Hidden Abodes and Inner Bonds

Literary Study and Marxist-Feminism

Bibliographic Data

ID23212930
AuthorsAmy De’ath (corresponding author)
Year2022
Pages225-239
Publication date2022-03-17
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeCHAPTER
VenueAfter Marx (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherCambridge University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1017/9781108776523.015
OpenAlexW4220651982
ISBN9781108776523
LanguageEN
Citations received9
References cited14

This chapter argues that Marxist-feminist methods informed by new readings of Marx that first emerged in Germany in the 1960s can provide capacious and flexible critical tools for feminist analysis. Drawing in particular on the concept of real abstraction, I demonstrate an approach to Marxist-feminist literary study that avoids structuralist and economistic understandings of cultural production, as well as the simplistic notions of false consciousness and ideology critique that inflect much twentieth-century Marxist literary criticism. Rather, Marx's critique of value as a social form that operates "behind our backs," as a set of impersonal compulsions that push forward independent of thought, can help us to better understand the dialectics of aesthetic experience – exemplified here in my reading of feminized poetry – as an important mode of sense-perception attuned to (or even able to "theorize") the dynamic and contradictory reproduction of gender and its mediation by capital.

Aesthetics · Art · Criticism · Dialectic · Epistemology · Feminism · Ideology · Literary criticism · Literature · Marxist philosophy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Value (mathematics) · Gender Studies · Law · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism