek word oikonomos, which has the sense of one who manages a household or family. As a mode of oikonomos, capitalism is patriarchal because it operates as a masculine economy that privileges the position of man in opposition and in relation to woman, including structuring and constructing the material and social spheres. As Margaret Whitford observes, “patriarchy is defined by Irigaray as ‘an exclusive respect for the genealogy of sons and fathers, and the competition between brothers’” (24). Irigaray’s essay thus theorizes patriarchy as economic exchange premised on woman’s position as commodity. The passage into the social order, which is any economic system of patriarchy, is marked by the exchange of women. Irigaray writes, “Men or groups of men circulate women amongst themselves according to a rule known as the incest taboo” (“Women on the Market” 174). The incest taboo entails that a man (e.g., a father, husband, son, brother) cannot procreate with his own blood (e.g., a mother, daughter, sister). In order to procure a woman with whom to reproduce, a man must perform an exchange with another man, strengthening the economic, social, and cultural bonds of men. But Irigaray asks: “Why exchange women?” (“Women on the Market” 174). Irigaray dismisses answers that women are scarce commodities or 8 Understanding woman as a gender and class does not seek to efface the many differences (race, ethnicity, sexuality, etc.) between women, or feminism’s tenuous position as exclusionary and elitist, but rather to signify that patriarchy encompasses and to an extent defines differences between women. Whether within the capitalist rule of men or women who are complicit with this rule, the operation of a masculine economy directly and indirectly affects all women. For an excellent discussion of the complex nature of patriarchy that supports my own arguments here see Judith Bennett’s History Matters. 430 Tegan Zimmerman that men have polygamous tendencies. For Irigaray, the incest taboo can explain the social order but cannot explain why sexual difference manifests itself in a division of labor from the outset, as if divisions of labor are ontological and would justify a privileging of man above woman prior to and within the social order. The incest taboo entails that being the negotiator of exchange, the man who will pass his woman over to another man’s hands is in a dominant position. As Marx argues, commodities “cannot take themselves to market and perform exchanges in their own right” (Capital 178). The woman is subordinate the moment she is passed from one hand to the next. Her hands are tied, and she arrives and leaves empty handed. The question is why the man is already and in advance in a dominant position when from a biological standpoint both sexes are necessary to each other in terms of procreation. Marx and Engels’s approach to the origin of the division of labor between the sexes is not always consistent but is worth pursuing in order to better understand Irigaray’s position. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels suggest that the sexual division of labor is originally nothing but the division of labor in the sexual act (42–43). Whether there is a hierarchy of labor between the sexes in the sexual act is ambiguous, but Irigaray suggests that a hierarchy is implicit. Martin, in her work Luce Irigaray and the Question of the Divine, clarifies that for Irigaray, “a veiled concept of sexual difference is thus already operative in discourse [including “Marx’s analysis of the value of commodities” (88)]; it has given rise to the possibility of abstract form and value and has informed social orders by providing the conceptual parameters underlying any economic exchange” (88). According to Irigaray, Marx and Engels assign hierarchical sexual difference in the sexual act by allocating activity to man as a subject and reserving passivity for woman as object. This notion of sexual difference as hierarchical fails to resonate with Irigaray’s own conception, which resolutely refutes defining the sexes according to binaries and hierarchies, including in the sexual act.9 If the “first” division of labor in the sex act corresponds to man as activity (form) and woman as passivity (matter), then Irigaray suggests that this justifies, erroneously, other divisions of labor—such as woman in the domestic, and man in public—between the sexes. For this reason, Irigaray stresses that sexual difference and woman’s position as a commodity are inherent in patriarchal economic exchanges and must be taken into account when analyzing Marx’s critique of the commodity in capitalism if it is to prove useful for feminism. Unlike Marx, Engels returns to the patriarchal family and revises the ahistoricity of a division of labor founded on hierarchical sexual difference in The Condition of the Working Class in England. Gareth Stedman Jones suggests that Engels’s conclusion is that if the rising of the wife in modern day capitalist societies “over the husband, as inevitably brought about by the factory system, is inhuman, the pristine rule of the husband over the wife must have been inhuman too” (267 n36). Engels’s point is not necessarily that sexual difference does not entail a division of labor, but that a hierarchy of one sex over the other, which is a 9 See, for example, her work Speculum for a critique of Aristotle for putting forth the same binary of woman as passive in opposition and in relation to man’s activity, and of his metaphysical division between matter and form. Revisiting Irigaray’s Essay “Women on the Market” 431 division of labor, is ethically oppressive. Abolishing private property for Engels is necessary if woman is to be equal to man because he identifies the subordination of woman to man in terms of private property. Engels writes that we must destroy “the twin foundations of hitherto existing marriage—the dependence through private property of the wife upon the husband and of the children upon the parents” (qtd. in Jones 67). For Engels, woman’s role as the womb/home is challenged in modern capitalism.10 Marx and Engels continue to suggest that “the less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labour, in other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labour of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class” (Communist Manifesto 28). With the advance of capitalism, women have increasingly left the home and entered the working world formerly belonging to men. In modern capitalist society, the worker is stripped of his trade and vocation in production and is reduced to factory work at the mercy of machines—but factory work initially frees women from the confines of the home. Engels argues that woman will be emancipated by entering into public industry and the “quality possessed by the individual family of being the economic unit of society [will] be abolished” (The Origin of the Family 83). Women are permitted to work because they are considered cheaper labor than men, a trend that has increasingly continued with globalization and in cementing labels such as the feminization of poverty and the feminization of labor. Marx aptly summarizes the paradoxical situation for women in his time and in our own: However terrible and disgusting the dissolution of the old family ties within the capitalist system may appear, large-scale industry, by assigning an important part in socially organized processes of production, outside the sphere of the domestic economy, to women, young persons and children of both sexes, does nevertheless create a new economic foundation for a higher form of the family and of relations between the sexes. (Capital 620–21) Marx sees the family in terms of historical development, but capitalism re-enslaves the worker: “the worker exists for the process of production, and not the process of production for the worker” (Capital 621). Marx’s quotation typifies the paradoxical position of women in not only confronting patriarchy, but also the capitalist system that initially “frees” her from the home, if only to re-enslave and exploit her as merely an unsexed worker (although for the purposes of lower wages, fewer rights, selling products, and so on, woman remains conveniently sexed). Marxist feminists have addressed the issues of private property. Hartmann notices that “the prediction of nineteenth century Marxists that patriarchy would wither away in the face of capitalism’s need to proletarianize everyone has not come true” (23). In agreement with Hartmann, Irigaray argues that abolishing private property is not enough. A renewed civility between the sexes, as subject to subject, that preexists prior to and after property is necessary (Key Writings 204). 10 Irigaray revisits and rejects much of Freud’s theories on the relation between womb and home in Speculum of the Other Woman. 432 Tegan Zimmerman Irigaray stresses that civility reestablishes a respect for sexual difference and correlates to different “civil rights and duties for men and women … the question of respect between the sexes, of an equitable identity for each sex, is always bound up with problems of money, or at least with the preference for ownership of property over respect for persons” (Thinking the Difference 72). According to Irigaray, patriarchy functions on the lack of civility by men because men are more concerned with wealth, wealth earned from the commodification of women (Thinking the Difference 73). I have been arguing throughout this article that women in their imitations of men and equality to men in terms of civil rights enact a lack of civility against women. Irigaray suggests that mimesis is one strategy women can employ in combating patriarchal hierarchies. She writes that there is perhaps only one “path,” the one historically assigned to the feminine: that of mimicry. One must assume the feminine role deliberately. Which means already to convert a form of subordination into an affirmation, and thus to begin to thwart it. … To play with mimesis is thus, for a woman, to try to recover the place of her exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself to be simply reduced to it. (This Sex Which is Not One 76) The problem is that mimesis has not realized its envisioned potential. Rather than subverting femininity, mimesis has become a tool for postfeminism, reinforcing that which Irigaray believed it would usurp. Finney notes: perhaps the most compelling conception of postfeminism is one that could be understood as dialectical, combining the accoutrements of traditional femininity with masculine privilege … embracing conventional ideals of feminine beauty yet expecting that they as women will have equal access to the same institutions, rights and privileges that their male fellow students do. They reject the label feminist but they have internalized the goals of the ideology. (123) Finney’s work suggests that postfeminism conflates two different strands of feminism: one focusing on economic and political equality, for example the right to vote, and one privileging notions of essentialism, seen for instance in sexual politics of the body and the right to have an abortion or use contraception. Postfeminism suggests that the goals of feminism have been met, and feminism is therefore no longer necessary.11 Informed by Irigaray’s thinking, a deeper analysis into women’s roles in capitalist/ consumer culture, however, paints a very different and unequal picture. Extending Irigaray’s work is necessary if women are to adopt a process for dismantling the postfeminist/capitalist patriarchal economy from the position of woman as both a gender and a class. To reiterate, the exchange of women between men is believed by Irigaray to be based on the familial hierarchy of the sexes and the incest taboo. The exchange of women between men constitutes a monopoly. A man controls the exclusive rights to the commodity with the power to manipulate and 11 This is a simplification of the first and second waves of feminism and by no means suggests they are monolithic movements. Paula Ruth Gilbert references the work of Lori Saint Martin who “introduces her concept of metafeminism as after feminism [après] which goes beyond post: it integrates the past rather than abandoning it; it does not announce the decline of feminism but rather accompanies and envelops it, and it suggests and signifies transformation, participation and metamorphosis” (156). Revisiting Irigaray’s Essay “Women on the Market” 433 negotiate prices and terms of sale. Irigaray refers to this sale as a “ho(m)mo-sexual monopoly” (“Women on the Market” 175) because society functions according only to one sex’s desires and demands—men’s. She argues: “the law that orders our society is the exclusive valorization of men’s needs/desires, of exchanges among men. Passage from nature to culture is hommosexualitie. Not in immediate practice but social. Societies function in mode of semblance. It is played out through the bodies of women” (“Women on the Market” 175). When Irigaray posits that the role of men in exchanging women seemingly excludes woman from this role, this is not necessarily the case. Women need not be excluded per se from being exchangers if they likewise exchange women according to male desires/needs. If women remain commodities, a role man does not instantiate, then a masculine economy can operate successfully, and our capitalist postfeminist era is living proof. Amber E. Kinser elaborates on the complexity of postfeminism and how despite hijacking feminist rhetoric it undermines feminism’s political goals such as a commitment to social justice and gender equality: It is further complicated by a now sophisticated and prolific postfeminist ideology that has co-opted and depoliticized the central tenets of feminism. The only thing postfeminism has to do with authentic feminism, however, is to contradict it at every turn while disguising this agenda, to perpetuate the falsehood that the need for feminist change is outdated. (1) Contrary to other commodities, there is the possibility for woman to occupy two positions simultaneously—that of exchanger and that of commodity/object of exchange. Upon closer inspection, woman as exchanger is a false power, a power that turns women against each other, whereby the exchanger earns capital gains at the cost/exploitation of another woman. Irigaray does not consider women as negotiators of exchange. She suggests that while two differing sexes are necessary for any kind of biological reproduction (including present forms of in-vitro fertilization, surrogate mothers, etc.), the socioeconomic order is homosexual and requires only one sex; it is a monopoly and a monopsony. Irigaray is not advocating a monopoly for women whereby woman would exchange man, nor is she advocating a duopoly/duopsony. A monopoly among women replaces patriarchy with matriarchy, while a duopoly stretches the masculine economy to accommodate women as the other controller/exchanger in the market. A duopoly characterizes the capitalist postfeminist market today; the market, its masculine parameters and the commodification of women, does not change. Postfeminism relies on competitive individualism and eschews collective action. It obscures or makes invisible the many ways in which women are connected, such as transnational projects and organizations, production of goods, labor exploitation, sexual health, education, poverty, spousal abuse, rape, and sexual harassment. Postfeminism denies that women are, globally, politically and economically underprivileged. Just when women’s voices from the margins were beginning to have effect, postfeminists declared that feminism was over. Irigaray fundamentally challenges the very terms of hierarchal exchange based on sexual difference, the ownership of bodies, and the competition of buying and selling human beings associated with postfeminism. She writes that “the exchange of women as 434 Tegan Zimmerman goods accompanies and stimulates exchanges of other ‘wealth’ among groups of men” (“Women on the Market” 175). Marx never equates the exchange of women as commodities with wealth, but he does suggest that “the wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities’” (Capital 125). For Marx, a commodity is an external object, a thing, or ware, but more importantly it in some manner is presupposed to satisfy human needs/desires —for example ranging from the physical necessity to imaginative pleasure. The object in and of itself has no inherent value; it only receives value in relation to human beings. Irigaray reads human beings as male. A woman is and a woman is not a commodity because patriarchal society is not fixed; it is unstable, a mere version of reality. Therefore, women are not commodities in any essential or ontological sense. The categorization is created, maintained, and perpetuated by patriarchy to suit its needs and desires, making woman’s commodification seem permanent. In a postfeminist age, women who willingly take on thing-hood support this perpetuation. Woman and things as objects become equivalences. Irigaray writes that “the commodity takes on indifferently any (given) form of use-value. The price comes not from their natural form, from their bodies, their language, but from the fact that they mirror the need/desire for exchange among men. The commodity does not exist without at least two men to make an exchange” (“Women on the Market” 181, emphasis in original). Man defines woman as capital, as an accumulation of things. In patriarchy, woman is an accomplice. She is an economic unit that can be counted when the king is in his counting house counts his money, and she can now be the queen in her counting house counting all her money. Sexual Difference and Divisions of Labor: Analysis of Value Irigaray pursues, in Marx’s terms, a relation between use-value and accumulation in the social order. For Marx, “the usefulness of a thing makes it a use-value,” but commodities are also bearers of exchange-value (Capital 126). Exchange-value, like use-value, is never static but is in a constant state of flux. For instance, wheat is exchanged for milk one day, and wheat is exchanged for eggs the next. The wheat and milk have no intrinsic or inherent exchange relation; the relation is arbitrary. Marx states, “both are therefore equal to a third thing, which in itself is neither the one nor the other. Each of them, so far as it is exchange-value, must therefore be reducible to this third thing” (Capital 127). The third thing for Marx is value. Marx would have to admit that women as commodities bear no intrinsic relation to value—the value arises from the exchange. If one woman is exchanged for another it is because they have the same value to at least two men—and presumably a woman, like any commodity, could just as easily be exchanged for another commodity such as wheat or milk. Marx argues that “commodities which contain equal quantities of labour, or which can be produced in the same time, have therefore the same value” (Capital 130). Irigaray interprets this as “woman has value on the market by virtue of one single quality: that of being a product of man’s ‘labor’” (“Women on the Market” 177). Irigaray suggests that woman is not a determination of her own self but is the product of man’s Revisiting Irigaray’s Essay “Women on the Market” 435 imagination and his freedom. The lie that patriarchy perpetuates is that women are things and not subjects or equal, though different, human beings.12 Woman-as-commodity is subject, like all commodities, to a use-value and an exchange- value; woman’s body is for private/public use and her exchange as object is social use. Marx, in theorizing the means of circulation in terms of private use and social exchange, is less interested in consumption (use) than he is with the “metamorphosis of commodities” (Capital 198) from exchange to use. Referring to an example of a linen weaver, Marx demonstrates how the metamorphosis (which is selling and buying) takes place; first the linen weaver sells 20 yards of linen for the set price of ₤2. The weaver sells his linen then takes his ₤2 and buys a family Bible. The Bible remains in his house for his family to use and enjoy (Capital 199–200). The metamorphosis of commodities reflects a constant fluctuation and negotiation between buyers’ and sellers’ desires or needs. Irigaray, however, sees one commodity whose value on the market both privately and publicly is a guarantee—woman as commodity ensures that the masculine economy continues to dominate and permeate every aspect of human existence. Irigaray argues that the masculine economy operates on the use-value and exchange-value of women and that when the social is elevated above the natural the commodity becomes a dual entity. The moment the commodity makes the transition from use-value to exchange-value it possesses a phenomenal form not independent of its natural form but distinct from the natural form. The phenomenal form of the commodity depends on another commodity. It cannot exist in isolation, but corresponds “only in its relation to another commodity” (“Women on the Market” 181). As a social form, the phenomenal form functions as if it were real, but this masks or fabricates the material (“Women on the Market”181). The economy maintains a split between subject-object whereby the value of the object or the accumulation of objects signifies a man’s social wealth and, according to Irigaray, excludes women from the process of exchange as exchangers—although as I have argued this is no longer, and perhaps never was, the case.13 Thus, woman’s position as object/subject is paradoxical and contingent. Irigaray, however, does not take into consideration the imperializing aspect of Western feminism enough. Irigaray never asks if her own kind of feminism 12 Marx explains that a commodity has a dual character of use-value and exchange-value (Capital 131). Usevalue is for consumption: “once a commodity has arrived at a situation in which it can serve as a use-value, it falls out of the sphere of exchange into that of consumption” (Capital 198). Exchange-value, on the other hand, pertains to circulation. Labor is also relevant to value and has a dual character: its expression in value, meaning the relation between two things and as the creator of use-values (i.e., things for consumption). Irigaray concludes that the use made of woman is not what matters most, but a comparison of two women to another object such as gold is what matters. Woman as commodity, like all commodities, is a sign of capital. Marx clarifies; “they [owners] can only bring their commodities into relation as values, and therefore as commodities, by bringing them into an opposing relation with some other commodity which serves as the universal equivalent … only the action of society can turn a particular commodity into the universal equivalent … this becomes—money” (Capital 180–81). Marx writes that the value is “signified through its equality with gold, even though this relation to gold exists only in their heads” (Capital 189). Thus, woman is only tenuously a commodity in so far as she exists in men’s, and now women’s heads. In this sense one can formulate how woman is sociohistorically and not essentially a commodity. 13 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason resists making the subaltern in India (the focus of many of her discussions) an object (protection from her own kind), or as assimilated subject, which she reads as an imperialist project (and here we cannot exclude Western feminism) (235, 304). 436 Tegan Zimmerman operates to commodifying/objectifying other women. A more useful analysis of Irigaray’s work, rather than dismissing it as universalist outright, is to understand her writing as speaking relationally to women’s specific encounters with patriarchy, capitalism, postfeminism, and feminism. For example, when Irigaray writes “Commodities, women, are a mirror of value of and for man. In order to serve as such, they give up their bodies to men as the supporting material of specularization, of speculation. They yield to him their natural and social value as a locus of imprints, marks and mirage of his activity” (“Women on the Market” 178, emphasis in original), feminists will want to take up this claim from a specific geopolitical–historical position while still arguing for solidarity. Irigaray also never suggests that all women are passive victims in an oppressive patriarchy, though this is a common but erroneous postfeminist charge against her works, and one that grossly simplifies Irigaray’s writings. The commodification of woman is a social process of man’s labor, and it can be opposed. Admittedly, Irigaray does not give enough critical attention to women’s own complicit and explicit support of capitalist patriarchy. When she firmly writes “man,” “woman” should be provisionally to her claims. For instance consider Irigaray’s inclusion of the following quotation from Marx’s Capital (165): the existence of things qua commodities, and the value relation between the products of labor which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the matter relations arising there-from. [With commodities] it is a definite social relation between men [and woman], that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. (“Women on the Market” 183) Woman as commodity, as a bearer of value, can take on any value whatsoever because the economic social order has no set or intrinsic value at all—the value is only in an ability to carry any value of man’s labor. Woman is some-thing and man is no-thing because man produces things. Irigaray argues that because woman functions as if she has an inherent value or property she is a [heterosexual] fetish commodity of man’s labor and production. Sexual Difference and the Divisions of Labor: Re-Productive Labor and Alienation Marx defines true productive labor as a moment when inner desire corresponds with the external object. There is a certain care put into making the object that escapes the capitalist model of mass production, global consumption, and extensive technology/ mechanization. The problem for feminists, including Irigaray, Linda Nicholson, Selya Benhabib, and Drucilla Cornell, is that Marx’s process describes man as producer and not necessarily nor intentionally woman. Not surprisingly, there are concerns over Marx’s seemingly narrow definition of production. Benhabib and Cornell argue that if feminists are to look to Marxism, then this “requires nothing less than a paradigm shift of the former [Marxism]. We can describe this shift as the ‘displacement of the paradigm of production’” (1). The displacement of production means reorienting anti-capitalist feminism away from an emphasis solely on economic production. Benhabib and Cornell argue that Marx’s insistence on production as the true Revisiting Irigaray’s Essay “Women on the Market” 437 means for human fulfillment precludes women from wholly joining because of their roles in reproduction. Both authors maintain that it is not enough for feminists like Hartmann to argue for a more progressive union between Marxism and feminism or for expanding Marx’s definition of production to include or incorporate women’s reproductive activities such as childbearing or childrearing. A radical rethinking of production itself is necessary. Nicholson similarly notes that Marx’s definition of production is ambiguous and therefore his definition of economy is likewise ambiguous (17–19). In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels state explicitly that there are two aspects to “the production of life, both of one’s own in labour and of fresh life in procreation now appears as a double relationship: on the one hand as a natural, on the other as a social relationship” (41). However, in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels states that the production and reproduction of immediate life has a twofold character: On the one hand, the production of the means of subsistence, of food, clothing and shelter and the tools requisite therefore; on the other, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species … the social institutions under which men of a definite historical epoch and of a definite country live are conditioned by both kinds of production: by the stage of development of labour on the one hand, and the family, on the other. (25–26) Nicholson argues that Marx defines childbearing, childrearing, and all other tasks within the home as part of the non-economic or the superstructural realm (23–24). Marx’s definition of class, defined as a struggle for the means of production and social surplus, ignores familial conflicts because they are considered non-economic and non-public. Young, like Benhabib and Cornell, elaborates that if Marx and Engels’s concept of production has no place for domestic gender relations between men and women, then the theory is inadequate in conceiving production (50). Benhabib and Cornell suggest that feminists, such as MacKinnon, Nicholson, and me, stray from the matter at hand when attempting to reconcile gender with class and adapting and revising Marx’s notion of reproduction. Benhabib and Cornell believe that feminists have not effectively taken issue with Marx’s utopia of labor and its supposed emancipatory power. They pose a difficult question: “What kind of a restructuring of the private/public realms is possible and desirable in our societies such as would further women’s emancipation as well as create a more humane society for all?” (9). Postfeminism suggests that reproduction has not hindered women from being incorporated as reproducers/producers in the capitalist economy. Benhabib and Cornell’s concerns about the primacy of production are important, but they do not necessarily preclude considering woman as a gender and a class, nor do they suggest that redefining production is undesirable or impossible. Redefining Marx’s “communal essence,” as interpreted by Irigaray as an ethical sexual difference referred to as “subject-subject,” has promise (Martin 22). If, as Benhabib and Cornell write, “the norm in the disembedded, capitalist, commodity economy of modern societies is the pursuit of one’s private welfare and profit” (7), then combating patriarchal dichotomies between the private and public and between men and women differently is necessary, as Irigaray’s work on Marx suggests. 438 Tegan Zimmerman The masculine economy, as an attempt to split the private and public, natural and social, woman and man (here we should now add woman and woman), Irigaray argues, functions on men’s desire and the commodification of women. Woman is a product of man’s desire; she is an object of desire, but not a desiring object or subject herself.14 Irigaray refers to the process of producing woman as the productive labor of man’s abstract human labor: “That is, that it [woman, commodity] have no more body, matter, nature, but that it be objectivization, a crystallization as visible object, of man’s activity” (“Women on the Market” 180). The nature of masculine exchange attempts to exclude woman from activity and assign her to passivity and femininity. Woman as womb is associated with nature and her nature is exploited by man’s productive labor; production defines man in a capitalist patriarchal regime. MacKinnon aptly points out that for Marx alienation occurs when man is restricted in his vocation or ability to produce objects (541), but is this now true for women also? Is woman’s alienation fundamentally different from man’s alienation? What is the meaning of reproduction for both sexes in terms of capitalist/postfeminist production? These questions suggest that Marx’s conception of alienation needs to be radically challenged by women if women are the objects men and women now alike are producing, and if woman herself is restricted from an “authentic” production (i.e., non-masculine, non-capitalist). Irigaray makes explicit her position; What makes such an order possible, what assures its foundation, is thus the exchange of women. Patriarchal society presupposes the appropriation of nature by man; the transformation of nature according to “human” criteria, defined by men alone; the submission of nature to labor and technology; the reduction of its material, corporeal, perceptible qualities to man’s practical concrete activity; the equality of women among themselves, the constitution of women as “objects” that emblematize the materialization of relations among men, and so on. (“Women on the Market” 184, emphasis in original) In a similar train of thought, Azizah Al-Hibri argues that patriarchy begins with male technology and a quest for immortality. Al-Hibri believes that in producing a product, man mimes woman’s reproductive process and that this process can “be interpreted as the male’s way of emphasizing his own significance and of forcing himself deeper into the cycle of life” (174). The father (and mother likewise stamping in the name of the father) stamps his product, his family, with his name and thus, “the production of women, signs, and commodities is always referred back to men” (Irigaray, “Women on the Market” 174). The woman is a mirror in which man can/will see himself. The problem is that the material origin of not only woman but human being denies the untenable split between the natural and the social order. Woman as nature, as a base for the social order, has her being tacked onto her, and “the commodity, like the sign, suffers from metaphysical dichotomies. Its value, its truth, lies in the social element. But this social element is added on to its nature, 14 Much of third-wave feminism and postfeminism have falsely claimed to change this; so-called authentic woman’s desire as a desiring subject nevertheless feeds directly back into a patriarchal society operating on heterosexuality, extreme femininity, and increasing women’s visualization/objectification. Revisiting Irigaray’s Essay “Women on the Market” 439 to its matter, and the social subordinates it as a lesser value, indeed as nonvalue” (“Women on the Market” 180). It is essential for feminists to reject a hierarchal division between the natural and the social order if the act of productive labor particularly in relation to woman and materiality is to be rethought. Why should women give up their new role in capitalist production? Is a noncapitalist, non-patriarchal society truly more authentic than a capitalist one? What incentive is there for men and women alike to change the economic order? Here feminists must take seriously the words of Chandra Talpade Mohanty, who writes, if relations of domination and exploitation are defined in terms of binary divisions—groups which dominate and groups which are dominated—surely the implication is that the accession to power as women as a group is sufficient to dismantle the existing organization of relations? But women as a group are not in some sense essentially superior or infallible. (71) Mohanty characterizes today’s situation in a late capitalist/postfeminist patriarchy, whereby women for the most part uphold the status quo rather than making fundamental changes. Paradoxically, at the same time, if women are no longer defined as a universal category, group, or referent, why should women care about other women, as Irigaray would argue, qua women? The body, or some form of materiality, for Irigaray is one example of how a patriarchal society connects women. She argues that the body has two modes: the natural body and the social body. Irigaray refers to this gap between the natural and social as metaphysical. The social order becomes a superstructure supported by the material (body–woman) but acting and operating above the material as if it could subsist independently (mind–man). This might suggest why men, instead of or in conjunction with, women are not as often traded like objects. Irigaray, like Marx, identifies woman with materialism (mater referring to the Latin for mother). Irigaray writes, “Women’s bodies through their use, consumption and circulation, provide the condition of making social and cultural life possible although they remain an unknown ‘infrastructure’ of the elaboration of that social life and culture” (“Women on the Market” 174). The question remains: why is woman more her body than man? Part of the reason why woman is equated with her body is that “as mother, woman remains on the side of (re)productive nature and because of this, man can never fully transcend his relation to the ‘natural’” (“Women on the Market” 184, emphasis in original). A relation to the maternal body, because we are all born by a mother, implies that neither man nor woman is fully disembodied in the social order. Woman wavers between nature and the social because her body provides potential to be a mother. But, her body’s role in reproduction is ambiguous. She need not be a mother biologically, and motherhood should not determine one sex as more ontologically natural and inferior: man’s body is equally, in its differences, ambiguous. Irigaray’s politics of sexual difference ultimately tries to make sense of the body as material, and gender as fundamentally a part of that material, without separating the two into distinct spheres or conflating the two into one and the same.15 15 For two nuanced and excellent discussions of Irigaray’s essentialist position see Alison Stone’s article “From Political to Realist Essentialism: Rereading Luce Irigaray,” and Naomi Schor’s “The Essentialism Which Is Not One: Coming to Grips with Irigaray.” 440 Tegan Zimmerman The problem with a patriarchal economy for Irigaray is that it denies ambiguity and perpetuates the notion that a woman corresponds to her womb/home and the private property of man. Woman’s reproductive role in production is denied so that man can prevail; as Irigaray argues, “This means that mothers, reproductive instruments marked with the name of the father and enclosed in his house must be private property, excluded from exchange” (“Women on the Market” 184). Irigaray argues that the incest taboo prohibits productive nature for exchange. If women as mothers were considered as productive nature it would imply a natural value and a use-value, and the masculine economy would be threatened because commodities supposedly do not possess a natural value, only a social one. Irigaray further suggests that while “mothers are essential to its (re) production (particularly inasmuch as they are [re]productive of children of the labor force: through maternity, child-rearing, and domestic maintenance in general. Their responsibility is to maintain the social order without intervening so as to change it” (“Women on the Market” 184). Irigaray aptly criticizes the postfeminist situation today. Her criticisms align with the example provided earlier in relation to Holly Madison’s role in Playboy which is “to maintain the social order without intervening so as to cha[lle]nge it” (“Women on the Market” 185). With the advent of postfeminism it is commonly assumed that the feminist goals women have worked for/toward have been reached (e.g., equal pay, education, voting, and so on), but while these gains are often described as empowering for women, in reality they only empower a capitalist/anti-feminist patriarchal society. This is perhaps most evident in the now well-known term “having it all,” which designates a working mother who dedicates all her time to her job and perfect children while managing to cook meals, clean (or hire a woman at a bargain cost to do this for her), and look fabulous (a dedicated reproducer-producer-consumer), who is heralded or lauded by society. Thus woman as the site for man to mark himself continually bears several invisible and visible markings by her master, be it God, father, husband, boss, or customer. Irigaray argues that the definition of woman as mother “is a social role imposed on women” (“Women on the Market” 185) and that social roles for women—mother, virgin, and prostitute—are so essentially ingrained in a patriarchal society that all value is defined in masculine terms.16 These roles for women fulfill the market’s need/desire of the commodity in use-value, exchange-value, and usage that is exchanged. Therefore, The characteristics of (so-called) feminine sexuality derive from them: the valorisation of reproduction and nursing: faithfulness; modesty, ignorance of and even lack of interest in sexual pleasure; a passive acceptance of men’s “activity”; seductiveness, in order to arouse the consumers’ desire while offering herself as its material support without getting pleasure herself. (185) Feminine sexuality, a defining characteristic of the postfeminist era, is a sign of the social order of commodities, and any “natural” desire remains inaccessible: “The 16 Postfeminism exaggerates these roles to the extent that to be a woman is to be a mother, virgin, and prostitute simultaneously. Revisiting Irigaray’s Essay “Women on the Market” 441 ‘natural’— physiological and organic nature, and so on—that are equally ambiguous” (Irigaray, “Women on the Market” 186). The ambiguity of nature and the material body suggests that a social reading is likewise ambiguous, and woman as commodity has no fixed grasp or hold except in its own social patriarchal realm. A woman becomes a commodity—she is not born one. If man marks his transformation from the natural into the social through production then woman’s event only occurs or happens in that she functions as a commodity, as private property, or now as producer of patriarchal values in a capitalist society. Woman’s alienation, as I have pointed out, however, is never taken into consideration in this process and any differences between individual women (e.g., class, race, sexuality, religion) become erased by the universal woman, which guarantees circulation in relation to a general equivalent: this time not Marx’s money, but the male sex. Irigaray writes, “for, uprooted from their ‘nature,’ they [women] no longer relate to each other except in terms of what they represent in men’s desire (which is a constantly changing value; a whim), and according to the ‘forms’ that this imposes upon them” (“Women on the Market” 186). Irigaray’s work inspires us to ask what a transformation of the natural into the social would look like if woman did not constitute postfeminist producers, private property, and commodities? How can woman begin to thwart the established symbolic order? Conclusion This article puts forth a feminist materialist perspective by developing Irigaray’s notion of sexual difference in relation to Marx’s analysis of the commodity and a division of labor in capitalism. By recuperating Irigaray’s essay “Women on the Market” and her conception of woman as a commodity, I explicated the process by which this occurs in a postfeminist capitalist patriarchy, updating Irigaray’s claims about men as sole exchangers. We must now include the roles of women as producers, reproducers, and consumers in perpetuating capitalist patriarchy. A reengagement with Irigaray’s essay on Marx confronts postfeminist definitions of equality and devises strategies for combating postfeminist capitalism. Recognizing capitalism and patriarchy not as two separate systems, but as intersecting to produce both late capitalism and postfeminism, one sees how the two function together to conceal the structural subordination of women. These modes of capitalist patriarchy operate according to two hierarchies simultaneously: gender and class (women as opposed to and in relation to man, which is essentially a difference in class: proletariat and the bourgeoisie). In a masculine economy, woman is a commodity, not by any natural or essential property—for example her material body—but by social constructions of reproduction, production, use, exchange, and alienation. Irigaray’s essay requires nothing less than for feminists to challenge postfeminist claims for equality and woman’s position as commodity, and to reconsider collective action, relational systems of generosity, coresponsibility, cooperation, and ethical sexual difference as viable alternatives to capitalist patriarchy. 442 Tegan Zimmerman Works Cited Adriaens, Fien. “Post Feminism in Popular Culture: A Potential for Critical Resistance?” Politics and Culture 4 (9 Nov. 2009). Web. 20 Sep. 2011. 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