Dr. Johanna Oksala is Arthur J. Schmitt Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. Her areas of expertise are political philosophy, feminist philosophy, environmental philosophy, Foucault, and phenomenology. Oksala is the author of five monographs and over fifty refereed journal articles and book chapters in her areas of expertise. Her work has been translated into ten languages. Her books include Foucault on Freedom (Cambridge UP, 2005), Foucault Politics, and Violence(Northwestern UP, 2012), and Feminist Experiences (Northwestern UP, 2016).

Abstract:

Can Gender Subordination be Eliminated in Capitalism? analyzes the functional role of generational reproduction in capitalism. I start from the provocative claim forwarded by some post-structuralist thinkers that the global rise of neoliberalism as the leading political and economic paradigm has spelled the end of Marxist-feminism by showing that men and women can be rendered interchangeable cogs in the capitalist machinery.  I will respond by insisting that feminists still need to pose the definitive Marxist-feminist question on the connection between capitalism and gender subordination. While neoliberalism and the rapid development of biotechnology have reconfigured the context for investigating this question, its centrality for feminist theory has not been eradicated. On the contrary, it is vital that we pose it in renewed forms today.

The argument moves from empirical facts to theoretical thought experiments. I begin by explicating the liberal position that, rather than being oppressive, capitalism is in fact emancipatory for women. I will outline the theoretical underpinnings of the liberal position through Ann. E. Cudd’s work before subjecting it to a Marxist-feminist critique. I then make the argument that the question whether capitalism is emancipatory for women can ultimately only be answered negatively if it is argued for theoretically. I will follow those Marxist-feminists, such as Lisa Vogel, who have attempted to show that gender oppression stems necessarily from the economic logic of the capitalist mode of production due to the indispensability of women’s reproductive labor for capitalist accumulation. To show that the economic logic of capitalism can explain something significant about gender oppression in capitalist societies, the question about the relationship between capitalism and gender oppression has to be posed as a philosophical, and not merely as an empirical, question. I will show, with the help of such a philosophical investigation, that the entwinement of capitalism and gender oppression is structurally indispensable for capitalism for reasons related specifically to generational reproduction.