Hartsock, "The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism" (1983):

• The insight feminists can most usefully draw from Marx is a "metatheoretical" insight, namely, his "proposal that a correct vision of class society is available from only one of the two major class positions in capitalist society" (463).
• Hartsock holds that since women's lives differ structurally from those of men (just as workers lives differ structurally from owners' lives), it may be that the structure women's activities provide a basis for a feminist standpoint [this term will be defined below] just as the structure of workers' activities provide a basis for a proletarian standpoint.
• A "standpoint," in the technical sense intended here, is not merely a "perspective" in some vague sense. It is a perspective as understood in accordance with the "metatheoretical" belief that when two social groups have their activities structured in opposing ways, then a correct vision of human relations in that society is available from only one of those groups' social positions.
• The focus on "activity" here is crucial. The assumption is that humans are what they do--especially what they do in producing their means of subsistence.
• An example of a society structured such that two social groups are fundamantally opposed is capitalist society, which opposes the interests and activities of capitalists to those of workers.
• From the perspective of the capitalist (the perspective of exchange), labor is just another commodity.
• From the perspective of the worker (the perspective of production), labor is life activity.

• Standpoint epistemology makes the following claims:
1. Material life structures consciousness and limits one's understanding of social relations.
2. If material life is structured in opposing ways for two groups, their visions of reality will be inversions of one another. Furthermore, the vision of the dominant group will be both partial and perverse.
3. Yet, the vision of the dominant group will not be simply false, because that group has, after all, the power to structure life for everyone in the society.
4. The vision available to the oppressed group doesn't come clear automatically; it is an achievement, reached by a combination of theoretical analysis and political struggle (as, for example, in "consciousness raising").
5. When achieved, the understanding of the oppressed exposes the fact that human relations in the society are inhuman, and points toward future liberation.

• Marx's account of production in capitalist society amounts to an elaboration of the five claims that make up the concept of a standpoint. Thus:
1. Material life structures understanding:  those who live the life of exchange develop a dualist way of thinking; those who live the life of production develop instead a dialectical epistemology.
2. The dominant standpoint is partial and perverse:  the exchange perspective is partial (it ignores the workers' lives) and is perverse in that it treats exchange as more important than use whereas use is really the purpose of exchange.
3. Yet the capitalist class, the exchangers, have the power to determine the structure of society, so even though their standpoint is perverse, it reflects the current reality and is in that sense true.
4. The exchange class controls the production of ideas in the society too, so the opposing standpoint (that of the producers) develops only as a result of analysis and political struggle.
5. When achieved, the standpoint of the producers reveals that capitalism have produced abundance for all, but in fact is not doing that.

• Marx developed his critique of capitalism by focusing on "life activity." Hartsock makes a similar move, but she focuses on women's life activity. She does this by beginning her analysis with the sexual division of labor.
• Marx did not really see the importance of the sexual division of labor; but Hartsock insists on it. Moreover, she does find some indications in Marx's texts that he may have occasionally glimpsed the point.
• Hartsock sees women's activities as sharing many characteristics with the activities of the proletariat (industrial workers). However the following traits characterize women's world even more intensely than the proletarian world (women are immersed in this world not only during those hours spend working for the capitalist, but continually):
• interaction with nature, natural substances
• quality and qualitative changes are more important than quantity
• the activities performed are activities which unify mind and body
• Specifics of women's activity, under the sexual division of labor:
• women produce both goods (commodities and use-values) and human beings
• women are, however, institutionally defined by their production of use-values in the home
• women as a group work more than men
• a larger proportion of women's labor time is devoted to production of use-values than men's
• women's production is structured by repetition in a different way than men's
• women's immersion in the world of use-values is more complete than men's
• women produce not just subsistence use-values, but also people; and this aspect of their work exposes the inadequacies of the concept of production for describing women's activities
• this work is not easily categorizable into play or work
• it involves change and growth, of a sort that requires avoiding excessive control
• it involves relational and interpersonal skills
• it results in the construction of female existence as centered on a complex relational nexus--i.e. women tend to define themselves relationally
• one aspect of this is the experience of living in a female body, with challenges to body boundaries
• object-relations psychology argues also that girls grow up with less starkly differentiated ego boundaries

• Male and female experience replicate themselves as epistemology and ontology, that is, as frameworks of thought and as social institutions. The difference between male experience and female experience generates the difference between "abstract masculinity" and "the feminist standpoint."
• the boy's construction of self in opposition to unity with the mother sets up a dualism at the center of the masculinized world view
• this hierarchical dualism includes a division of reality into the abstract and valuable on the one hand, the concrete and demeaning on the other hand; it devalues work or necessity and gives primacy to "purely social interactions." These dualities are then overlaid with gender connotations.
• Nonetheless, all these assumptions are counterfactual; they are contrary to lived experience.
• The same set of hierarchical dualisms that make up the epistemology and society of abstract masculinity also  describe the effects of commodity exchange. I.e., abstract masculinity shares much with the exchange abstraction.
• Female construction of self-in-relation leads in the opposite direction:  opposition to dualism,  valuation of the concrete,  a sense of connectedness
•    This world-view reflects women's activity under the sexual division of labor, characterized by:
• activity of transforming both material objects and human beings
• issues of change rather than stasis
• the importance of qualities, of both things and people
• conjoint action beyond the instrumental cooperation of the workplace
• women's bodies themselves as instruments of production

• Women's activity does meet the criteria for a standpoint:
1. Women's material life activity does have epistemological and ontological consequences, i.e. consequences for the understanding and construction of social relations.
2. On the basis of women's experience, one can see that abstract masculinity is both partial and perverse
• Partial because it acknowledges as valuable only male activity
• Perverse because it "substitutes death for life," as Bataille describes it in his analysis:
• Rigid ego boundaries mean a self that is discontinuous with others. Continuity, penetration of ego-boundaries, fusion with another can then be experienced as violent.
• Then desire for fusion can take the form of domination, or a call for the death of the other.
• Hence the links among violence, death, and sexual fusion--cf. rape and pornography
• In reproduction, the sperm is what dies
• In reproduction, growth does occur, but the male experiences it as "only impersonal"--unlike the female experience of reproduction and birth.
• Cf. de Beauvoir:  'it is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal"
3. But men structure social relations in their own image, so women too must participate in social relations that express abstract masculinity:
• cf. devaluation of women's work
• structuring of women's work so that it destroys minds and bodies
• isolation of women from each other in domestic labor
• female pathology of loss of self in service to others
• concealment of all this beneath layers of ideology
4. Need for struggle and analysis in order to achieve the feminist standpoint
5. The feminist standpoint is a basis for moving beyond these relations, toward a non-problematic social synthesis
• Capitalism enabled the proletariat to raise the possibility of society without class domination
• Feminism should enable women to raise the possibility of society without any forms of domination

• What is necessary is "the generalization of the potentiality made available by the activity of women--the defining of society as a whole as propertyless producer both of use-values and of human beings" (477). What this requires is:
• abolition of private property
• seizure of state power
• lengthy postrevolutionary class struggle

• Sexist oppression is perpetuated by:
• institutional and social structures
• the individuals who dominate
• the victims themselves (who are socialized to be complicitous)

• Why was the contemporary feminist movement not a training ground for women to learn political solidarity?
• Because the vision of Sisterhood evoked was based on the idea of common oppression
• Because Sisterhood was not viewed as a revolutionary accomplishment women would struggle to obtain

• But, nevertheless, we must not abandon the idea of Sisterhood as an expression of political solidarity; instead, we must construct a less shallow notion of sisterly bonding, one not based on shared victimization:
• viewing women as victims is a product of sexist ideology
• women who are oppressed daily cannot afford to see themselves solely as victims; they mus bond on the basis of shared strengths and resources
• white women liberationists bonding as "victims" was also informed by racist and classist assumptions:  a "lady" should minimize conflict and disagreement
• so even though there was plenty of conflict and hostility, it was not acknowledged
• another basis for bonding among white women liberationists was the view of men as the only enemy

• We must break out of attachment to sexism, before we can resist male domination. This means we must work to transform female consciousness
• must not devalue parenting while inflating the value of jobs and careers
• must include, in our writing, attention to ways to unlearn the sexism we see in:
• homophobia
• judging by appearances
• conflicts between women with diverse sexual practices

• Racism is also a barrier to solidarity between women
• in the white women's liberationist movement, racism was not confronted
• then, when it finally was, it was left to women of color to call attention to race
• and then, furthermore, the concern was granted validity only when white women took it up
• also:  it's not enough to resist racist oppression within feminism. Must resist it in our society overall.
• should see the connection between white racism and late control of all women's bodies
• should recognize the error of assuming bourgeois white women are more capable of leadership than others
• must not just focus on cathartic individual acknowledgement of personal prejudice--instead, need political commitment to change
• women of color must also confront their own absorption of racist beliefs
• must take responsibility for learning about one another's diverse cultures and "cultural codes"
• must speak truthfully from our own experiences, in a noncompetitive way--rather than comparing and judging
• Class also divides women politically, so women must criticize and repudiate class exploitation
• must not permit the focus on individual status and change to be the emphasis in discussions of class
• must not equate social equality with careerism, or liberation with class mobility
• must not equate psychological pain with material deprivation, or overlook the latter
• must accept the need for redistribution of wealth and resources in the US
• NB: the masses of women are as poor as ever, or poorer, despite the economic gains of individual white middle-class women
• socialist feminists, who do talk about class, must do more:  they must stop using so much of their energy to address the white male Left, and use more of it to work and organize together with poor and working-class women (who may not identify themselves as socialists but do see the need for redistribution of wealth)

• How to achieve real solidarity among women:
• must not accept splintering. May focus on a particular cause, but in such a way that firm opposition to all forms of oppression is manifest in one's work.
• accept responsibility for fightng oppressions that do not directly affect us as individuals
• must not confuse "support" with solidarity
• "support" too often meant lack of criticism and lack of conflict or disagreement or hostility
• we need to experience working through hostility to arrive at understanding and solidarity;
• the idea that we must avoid confrontation because it will victimize or destroy us is a product of sexist socialization from which we must break free
• solidarity requires community of interests, shared beliefs and goals--it can't be occasional; it must be sustained, ongoing commitment
• solidarity need not eliminate difference
• solidarity does not require sharing common oppression; we can all fight to end oppression
• women's solidarity does not require anti-male sentiments to bond us together
• solidarity requires sharing our wealth of experience, culture, and ideas--our strengths and resources

Haraway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and  Socialist Feminism in the 1980s":

I. An Ironic Dream of a Common Language for Women in the Integrated Circuit:

• Point of the essay:  to build an ironic political myth faithful (in a blasphemous way) to feminism, socialism, and materialism
• center of the myth = the image of the cyborg = a cybernetic organism, or hybrid of machine and organism
• In our time, we are cyborgs--that fact is what gives us our ontology and our politics, our possibilities

• Haraway is arguing that breakdown of boundaries should not be seen as "border wars"; rather, she argues "for pleasure in the confusio of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction.
• she also sees in the cyborg myth a hint that we could have a socialist feminism even in a world without gender

• The cyborg has no origin story
• Western humanism always has a myth of original unity, followed by a tale of separation and individuation
• cf. individual development (psychoanalysis) and history (Marxism)
• the cyborg skips the original unity of identity with nature
• therefore the question of how to form unities, wholes, is an issue for cyborgs; they have trouble with holism
• but holism is not the same as need for connection, and cyborgs do need connection

• Granted, cyborgs are the "illegitimate offspring" of militarism, patriarchal capitalism, and state socialism; but they do not need these "fathers."

• This analysis is made possible by three crucial boundary breakdowns:
1. between human and animal
2. between organism and machine
• this is not a matter of technological determinism; it is, rather, a question of seeing everything as a "text," as something coded [which could, therefore, be re-coded]
3. between physical and non-physical
• cf. electronic devices, their difference from mechanical machines
• electronic "machines" are invisible, everywhere, "made of sunshine," nothing but signals, minature, mobile
• nb:  miniaturization makes women, who are good at "small" work, important as workers in a new way

• So, Haraway's cyborg myth is "about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities that progressivew people might explore as one part of needed political work" (506).
• most American progressives tend to call for a return to the organic body, and to regard a cyborg world as the imposition of a final grid of control, something to be feared
• the other possibility, however, is that a cyborg world is about living unafraid of our joint kinship with animals and machines, not being afraid of "permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints" (506).
• cyborgs:  potent myths for resistance and recoupling

II. Fractured Identities:

• In our time, "the sources of a crisis in political identity are legion" (507). Attempts to find political identity in terms of race, class, or gender have made it clear to us that any time "we" name ourselves we exclude others.
• One response has been splitting of identities and searches for new essential unities (not "women" but "lesbian women" or "black women" or "Asian-American women" becomes the new rallying call)
• Another response is to work through coalition--through groups based on affinity, not identity
• cf. Chela Sandoval's model of political identity based on "oppositional consciousness"
• Sandoval focuses on the group "women of color," a group composed of those refused stable membership in the usual social categories of race, sex or class, and joined only by the skill they have in reading webs of power and consciously appropriating the negations and exclusions to which they have been subject
• U.S. "women of color" marks out a consciously constructed space that is not based on any "natural" identification but is based solely on affinity and conscious coalition.
• cf. also Katie King's model of "women's culture" as something consciously created by mechanisms inducing affinity
• King refuses the impulse to taxonomize the woman's movement; instead her focus is on affinities, on "poetic/political unities" that do not rely on a logic a appropriation, incorporation, or taxonomic identification (splitting).

• But note:  by refusing unity-through-domination [e.g. male-dominant culture claiming "but we're all just human"] or unity-through-incorporation [e.g. white bourgeois feminism claiming "but we do invite women of color to join our movement"], one is undermining all claims for an organic or natural standpoint.  We are thus implicitly accepting that the task is  to build affinities rather than to affirm identities.
• standpoint theories already pointed to the limits of identification on the basis of "nature," by showing that the standpoint of the oppressed is only a potential until it is achieved by struggle and analysis
• postmodern theory goes farther still in dissolving the traditional western self-identical, natural self
• but if the  postmodern self cannot claim an original innocence, neither is it guilty of a fall. No origin means no original sin, no natural basis of identity means no corrupting of a natural state. [The postmodern cyborg self is neither natural and innocent nor corrupt and guilty--it just is. It is implicated in the real world of social relations where all are in some sense dominated and all are in some sense dominators.]  There are no innocent categories; all categories exclude some other. None of our constructions, none of our categories, are (or name) natural wholes.
• Marxist/socialist feminisms and radical feminisms have to some extent accepted that there are no "natural" categories (whether "women" or "labor"); but in other ways they have once again naturalized "women."
• Marxists privilege the category of labor.
• Radical feminists such as MacKinnon "essentialize" women as non-subjects.
• Socialist feminists have unreflectively contributed to the production of essentialist theory by searching for a single ground of domination
• But we must not, in reaction, risk lapsing into boundless difference, but rather:
• Must take up the task of making partial, real connection

• Haraway will sketch a picture of possible unity framed by contemporary rearrangements in social relations, worldwide, that are tied to science and technology.
• These are bringing fundamental changes in the nature of class, race, and gender in an emerging world order.
• We're moving from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous information system--
• from hierarchical dominations to the networks that make up an "informatics of domination" (see chart, p. 512).
• The objects prevalent in the informatics of domination cannot be coded as "natural"; and this subverts naturalistic coding for any current objects of knowledge

• Objects of knowledge today must be formulated in one of two ways-- both of which are cyborg semiologies:
• as problems in communications engineering (for the managers)
• as theories of the text (for those who would resist

• We no longer can think in terms of essential properties, or of organic aspects in natural objects. Rather, we think in terms of:
• design, boundary constraints, rates of flow, systems logics, the frequencies of various parameters
• disassembly and reassembly and interfacing
• control strategies, formulated in terms of rates, costs of constraints, degrees of freedom
• finding the proper code for processing signals in a common language so as to create an interface
• stress, or communication breakdown, as the privileged pathology

• Organic, hierarchical dualisms are no longer adequate for feminist analysis; they have been "techno-digested."
• women's actual situation is this: they are integrated/exploited into a world system of production/reproduction and commonucation--the system Haraway calls the informatics of domination
home, workplace, market, public arena, the body itself--all can be dispersed and interfaced in infinite way
 
• "The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. This is the self feminism must code" (514).
• the tools for crafting this self are communication technologies and biotechnologies
• communication science and modern biologies are constructed by a common move:
• the translation of the world into a problem of coding
• i.e., a search for a common language, in which resistance to instrumental control disappears, and all heterogeneity can be reduced to disassembly and reassembly

• "Information is just that kind of quantifiable element ... that allows universal translation, and so unhindered instrumental power" (514).
• the metaphor that condenses this technology is C3I:  command-control-communication-intelligence
• this is the military's symbol for its operations theory
• where we see the translation of the world into a problem in coding and recognition systems:  in molecular genetics, ecology, sociobiological evolutionary theory, immunobiology

• These sciences and technologies indicate fundamental transformations in the structure of the world for us
• economic reality supports this claim:  cf. the dependence of communications technologies on microelectronics
• but microelectronics is the basis of "simulacra"--copies without originals (as opposed to copies which represent natural originals)
• boundary-maintaining images (copy/original, private/public, base/superstructure, etc.) were never more feeble
• the point here is not that we live in a world of technological determinism
• rather, the point is that high-tech-facilitated social relations are rearranging relations of race, sex and class

• "The 'new industrial revolution' is producing a new worldwide working class" (515):
• women in third-world countries are the preferred labor force for science-based multinationals
• but this change is also larger and more systematic than that--it involves reproduction, sexuality, culture, consumption, and production

• This new "homework economy" has the characteristics formerly ascribed to female jobs:
• extremely vulnerable; subject to disassemly and reassembly as a reserve labor force
• seen less as workers than as servers
• subjected to time arrangements that make mockery of the limited working day
• large-scale deskilling (but with new skills acquired also)
• integration on a new scale of home, factory, market
• Hence the places of women need to be re-analyzed, having become newly important

• This new homework economy is tied to the power of the new communications technolgoies to integrate and control labor despite dispersion and decentralization

• The feminization of poverty has become an urgent focus. It is brought about by:
• dismantling of the welfare state
• a homework economy, where stable jobs are the exception
• the expectation that there will be no male income to help support children
• i.e., the shift from (1) the patriarchal nuclear family to (2) the modern famly mediated by the welfare state to (3) the "family" of the homework economy, with women as heads of households
• Some of the important economic developments occurring in this context, and structuring our imaginations of personal and social possibilities:
• projections for worldwide structural unemployment and/or underemployment
• effects on hunger and food production (with women generally excluded from benefits)
• forms of "privatization" that erode, even eradicate, "public life" for everyone--e.g. video games that promote individual competition, or even warfare
• a linking of sexuality and instrumentality
• cf. sociobiology's story of the body as a private satisfaction-machine or utility-maximizing-machine
• and cf. the technologies of visualization, the predatory nature of a photographic consciousness
• danger of science being done by narrower groups of people where most people work in the homework economy and only a few produce knowledge
• the homework sector will then be marked by illiteracy and impotence
• it will be controlled by high-tech repressive apparatuses:
• entertainment
• surveillance
• disappearance

• Women's lives are not, now, structured by the distinction into a private and public domain, but by the image of a network--a profusion of spaces and identities, and the permeability of boundaries in the personal body and in the body politic

• The informatics of domination is a massive intensificatin of insecurity and cultural impoverishment--as well as outright failure of subsistence networks for the most vulnerable.

• Still we should not ultimately be depressed. There is hope--in:
• emerging pleasures, experiences, powers that have serious potential for changing things
• new kinds of unity across face, gender and class
• the fact that politics designed to produce loyal technocrats also have produced many dissenters
• the fact that the permanent partiality of feminist points of view is acceptable--that we do not need totality in order to do good work

VI. Cyborgs: A Myth of Political Identity:

• Body imagery is fundamental to world view. Hence two groups of texts that are especially interesting for constructing a cyborg myth are:
• constructions of women of color
• monstrous selves in feminist science fiction

• "Women of color" might be understood as a cyborg identity, a "potent subjectivity synthesized from fusions of outsider identities" (520) -- cf. "Sister Outsider"
• e.g. woman of many racial and ethnic identities are maipulated for competition and exploitation in the same industries
• literacy is a special mark of women of color
• literacy releases the play of writing--a deadly serious play
• writing implies the power to signify--even in the absence of "origins" (speech, natural language)
• Cf. Cherrie Moraga's writing as an example:
• explores the themes of identity for one who never possessed the original language, or resided in the garden of legitimate heterosexuality
• her writing is a "violation"--an illegitimate production, not whole, spliced from two conqueror languages (English and Spanish), a chimeric monster
• yet this language crafts the erotic, competent, potent identities of women of color
• her writing marks her as a woman of color with no possibility of passing into:
• the unmarked category of the Anglo father, or
• the orientalist myth of "original illiteracy"
• "Writing is pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs" (522). Cyborg politics is:
• the struggle for language
• the struggle against perfect communication--against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly
• different from the liberal politics that imagines reproduction on individuals [on the natural model, the model of original and copy] before the wider replications of texts [production of texts which are always already replications of other texts]
• freed from the need to ground itself in "our" privileged position of the oppressed, or the merely violated, or the closer to nature
• a matter of being written into a text with no privileged reading, and recognizing "oneself" as fully implicated in the world
• being freed of the need to root politics in identification, vanguard parties, purity, or mothering

• The cyborg has no myth of origin, and expects no return to wholeness:
• the cyborg myth is not a drama of separation and individuation
• the cyborg is not "of Woman born"--and not merely a victim
• the cyborg is a present-tense, illegitimate being, with a real life, playing the game of survival

• Dualisms have been persistent in western traditions, and systemic to the logic and practice of domination
• the One knows he is not dominated by the service of the Other

• High-tech culture challenges these dualisms:  we don't need organic holism or impermeable wholeness
• The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment
• We are responsible for our machines, responsible for boundaries
• Female embodiment isn't simply a given; gender might not be central in a cyborg world at all

• Cyborgs have an intimate experience of boundaries, their construction and deconstruction.

• Holistic politics depend on metaphors of rebirth; cyborgs have more to do with regeneration
• cf. the salamander--requires growth of structure and restoration of function--not rebirth
• Cyborg imagery can help express two crucial arguments:
1. the production of universal, totalizing theory is a major mistake
2. taking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology means:
• refusing an antiscience metaphysics, and a demonizing of technology
• embracing the task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life