| ID | 178134 |
| Title Proper | Necessarily historical materialist moment? Feminist reflections on the need for grounded critique in an age of crises |
| Language | ENG |
| Author | Basham, Victoria M |
| Summary / Abstract (Note) | The necessity of making sense of our current moment, one characterized – as Andreas Bieler and Adam David Morton suggest – by the interconnected forces of global capitalism, global war and global crisis is clear. Given the continuing body counts attributable to the prioritisation of rapid economic and industrial growth over ecology, to the expansion of expeditionary and pre-emptive warfare, and to the liberalisation and deregulation of economies that has reduced social welfare safety nets around the globe to tatters, it is pertinent to ask, as Bieler and Morton do, ‘what had to have happened in the past for capitalism as a mode of production to emerge and consolidate?’.1 One of Bieler and Morton’s central aims in approaching this question is to revolt against the ‘violence of abstraction’, which drawing on Sayer’s seminal work,2 they describe as eschewing the fetishisation of concepts in favour of analysing social relations rooted in specific historical and sociological practices.3 Feminist scholars have similarly asked how patriarchy, as a set of power relations, has come about, and urged us to pay very close attention to how historical social relations in different parts of the world shape people’s presents. Just as Bieler and Morton argue that historical materialism ‘does not relegate the “economic” or the “political” to spatially separate spheres but conceives of the social constitution of the economy so that relations of production are embodied in juridical-political and ideological forms’,4 so too have feminists shown how the political, economic, juridical and ideological have worked with and through each other to substantiate patriarchal social relations that often normalise the spatial separation of social spheres. Although the book engages directly and productively with some branches of feminist thought, reflecting on points of convergence and divergence reveals some of the book’s blind spots and wider contributions. In my contribution to this forum, I consider what opportunities the book offers for rethinking feminist critique after the postmodern turn and in an age of crises, and what contemporary feminist theory in turn offers historical materialism. I ultimately aim to show how the present, and the historical and sociological forces that shape it, is necessarily both a historical materialist and feminist moment. |
| `In' analytical Note | International Relations Vol. 35, No.1; Mar 2021: p.178-182 |
| Journal Source | International Relations Vol: 35 No 1 |
| Key Words | Capitalism ; Race ; crises ; Feminism ; Gender ; Global Violence |