Francophone materialist feminism, the missing link: Towards a Marxist feminism that accounts for the interlockedness of sex, race and class

Abstract

This article discusses the Marxist-Feminist Theses III and VIII. It is based on the ‘French-speaking materialist feminist’ theoretical perspective that has been developed at the end of the 1970s by Colette Guillaumin (with the concept of ‘sexage’), Monique Wittig (with the concept of ‘straight mind’), Nicole-Claude Mathieu, Christine Delphy and other members of the Nouvelles Questions Féministes journal’s board. The article first presents this theorization, which is too unknown to many English-speaking theorists. It then shows how ‘French-speaking materialist feminist’ theoretical perspective fully demonstrated that ‘sex’ was a structural social relation as much as class is (Gender relations are relations of production). The article also analyses how this theoretical perspective enables us to pay a deep attention to the ‘race question’. Therefore, it appears as the missing link that can help bridging at least two important theoretical and political gaps: first, between Marxist feminism and lesbian theory, and, second, between Black feminism and Marxist feminism.