-Addison Turner

Preface

I’ve started a few different writing projects this year, but I kept running into the same problem: I would start from a focused topic and watch it unravel through numerous connections, producing loose ends before anything reached a sharable state. I’ve been more determined to make these particular thoughts presentable, even if they’re unfinished, in part to respond to allegations that Implacable Books is “transphobic.” This is despite numerous people of various ages and walks of life using the space to get material, social, and intellectual needs and desires met, and despite the growing community of people who experience it as a safe space and something like an intellectual public living room.

To be clear, I do not think the fact that we’re doing good work is a real defense in itself, just a noteworthy fact. Practical efficacy is not a defense against reactionary politics. Keeping politics in command is critical, and strengthening one political line or another can determine the fate of a social movement. What follows is therefore an opening into how I am presently thinking through sex and gender personally and, by extension, how some of these questions are being thought through politically at Implacable Books.

I’m using prolegomena in the title because the word refers to preliminary remarks or arguments that prepare the ground for more developed theoretical work. The point here is to work through some of the problems I think have to be confronted before firmer conclusions can be reached, while being clear about what remains unfinished or unproven. If theory and words like prolegomena are unfamiliar to you, there’s nothing wrong with that, but we need to get serious about thinking again and about what rigor actually requires of us. Especially coming from a people whose literacy was criminalized under slavery and from revolutionary traditions in which people have taught themselves to read and learned how to study under conditions of imprisonment, struggling through difficult texts word by word and page by page with a dictionary and thesaurus at hand. We need to care enough to struggle intellectually, because so much depends on it. Accessibility cannot mean abandoning the theoretical labor necessary to understand the world we are trying to change.

Sanyika Shakur, who bestowed Russell “Maroon” Shoatz with the nickname “The Implacable,” describes this problem beautifully in reflecting on his own political development in prison. When confronted with the fact that he could barely read or write, he says that he “had to face that, had to confront that” rather than deny it, and that the people around him who were committed to intellectual growth would not let him simply fake his way through. More importantly, he distinguishes learning to read from learning to study. At first, he says, “i was reading the material and emotionally attaching myself to what i could overstand” (Shakur, 2013). He still thought revolution was principally physical violence and that liberation required little more than gathering enough people together to fight. What he did not yet understand was capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, self-determination, socialism, or even adequately what he was trying “to get free from, and, further, to get free to.” His conclusion is the point I want to emphasize: “i didn’t begin to overstand what was really going on until i learned how to study and then attained the material that corresponded with my reality” (Shakur, 2013). 

The point of using theoretical language is to develop concepts adequate to the reality we are trying to understand and transform. Unfamiliar concepts should be explained, but difficult ones also have to be struggled through, with the possibility always open that the categories we began with will prove inadequate. If we are serious about liberation, we have to be serious enough to study not simply to know what we’re talking about, nor merely to understand or overstand, but to grasp what it is that we’re dealing with concretely in thought. Only what is grasped in this sense can become the basis for a material force capable of changing reality.

Part I

The concrete problem that set this particular process of study in motion was the concept of “cis privilege.” Initially I felt frustrated with what seemed to me to be a dangerous implication of the concept: that it misconstrues women’s position within the patriarchal power structure, particularly in ways that can facilitate further violence against them. My starting point was an understanding of “woman” as the social designation of the subordinate position within that structure. To speak of the “privilege” of someone who is “comfortable identifying with” a subordinate class position presents a contradiction and risks flattening the poles of a social relation in which wealth and power accumulate at one end and misery at the other. Secondly, the concept risks sliding from the observation that some female people do not contest their classification as women to the unwarranted assumption that they therefore stand in an uncomplicated or privileged relation to the feminine social role they are disciplined to perform. This is the unwarranted assumption that I fear enables further violence against women in the name of “inclusivity,” a concept that becomes theoretically vacant when rendered as a universal liberal virtue independent of the material relations within which inclusion and exclusion acquire their political meaning. One of the first thoughts I had as I processed my frustration was the example of racism and the correct (in my opinion) conclusion that Black people cannot be racist as such because we lack the structural power to do so.

I soon noticed, however, that what initially seemed like a relatively straightforward structural argument was opening onto much more difficult questions about social class, determination, ideology, and abstraction. If a concrete person is overdetermined by several relations at once, we have to explain when one of those relations can legitimately be isolated as an object of analysis and political organization without mistaking the abstraction for the whole person. If gender classification can materially determine how someone is perceived and treated, we have to explain whether that efficacy constitutes patriarchal class position or instead represents, organizes, polices, and reproduces a class relation constituted at another level. And if we say that sex is determinant of patriarchal class position, we have to explain how historically specific social relations make sexual difference determinant without treating patriarchy as the natural or inevitable expression of biology.

Fortunately, I had already begun working through some of the abstract ontological and epistemological problems that will have to be resolved to make the claims developed here more fully intelligible. This shorter piece, therefore, does not pretend to have resolved all of the problems that are discussed within it. Some of my strongest claims are deliberately presented as hypotheses: propositions whose implications I want to follow here but whose theoretical foundations and limits will have to be more rigorously tested in my longer, forthcoming work.

For now, I want to present these unfolding thoughts to demonstrate and disclose something of both the social process under investigation and the thought process through which I am attempting to understand it, for anyone who is interested in similar problems. These are problems that cannot be settled mechanically through anatomy, self-identification, or social perception considered in isolation, or the fact that one group experiences one or another form of suffering. They require us to ask what material social relation we are actually analyzing, what positions that relation constitutes, how concrete people are situated within it, and what political forms of organization follow from that analysis. The stakes are too high to go over this issue lightly or to immediately descend into label-mongering. So here we go…

If we accept that Black people can’t be racist because we define racism as “prejudice + systemic power,” it follows, if we understand oppression in the structural sense, that women can’t oppress another group as a class vis-à-vis the patriarchal power structure. When women occupy positions of relative dominance along axes of race or nation (for instance), that is different from women occupying a position of privilege within a system that, along the axis of sex, by definition subordinates their bodies and labor and structurally inhibits their self-determination both as a class and as individuals.

Before we get carried away, I want to pinpoint that the claim above is simply that women cannot exercise patriarchal class power as the dominant class. It remains for us to establish which social relations constitute the patriarchal classes and trace the development of their struggle across time and space. That will require a more thoroughgoing ontological, epistemological, and historical analysis that I am developing simultaneously elsewhere. I intend to present that working framework here at the minimum level required to get across some introductory points and keep conversation going. 

For now, we need not assume that social position can simply be read directly from biology, nor need we grant sovereign power over material reality to self-identification and direct experience. We can begin instead from the fact that concrete reality is complex and overdetermined (Althusser, 1969, pp. 99–101). In other words, a concrete individual can be constituted through and occupy several social relations at once, sometimes in contradictory ways, without every one of those relations being equally determinant in every context. No single determination (species, nation, ancestry, sex, etc.) exhausts the concrete individual, nor does the way a person understands or identifies themselves exhaust their concrete reality. At the same time, the determinations implicated within a particular material-historical conjuncture do not all contribute equally to its concrete reality.

The questions that follow are which material social relation we are analyzing, what positions that relation constitutes, and which determination becomes determinant within that relation. Within such a framework, to say that sex is determinant within the patriarchal relation is a claim about structural position, not a reduction of the concrete person to sex or a denial of the reality and efficacy of other determinations. Nor does it require, in theory, that every member of a sex class experience patriarchy in the same way. Consider Lenin’s insistence that Social Democracy “must postulate the division of nations into oppressor and oppressed as basic, significant and inevitable under imperialism” (Lenin, 1916/1964, p. 150). To identify the global contradiction between oppressor and oppressed nations was not a lapse into metaphysics, nor did it require him to erase the class divisions, political contradictions, or divergent experiences internal to those nations. Class contradictions within nations did not negate the reality of national oppression between nations, nor the fact that the national liberation of oppressed nations could become a cutting edge of the class struggle itself. Likewise, the claim that sex is determinant within the patriarchal relation leaves substantial room for diverse experiences and for the relative autonomy and efficacy of other determinations. What it does require, however, is that we demonstrate why sex becomes socially determinant within this historically constituted relation in the first place.

I remember I was in elementary school when a teacher first introduced us to the idea that rape is about power rather than sex or sexual gratification as such. That notion formed in my mind an image of a psychologically sick individual, who, for some unfathomable reason, was bent on exercising individual power over another person. It mostly made sense to me, but it wasn’t until I read Against Our Will by Susan Brownmiller that I came to more fully understand the power exercised through rape as a collective power aggrandized to men as a class and reinforced by each individual instance of rape instead of just as an individual power trip. This act of male power is unlike, in significant ways, the means of bourgeois power: its violence is enacted within and felt inside the very body of the subordinate subject and occurs at unfathomable rates across classes, nations, cultural and religious contexts, and political economies. The punishment doesn’t have to happen to every woman for the threat of punishment to become a material condition organizing women as a class. The ever-present possibility of male sexual violence disciplines women who are never actually raped as well as women who are. Brownmiller’s famous formulation is that rape functions as a “conscious process of intimidation” through which women as a class are maintained “in a state of fear” and through which they learn to restrict and modify their own conduct (behavior, dress, decision-making) in anticipation of male violence (Brownmiller, 1975, p. 15). 

The process through which female people are positioned within a subordinated sex-class relation begins even before they are born, while their conditioning for that position begins from the earliest moments of social life. Their very reproductive anatomy (let alone their unpaid reproductive labor) becomes part of the material conditions of social reproduction that imperialist patriarchy governs and controls. Patriarchy does not follow naturally from reproductive anatomy, nor does sexual dimorphism contain within itself a necessary social hierarchy. Quite the opposite. The fact that sexual difference has to be socially organized, reproduced, represented, and enforced is precisely what I intend to demonstrate. Historically constituted social relations can organize real material differences in ways that make those differences socially consequential within particular concrete social formations.

Within this system, male people are expected to assume the socially defined role of “men,” and female people the socially defined role of “women,” with punishment waiting for anybody who steps out of or defies their expected role. To name just a few examples, women can be punished for refusing femininity by refusing to shave, raising their voice to men, or, until relatively recently, wearing pants or having a credit card. Meanwhile, men can be punished for acting, looking, or dressing “feminine.” But if we stop at the observation that both male and female people can be punished for violating gender roles, we have not yet explained the social relation those roles reproduce. The fact of punishment alone does not tell us what structural position the person being punished occupies within that relation. Girls are “kept in line” in order to condition them for and reproduce the subordinated position from which their bodies and labor can be exploited. Boys are also “kept in line,” but their discipline conditions them for and reproduces the other pole of that relation: the position to which socio-economic power disproportionately accrues.

You may have noticed that I have not yet demonstrated whether, or to what degree, sex, socially constructed gender, individually determined identity, or other factors constitute the patriarchal classes we are describing. I will refer again to the ontological and epistemological framework I am developing elsewhere and provide the minimum required here to present something of a hypothesis, develop the concepts necessary to test it, and keep the thought process moving constructively. 

For now, I want to keep several things analytically distinct that are otherwise liable, and often seem, to collapse into one another: (1) sexual difference and the reproductive asymmetry through which gestation and birth are borne by female bodies, or materially existing reproductive organization; (2) the historically constituted social relations that seize upon those differences and make them socially determinant; (3) the structural positions produced and reproduced through those relations; (4) gender as the ideological and social construction through which those relations can be represented, lived, enforced, and reproduced; and (5) the concrete individuals in whom these and other determinations are overdetermined.

The hypothesis I am developing is that, under our current historical conditions, sex constitutes the patriarchal class relation, while gender (although materially efficacious) holistically reproduces the resulting class positions of the political economy of patriarchy. Patriarchy historically organizes material relations concerning reproduction, sexuality, pregnancy, birth, kinship, domestic and subsistence labor, inheritance, and ultimately, control over the reproductive asymmetry through which gestation and birth are borne by women. Sexual difference becomes socially determinant through these historically specific material relations, rather than “biologically determining” any particular social hierarchy that could theoretically follow.

To clarify this principle and further establish the distance between this position and biological determinism, consider the proposition that under the system of chattel slavery in the United States, the color of a person’s skin could become determinant of their class position. Or consider Frantz Fanon’s formulation of the colonial relation: “The cause is effect: You are rich because you are white, and you are white because you are rich.” It occurs in the opening chapter, “On Violence,” where Fanon argues that in the colonial situation race and economic position are so structurally fused that the conventional Marxist distinction between economic base and ideological/political superstructure has to be “stretched” (Fanon, 2004, p. 5). I would go a little further and say that the framework does not necessarily need to be stretched so much as concretely applied to a particular social formation: Algeria under colonialism or the United States South in 1860. The point is simply that ancestry, phenotype, and something like the color of one’s skin can, under particular historical circumstances, become determinant of one’s class position. 

There is no problem in recognizing that ancestry, phenotype, and other material differences exist, nor in recognizing that under particular historical conditions they can become socially determinant. The problem begins when the historically constituted relation is read backward into the material difference itself, so that the social position produced through that relation appears to follow naturally from biology. Bio-essentialism (falsely) tells us that Black people are naturally fitted for a subordinate social position because of their ancestry, phenotype, and supposedly inherited characteristics. In this way, the characteristics supposedly appropriate to an oppressed population’s historically produced position are projected backward onto that population as innate qualities that explain and justify why they occupy that position in the first place. The effect is to transform a historically constituted relation of domination into the apparent expression of biological destiny.

Our anti-bio-essentialism therefore leaves room for material difference, including its capacity to become socially determinant. What it rejects is the proposition that the social relation is contained within the material difference itself. Skin color does not produce slavery or colonialism, and ancestry does not inevitably structure racial antagonism into social formations. Historically specific social relations organize real differences in such a way that those differences acquire a particular social efficacy and can become determinants of structural position. Under another set of historical conditions, those same differences need not organize an antagonistic class relation at all.

The same principle is being applied here with respect to sexual difference. Recognizing that female reproductive anatomy materially exists and has been made socially determinant within particular historical relations is not the same as saying that the social position of women follows naturally or necessarily from female biology. Sexual difference is not itself pregnant with patriarchy or gender roles any more than diverse ancestry contains slavery or colonialism within itself. The hypothesis being developed here is that historically specific relations concerning reproduction, sexuality, kinship, labor, inheritance, and control over reproductive capacity organize sexual difference into an antagonistic relation and reproduce the resulting structural positions. To say that sex becomes determinant of class position within patriarchy is therefore to identify the historically specific social relations through which, I am proposing, that difference has been made determinant. Nothing in that claim assigns biological necessity to what male and female people are capable of, the way they “naturally are,” what social roles they should perform, or what relations they should have with one another. 

This raises an important theoretical problem. If gender and/or race are ideological and socially constructed, that does not make them immaterial or incapable of producing material effects. Ideology can be materially efficacious. Gender classification can affect how concrete people are perceived and treated, where they can go, what is expected of them, what forms of violence they encounter, and how they understand and conduct themselves. In other words, ideology can be concretized in material practices, institutions, and apparatuses. But material efficacy alone does not settle what constitutes the patriarchal classes. Gender may exercise real material effects while functioning principally to represent, organize, police, and reproduce a class relation constituted at another level (Althusser, 1971, pp. 165–166). Whether its efficacy becomes constitutive of class position is something that still has to be demonstrated. 

By now, we should be able to consider two contrary propositions without necessarily accusing either position of biological essentialism, idealism, or otherwise deciding the question in advance. Those propositions are that (1) “biological sex is constitutive of one’s class position within social formations in which patriarchal social relations predominate” and that (2) “gender classification, social perception, and/or identity become constitutive of one’s class position within those same formations.” Having distinguished material efficacy from class constitution, both propositions can become objects of theoretical investigation rather than moral litmus tests. However, one would still need to explain whether, and in what sense, ideology can possess material efficacy without thereby constituting the class relation through which it operates, and whether sex becomes determinant within patriarchy because historically specific relations of social reproduction organize sexual difference into structural positions. For now, the former is a question that remains to be worked through, while the latter is the hypothesis we are working with.

Part II

Returning now to the notion of “cis privilege” that provided the emotional impetus for this thought process, we can begin by asking more precisely what kind of concept it is and what kind of knowledge it is capable of producing about the concrete social formations to which it refers. The fact that the concept of “cis privilege” refers to real experiences or observable differences between groups is not enough. In fact, we should expect ideological notions to refer to real phenomena and possess real practical efficacy without necessarily producing adequate knowledge of the social relations through which those phenomena are produced (Althusser, 1969, pp. 231–234). What matters, then, is whether “cis privilege” allows us to apprehend those relations concretely. If it instead abstracts an immediately observable difference in experience from the structured whole that gives that difference its social meaning, then the concept risks mistaking an effect of the relation for knowledge of the relation itself. 

If the latter is the case, then to speak loosely of the “privilege” of “cis women,” especially as though it were structurally analogous to male privilege, risks producing an inversion of the actual material relation. The problem arises through an empiricist error when a relative advantage observable between concrete individuals or populations is treated as though it necessarily expresses the positions those individuals occupy within the social relation under investigation. The overdetermination of concrete reality should not be misconstrued in a way that obscures or reverses a material system of power in which female people are subordinated on the basis of sex. The existence of a particular advantage enjoyed by one concrete person relative to another does not, by itself, tell us the structure of that advantage or the positions those people occupy within the social relation under investigation.

Consider, by analogy, an enslaved Afrikan who, under particular circumstances, has access to certain forms of material security that a fugitive or Maroon, forced to survive beyond the protections of the established social order, does not. It would be perfectly possible for the enslaved person to possess some immediate advantage relative to the Maroon in a particular circumstance: more predictable access to food or shelter, for example, or protection from certain dangers encountered outside the plantation. But it would fundamentally mischaracterize the relation to abstract those advantages from the system that produces them and describe the enslaved condition itself in terms of “privilege.” The apparent protection is paternalistic. Whatever security it provides exists within, and is conditional upon, the very relation of domination through which the enslaved person is subordinated.

I am proposing that we interrogate “cis privilege” in the same way. Female people who conform to, identify with, or are readily recognized within the social category “woman” may under particular circumstances receive forms of recognition, accommodation, or even paternalistic protection that another person does not. I do not need to deny that these differences can be real or materially consequential, but describing them as “privilege” requires abstracting those advantages from the patriarchal relation that organizes them. The theoretical problem is whether that abstraction clarifies the relation or instead redescribes the position of the subordinated sex class itself as “privileged.”

In other words, much of what appears as an advantage may be inseparable from successful incorporation into the subordinated role itself. Being recognized as the kind of woman patriarchy expects a woman to be can make interactions with those of the dominant class, men, easier while simultaneously marking successful integration into a relation of subordination. If the protection or recognition being described is conditional upon occupying, conforming to, or being intelligible within the position patriarchy has organized for women, then calling that protection “privilege” risks mistaking one of the ways a system manages its subordinated class for evidence that the subordinated class occupies a corresponding position of structural dominance.

This kind of ideological inversion appears repeatedly in the justification of relations of domination and can function to counter revolutionary impulses against them. Slavery and American citizenship have been represented as “good” for Black people on the grounds that we would otherwise be unproductive or “uncivilized.” Patriarchy is represented as “good for women” because women supposedly do not have to perform the most dangerous jobs or fight in wars. Capitalism is represented as “good for workers” because workers do not have to assume the risks associated with business or property ownership. In each case, a condition produced within the relation of domination is abstracted from that relation and returned to the subordinated class ideologically as a benefit conferred upon them by the system that marks them for exploitation from birth to death.

Returning now to our claim that a hierarchy based on sex is not the inevitable outcome of sexual difference, we can say that once such a hierarchy has been historically constituted, sexual difference can become determinant of structural position through the material relations of social reproduction. According to this claim, sex need not appear as the immediately decisive determination in every institution, practice, or encounter through which patriarchy is reproduced. The mediations through which patriarchal relations are socially apprehended and enacted possess their own material efficacy and relative autonomy, and in particular circumstances any one of these may become immediately decisive in determining how a concrete person is treated, as well as how they perceive and identify themselves within the structure. 

Here Althusser’s concept of determination “in the last instance” may help us state the problem more precisely (Althusser, 1969, p. 113). Sex can constitute the patriarchal classes without mechanically or directly determining every concrete effect of patriarchy. The hypothesis is rather that the relatively autonomous practices through which patriarchy is lived and reproduced are themselves articulated within a structured whole whose class relation is, in the last instance, determined by the historical organization of sexual difference through relations of social reproduction. Gender can therefore be genuinely determinant at one level, for example, by determining how a person is perceived, classified, punished, rewarded, or permitted to move through a particular institution, without necessarily being what determines their class position in the last instance. It is worth noting, however, that establishing what constitutes class position, and by what criteria we can identify it, remains one of the necessary theoretical tasks that will follow these prolegomena.

This is, however, a hypothesis rather than something established merely by invoking Althusser. The counter-proposition remains open: perhaps the material efficacy and relative autonomy of gender classification become sufficiently constitutive that patriarchal class position cannot finally be referred back to sex in this way. My forthcoming work will have to demonstrate whether the different instances of patriarchy are in fact articulated around a sex-class relation, rather than assuming that determination by sex in the organization of reproduction automatically makes sex determinant everywhere else. For now, the distinction allows us to ask: does being punished through the gendered mechanisms of a hierarchy necessarily tell us which class position a person occupies within that hierarchy? My answer is no.

Consider John Brown. He and many other white men and women were killed, imprisoned, attacked, or otherwise punished for defying their assigned “race role,” but their treatment was rooted in a system organized around the oppression of the Afrikan slave class as such. In a particular encounter, Brown’s abolitionism, his association with enslaved Afrikans, his violation of the conduct expected of a white man, or ultimately his armed attack on the slave system could become the immediately decisive determination of what happened to him. But the empirical similarity between John Brown’s treatment and Nat Turner’s did not make their treatment structurally equivalent.

This helps illustrate what I mean by determination in the last instance (see Althusser, 1969, pp. 111–113). The immediate determination of how a concrete person is treated need not be identical to the determination of their structural position within the social relation in which that treatment gains its particular political content. Brown could be punished precisely because he violated the ideological and political requirements of the racial hierarchy, while the system within which that punishment became intelligible remained organized, in the last instance, around the exploitation and reproduction of the Afrikan slave class. His persecution and the oppression of enslaved Afrikans can therefore be compared in order to understand how the racial system operated, but they cannot be structurally equated. They acquire different structural meanings because Brown and the enslaved Afrikan occupied different positions within the same system.

The analogy has certain limits if its role here is misunderstood. It helps clarify the kind of structural distinction that has to be made, but it does not, on its own, tell us where every group is situated within the sex/gender system in particular. Nor does the analogy prove that sex is determinant of patriarchal class position in the last instance; that remains part of the hypothesis we are working through. The point here is that being punished for violating the rules through which a hierarchy organizes and polices its positions is not the same thing as occupying the subordinated class position that hierarchy reproduces. 

The reason this is important is that it exposes the limits of empiricist comparison as a method of determining structural position and, critically, political strategy. One place this methodological problem manifests politically is in the tendency to reduce conflicts between female autonomy and demands advanced in the name of trans inclusion to a comparison of suffering. Being pro-female is not the same thing as being anti-trans, but where particular political demands advanced in the name of trans inclusion materially come into conflict with forms of female autonomy, the resulting contradiction can easily appear as a simple struggle between female people and trans people. From there, the argument quickly devolves into an oppression Olympics over “who has it worse,” as though establishing which population experiences greater suffering would tell us what material relations are actually at work or what political conclusion follows from them. It does not. The reality, severity, or even specifically political character of someone’s persecution cannot, by itself, tell us what structural position they occupy or how they are situated within the contradictions of the hierarchy in question. The struggle has never been about comparing quantities of suffering but about identifying the social relation, the positions it constitutes, the contradictions at work in the concrete conflict, and the political direction their resolution demands within that structured whole.

Part III

Here I begin to approach another thought that frustrates me, because the question of structural position leads directly into the question of political autonomy. If the hypothesis developed above is correct, another implication follows that should sound resounding alarm bells to anyone awake to the first principles of class struggle and its history when the autonomy of female people is denied, including their capacity to independently investigate, theorize, and organize around the material conditions of their own oppression. It’s not lost on me that female-only spaces have historically been treated as threats and subjected to forms of repression, particularly where women’s separation has facilitated autonomous organization. The threat to patriarchy posed by women coming together as women is precisely the possibility that they might collectively seize control of the means of reproduction, their own bodies, and overturn the existing order. Female autonomy represents the possibility of women organizing independently of the class whose social power depends, in part, upon controlling their reproductive and social labor. My hypothesis includes the proposition that female people occupy a structural position that generates particular interests, and autonomous organization provides a material form through which those interests can become the conscious, collective, and politically actionable domain of women. This doesn’t necessarily mean that female-only spaces are necessary, legitimate, or appropriate in all places at all times, but it does suggest, as I argued before, that framing female-only spaces as inherently oppressive and therefore necessary targets of repression abstracts the formal act of exclusion from the material relation that determines its political character.

This is why attacks on female-only spaces have to be understood in relation to the material conditions to which those spaces respond and the political function they serve. Where female-only organization or separation exists specifically because female people are subjected to particular forms of domination on the basis of sex, simply describing the exclusion of male people as “oppression” already abstracts from the social relation that made the space necessary in the first place.

Here one may pose what one might call the “challenge of practical application,” along with the accusation that we are “obsessed with genitalia.” Concrete classification of individuals need not occur through direct knowledge of reproductive anatomy for us to maintain the hypothesis that the social position “woman” is historically organized around the female sex class. We can distinguish here between the structural organization of the category and the proximate social mechanisms through which concrete individuals are classified. In everyday life, people are perceived, classified, and treated through socially intelligible mechanisms of classification. These mechanisms possess their own material efficacy and relative autonomy; they can determine how a concrete person is perceived, classified, and treated across particular institutions and even across extended periods of social life without that fact alone settling what constitutes patriarchal class position in the last instance (Althusser, 1969, pp. 111–113; Althusser, 1971, pp. 165–166).

There is nothing particularly novel about this kind of distinction. Generations of revolutionaries have had to theorize concrete class positions, interests, contradictions, and political strategy without simply arranging populations according to empirical “levels of pain or suffering.” Think of Mao’s analysis of the different classes and strata within Chinese society: social investigation was not reducible to determining empirically who suffered most, but what position different classes and strata occupied within the concrete social formation, what interests were generated by those positions, which forces could be won as allies, which would vacillate or oppose the revolution, and which class was capable of leading it (Mao Tse-tung, 1965). His later theorization of “contradictions among the people” similarly required determining concretely who constituted “the people” within a particular historical stage and recognizing that contradictions different in nature demanded different methods of political handling (Mao Tse-tung, 1977). Amílcar Cabral’s method was similarly non-dogmatic. The concrete social structure of Guinea and Cape Verde had to be investigated in order to determine the forces, contradictions, interests, and forms of unity actually present there, rather than deducing “the people” mechanically from an abstract schema (Cabral, 1974). The point is not that any of these analyses can simply be mapped onto the sex contradiction. It is that revolutionary strategy has never been adequately determined by ranking populations according to immediately observable suffering and allowing that ranking to substitute for an analysis of their material relations and structural positions.

The hypothesis, then, is that the social position “woman” has been historically constituted around the female sex class and the material relations through which sexual difference has been made socially determinant. This does not require every person classified or treated as a woman to have first had their reproductive anatomy directly apprehended. Gender is one of the ideological and social forms through which that position is socially mediated and reproduced. These proximate mechanisms can sometimes classify individuals independently of, or even contrary to, their sex. Such classification, by itself, is insufficient evidence that the patriarchal class relation has ceased to be organized around sex in the last instance. Nor does the result of that structural analysis mechanically determine the political strategy appropriate to every concrete situation; the movement from analysis into strategy itself requires a concrete analysis of the relations, contradictions, and conditions at hand.

But neither can the contrary conclusion simply be presumed. Proximate classification is not enough to show that sex has ceased to organize the patriarchal class relation. Nor does its failure to establish that conclusion prove that sex remains determinant in the last instance. This distinction places considerable demands on the ontology and epistemology being developed here, particularly on our ability to distinguish the immediate classification of a concrete individual from the structural position produced through the social relation itself. 

A mechanical appeal to self-identification does not perform this labor. Self-identification is itself a real feature of the concrete subject and may have important consequences for how that subject understands and conducts themselves, as well as how they are recognized and treated by others, but the declaration “I am a woman” cannot, by itself, tell us what material social relation constitutes the category “woman,” what structural positions that relation produces, or where the speaker is situated within it. To allow self-identification to settle those questions in advance would be to make the subject’s representation of themselves epistemically sovereign over the material relations we are attempting to investigate.

The same methodological principle applies to the concept of exclusion. The fact that a female-only organization does not organize membership according to individual gender identity cannot, by itself, establish that the organization is oppressive. That conclusion also has to be demonstrated through a concrete analysis of the organization’s position within the conjuncture. Treating a female-only organization as oppressive merely because it excludes males, without analyzing the material relations that may make sex-based separation necessary, performs a liberal abstraction that risks reproducing age-old misogynistic or reactionary political tendencies that have unfortunately maintained considerable traction, even on the Left.

Part IV

I would argue that the position we’re in today is due in large part to the fact that significant currents of the Left have failed to take feminist demands seriously. They have failed and continue to fail to theorize patriarchy as a material social relation in its own right, too often expecting the transformation of capitalist class and property relations to dissolve it, save for a little anti-misogynist re-education during and after the revolution. The error has taken different forms: reducing women’s oppression to ideas, attitudes, or biases, or treating the material relations through which it is reproduced as merely derivative of capitalist exploitation. Both fail to analyze ideology materially as part of the historically constituted social relations through which women’s oppression is produced and reproduced.

For political orientation, it would be helpful to remind ourselves that the depth, breadth, and scope of the oppression of women are virtually unfathomable. In the words of Safiya Bukhari, “The maturation process is full of obstacles and entanglements for anyone, but for a New Afrikan woman in amerikkka, it has all the markings of the Minotaur’s Maze” (Bukhari, 1979, p. 12). Her image is of a maze in which surviving the monster at its center does not guarantee escape; the victim may still perish attempting to find a way out through its intricate passages. The image captures something of the deeply circumscribed nature of women’s oppression: surviving or escaping one of its manifestations does not mean escaping the structured relations within which it occurs (Bukhari, 1979). It is significant, then, that Vita Wa Watu Book Nine insists that the struggle to end the oppression of New Afrikan women must become “a cutting edge of all theoretical and practical activity” and, in the same analysis, explicitly insists upon autonomous women’s organization (Vita Wa Watu, 1986, p. 3). Women’s liberation is treated here as constitutive of revolutionary theory and practice itself.

To be clear, I have no interest in arguing with anybody about their identity. That isn’t what this is about. Reducing the question to individual identity displaces the collective structural analysis necessary for understanding and transforming the relations through which imperialist patriarchy reproduces itself. What I am interested in is doing a materialist analysis of social development (history) and following the political imperatives that emerge from it. I believe I have shown why the legitimacy of autonomous female organization cannot be decided by abstract inclusion or exclusion alone and why, if the hypothesis developed here holds, such organization may be materially necessary. My hypothesis is that patriarchal social relations organize reproduction in ways that make sex determinant of structural position, generating particular interests among female people that require an independent material form through which they can become conscious, collective, and politically actionable. If this hypothesis holds, then autonomous female organization is not merely permissible but necessary for revolutionary politics to fulfill its vision of an oppression-free society, even if that does not mean that every female-only space is necessary or appropriate in every concrete circumstance. This is not a position I have come to lightly, nor can its political character be established merely by equating it with reactionary, right-wing positions toward trans people, as some have attempted to do.

Conclusion

As previously stated, these thoughts will be placed in the context of a deeper analysis within an ontological and epistemological framework I am working on. Much of the theoretical labor remains. In particular, we still need criteria for determining structural class position when sex, gender classification, social perception, law, sexuality, and other determinations can produce different and sometimes contradictory effects in the life of a concrete person. We also need to explain more rigorously how historically specific relations of social reproduction articulate sexual difference into class relations in the first place and why sex should be understood as determinant within that structured whole rather than simply assumed to be so. 

Finally, our framework will have to explain when political analysis can legitimately abstract a particular relation from an overdetermined concrete whole. No concrete person is reducible to sex, class, race, nation, gender, or any other single determination, but neither does the complexity of the concrete make it impossible to isolate a particular relation theoretically or to organize politically around the structural position it produces. The problem is to establish when such an abstraction reveals a real determination of the concrete and when, by cutting that determination away from the other relations through which it exists, the abstraction instead falsifies its object. That question bears directly on when it is legitimate to speak of women as a class, to identify interests generated by that structural position, and to organize autonomously on their basis.

That larger argument is necessary because many of the disagreements that presently appear to be disagreements over conclusions, such as whether “trans women are women,” whether female-only organization is permissible, whether “cis privilege” exists, or whether sex or gender is determinant of patriarchal class position, are actually disagreements at a much deeper level about what kinds of things exist socially, how we can know them, how social classes and categories are constituted, what relationship our political concepts bear to material reality, and how theoretical analysis should inform political strategy. These propositions are themselves of different orders: some concern classification and category membership, some concern structural position and social power, and others concern political strategy and organization. Part of the problem is precisely that these different questions are routinely collapsed into one another, so that an answer at one level is assumed to settle the others. Until those underlying disagreements, and the relations between these different levels of analysis, are made explicit, arguments over individual conclusions are likely to remain circular.

My purpose here has been to insist that abstracting individual acts, identities, and experiences from the material relations within which they acquire their social meaning is an inadequate method for developing the theory we need to drive revolutionary practice. Individual experience is real and politically relevant; it is itself materially produced and can provide indispensable evidence of the relations we are trying to understand. But experience does not interpret itself, and neither identity nor the subject’s representation of their own experience can be permitted to settle in advance the question of what material relations produced it or what structural position the subject occupies within them. Political conclusions have to follow from a concrete analysis of those relations. And if that analysis demonstrates that the liberation of women requires forms of autonomous female organization, then our political vocabulary has to be capable of saying so.

I welcome all principled feedback on any of this. I am not interested in being correct for the sake of being correct or winning an argument. I want liberation. If my analysis is wrong, incomplete, internally contradictory, or incapable of explaining concrete reality, I want people to show me where and why. If another framework can better account for the oppression of women while pointing toward the liberation of everyone subjected to exploitation and domination, then that is a conversation worth having.

What I am not interested in is substituting political labeling for political argument. Calling an analysis “reactionary,” “transphobic,” “liberal,” “misogynist,” or even “revolutionary” does not establish that it is any of those things. Those characterizations have to be demonstrated through an examination of the principles involved, the material relations being analyzed, and the political consequences that follow. A response that cannot do this discredits itself, even if it garners resounding applause and mobilizes people.

My commitments are not to a predetermined conclusion but to the liberation of oppressed people and the transformation of the material relations that reproduce oppression. Everything else is subordinate to that. The stakes are far too high.

References

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Bukhari, S. A. (1979). Coming of age. Notes From a New Afrikan P.O.W. Journal (Book 7). Spear & Shield Publications. 

Cabral, A. (1974). Brief analysis of the social structure in Guinea. In Revolution in Guinea: An African people’s struggle: Selected texts (R. Handyside, Trans., pp. 46–61). Stage 1.

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Lenin, V. I. (1964). The socialist revolution and the right of nations to self-determination. In Collected works (Vol. 22, pp. 143–156). Progress Publishers. (Original work published 1916). 

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Vita wa watu: A New Afrikan theoretical journal (Book 9). (1986, August). Spear and Shield Publications.