Study On Nancy Hartsock’s Marxist Feminism

Nancy Hartsock is a famous Marxist feminist in contemporary American. This doctoral thesis takes Nancy Hartsock’s Marxist feminist theories as the research object. By analyzing her theoretical achievements comprehensively and deeply, this thesis aims at interpreting systematically Hartsock’s theoretical explorations about combining feminism with Marxism, and promoting feminism to return to Marxism, thus, revealing Hartsock’s Marxist feminism’s theoretical significances and practical values of promoting the new development of contemporary feminism and Marxism from different levels. Thereby, it provides valuable theory source to Chinese contemporary women/gender studies and paradigm diversity of Marxist studies.The theoretical purpose of Hartsock’s Marxist feminism is to combine feminism with Marxism from a variety of perspectives. On the one hand, she uses Marxism to develop feminism; On the other hand, she supplements and develops Marxism from a feminist perspective. There are three purposes of Hartsock devoting herself to creating this kind of Marxist feminism. The first purpose is to solve the controversial theoretical problem of "whether feminism and Marxism could be combined and how" which has been attracting lots of attention of the western feminist scholars since Marxist feminism was born in1960s and70s. The second purpose is to deal with the challenge and blame from postmodernism, post-Marxism and neoliberalism since the1980s, so as to resolutely defend Marxism and Marxist feminism’s legitimacy and attempt to promote feminism to return to Marxism. The third purpose is to explore the new ideas and strategy of political practice of women’s liberation in the situation of globalization based on Marxist feminist standpoint so as to promote women’s liberation, together with comprehensive and free development. Therefore, formulating the Hartsock’s Marxist feminist theories systematically will help us to accurately grasp the characteristics and research trends of contemporary foreign Marxism and feminism, enrich and develop the women/gender studies in the context of contemporary China and open the new horizons of Chinese Marxism research, and stimulate us to deeply thinking of realistic problems such as how to promote women’s comprehensive and free development and the harmonious development of gender relations. However, Hartsock is not so well known to many Chinese scholars and all her writings have not been translated and published in China. Moreover, domestic scholars’studies on Hartsock’s theories are only confined to some translations and references about some individual point of view. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct a comprehensive and systematical research specifically on Hartsock’s Marxist feminism.Based on the methodology of dialectical materialism and historical materialism, and the principles of unifying the logic and historicity and combining the construction and criticism, this thesis follows the evolution logic that is from longitudinal historical investigation to transverse theoretical analysis and then to practical reflection and overall evaluation, so as to formulate Hartsock’s Marxist feminist theories systematically, analyzing its constructive basis and inner logic, excavating its positive significance, interpreting its inner contradictions and limitations and putting forward the personal thinking on the related issues.The introduction of this thesis opens the starting point of research. Based on teasing apart such concepts as "feminism","Marxism" and "Marxist feminism", the connotation of "Hartsock’s Marxist feminism", which is taken as the research object of this thesis, is defined clearly. And then, the theoretical and practical values, the research situation at home and abroad, the research ideas and methods are discussed.In Chapterl, based on discussing the contexts of Hartsock’s Marxist feminism and the trajectory of her theories, Hartsock’s academic identity localization is defined clearly by demonstrating differences and similarities of "Marxist feminism" and "Feminist Marxism","Socialist feminism","Post-Marxist feminism", etc. All these lay the foundation for the following theoretical interpretation and overall evaluation of Hartsock’s Marxist feminism. This chapter holds that Hartsock’s Marxist feminism is a result of the combined action of several subjective and objective factors. In terms of the social environment of Hartsock constructing these theories, the contexts of the transformation from modernism to postmodernism and the arrival of the era of globalization since the1980s provide the development of Hartsock’s theories with a far-reaching era background and social and cultural background; the sustainable development of the western new social movement, the second and third wave of the feminist movement after world war Ⅱ provide the development of Hartsock’s theory with the necessary social and political environment and the soil for practice; the classical Marxism, the new western Marxism, the western feminism and gender theories provide the development of Hartsock’s theories with the essential theoretical sources. It is because of all these factors that Hartsock spent more than30years using the Marxist historical materialism, dialectics and political economics as the analysis tool to construct a series of Marxist feminist theories by combining her practical activities and academic researches, focusing on feminist political philosophy, epistemology and feminist political economics research, responding to the postmodernist criticism and defending the legitimacy of Marxist feminism. All these efforts make her a well-known Marxist feminist theorist.In Chapter2, Chapter3, Chapter4and Chapter5, many problems of Hartsock’s Marxist feminism are analyzed systematically, such as its context, philosophical basis, generation mechanism, ideological essence and logical construction. The main emphasis of these discussions is to explore the core issue of combing feminism with Marxism from kinks of perspectives, and thereby, promote the new development of Marxist feminism and Marxism.In Chapter2, the constructive logic of historical materialism within Hartsock’s feminist standpoint theory is discussed. Hartsock is the earliest nomenclator and one of the earliest founders of the contemporary western feminist standpoint theories. In all Hartsock’s theories, the feminist standpoint theory is the most innovative and influential. Her feminist standpoint theory is based on digesting several kinds of philosophies including the historical materialism epistemology and ontology, Marx and Lukacs’ proletarian position theories derived from Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and the object relations theory of psychoanalysis. The uniqueness of Hartsock’ feminist standpoint theory lies in taking the historical materialism as the methodological principle of constructing the feminist epistemology and trying to enrich and develop the historical materialism from the gender perspective. The logical starting point of this epistemology is the sexual division of labor which emphasizes the priority of women’s specific labor in constructing epistemology. The core carrier of this epistemology is the feminist cognitive advantage theory which claims that knowledge, politics and value should be interconnected. And the fundamental orientation of this epistemology is to realize the all-round and free development of women based on the feminist standpoint. Although the construction path of this social epistemology is often shadowed by the impact of postmodernism, the significance of criticizing the western traditional epistemology and promoting the new development of feminist epistemology, as well as the research paradigm of historical materialism, can’t be neglected. Chapter3gives a deep insight into Hartsock’s Dialectical Feminist Reinterpretation for Marxist Philosophy. Faced with all kinds of crises and difficulties that the Marxist feminist theories and the western feminist movement encountered in the contexts of globalization, postmodernism and "The End of Marxism" since the1990s, Hartsock digs deep into the reasonable factors of the Marxist dialectics and expounds Marxist concept of the truth, subject and the view of social history from feminist perspective by using the dialectics of internal relations as an analytical tool; and consequently, a kind of Marxist dialectical feminism has been constructed, which includes:the concept of the truth based on the dialectic relationships of the truth and the practice, and the truth and the power. The concept of female subject is developed also based on the dialectic relationships of subordination and initiative subject, and collective and individual subject. Her social historical views are based on the dialectical relationships between the objectivity of social structure and initiatives of the subject. These dialectics thoughts not only refute various attacks of western scholars on her Marxism dialectics and defend contemporary applications of Marxism, but also open up a new feminist way of reoccupying Marxism and provide the women’s liberation with the scientific methodology under the background of globalization.In Chapter4, Hartsock’s criticism of the difference views of the postmodern feminism is offered. The postmodern feminists, who usually take a stand on deconstructing identity and seeking difference, have been criticizing the essentialism tendency of Hartsock’s feminist standpoint theory because of its universal presuppose of female identity difference, its biological destiny of seeking the roots of sexism and its quest on the enlightenment truth and objectivity of knowledge. Meanwhile, they point out that there are many epistemological paradoxes too difficult to solve between the situated knowledge perspective and the feminist cognitive advantage theory within the feminist standpoint theory. Hartsock responds to these criticism positively, revising the unified identity among women and exploring the relations between the group women subject and individual women subject, stressing the significances of eliminating the binary opposition in sex/gender and natural/cultural, indicating that postmodernism ignores postmodernist dimension of opposing the enlightenment rationality, emphasizing the importance of transforming "experience" into "position" in order to demonstrate the legitimacy of the marginal groups’cognitive superiority, adhering to reshaping the objective loaded value by virtue of insisting the feminist cognitive advantage theory in order to maximizing objectivity of knowledge and avoid relativism, calling for establishing women’s alliance based on dialogue rather than antagonistic relations in order to reach an inter-subjective commonality. It is in the theoretical response to the challenge of the postmodern feminism that Hartsock revises the original revision of the postmodern feminism and accepts some postmodernist criticism on the premise of trying to eliminate the adverse impact of the postmodernist difference views on her own theory, and resolutely defend the legitimacy of Hartsock’s feminist standpoint theory.In Chapter5, Hartsock’s new idea of women’s liberation in the era of globalization, as well as its practical significance is demonstrated. With the rapid development of anti-globalisation movement at the beginning of the21st century, Hartsock uses Marxist dialectics and political economics as analytical tools to establish the gendered globalizational primitive accumulation theory, expounding its expressive forms and the dialectical process of the gendered primitive accumulation in globalization and disclosing the economic globalization’s adverse effects and the root causes on the women’s development from the feminist perspective. These theoretical explorations, which conform to the developmental trend of women groups in the context of globalization demanding economic distributive justice, not only provide the women’s liberation planning with the theoretical source in order to promote feminist anti-globalisation movement, but also reveal the relationship between gender and economic globalization to promote the development of feminist globalization theory and the diversity of economic globalization paradigm.In Chapter6, many basic issues of Hartsock’s Marxist feminism are summarized, such as the overall characteristics, contemporary value and theoretical limitations. Hartsock’s Marxist feminism are characterized by carrying forward the Marxist traditional idea of "combining theory with practice" which is regarded as its guiding ideology, exploring multipath methods of "combining feminism with Marxism" which is regarded as its core task, and developing dialectical method of "combining critique with construction" which is regarded as its methodology principle. In general, Hartsock’s Marxist feminism focuses on combining feminism with Marxism and reveals the roots of the contemporary western women’s subordinate status and the path of women’s liberation from the Marxist feminist epistemology, dialectics and political economics perspective. Although these explorations still possess lots of theoretical limitations, such as the mode of binary thinking and combining simplistically feminism and Marxism, what is undeniable is that these theories, to a certain extent, not only promote the development of the western feminist theory and practice, but also develop the new ways of letting feminism return to Marxism to enrich the Marxism from gender perspective, and has a certain instructive value in promoting the women/gender studies in China.All in all, there are mainly two innovative points in this thesis. The first innovation lies in its research framework and contents. Based on combining feminism with Marxism as the main line, this thesis interprets systematically Hartsock’s theoretical achievements of Marxist feminism from multiple points of view, including lots of contents of exploratory significance, such as combing the contexts and theoretical trajectory of Hartsock’s Marxist feminism, revealing the logic of historical materialism within Hartsock’s feminist standpoint, expounding Hartsock’s dialectical feminist interpretation on Marxist philosophy, analyzing Hartsock’s exploration of transcending the postmodern feminism’s difference views, excavating Hartsock’s contemporary gendered globalizational primitive accumulation theory, discussing Hartsock’s women’s liberation planning theory in the era of globalization and its practical significance, reflecting and evaluating Hartsock’s Marxist feminism’s theoretical characteristics, contemporary values and the limitations, and so on. Secondly, lots of creative viewpoints have been put forward in this thesis, to be specific, Hartsock’s Marxist feminism makes up women’s absence in the historical materialism from feminist perspective, thereby opening a new era of Marxism research and helping to overcome and solve the theoretical problem of "whether feminism and Marxism could be combined and how"; Hartsock’s Marxist feminist epistemology and dialectical feminist thoughts contribute to promoting the new development of Marxist feminism and Marxist philosophy. Hartsock’s transcending the postmodern feminism’s difference views contribute to the theoretical exploration of promoting feminism returning to Marxism; Hartsock’s feminist globalization theory and contemporary women’s liberation planning ideas deepen our understanding of the new changes of contemporary capitalism and the new characteristics of the women’s liberation movement. Through analyzing and reconstructing these theoretical problems which have great significance to Marxist feminism, it helps us to understand the essential feature of the contemporary western Marxist feminism and promot the development of Marxist feminist theories. In general, the core innovative point of this thesis consists in expounding systematically the possibility and reality of combining feminism with Marxism and the significance of the feminist theoretical exploration of Marxism by studying on Hartsock’s Marxist feminism, and consequently, highly affirming Hartsock’s theoretical innovations and practice value of promoting the development of Marxist feminism.