The whole point of class analysis (materialist analysis) is that it destabilize notions of destiny and stability. The proletariate is not a group defined biologically or through some innate aspect of the body itself but through their position within a given historical moment and contradiction. As materialists, its obvious to us that any attempt to inscribe the identity of the proletariat as natural is ideology. Whether its claims of being less intelligent, being more lazy, whatever, it is all a means of naturalizing the class position to render it destiny. All such justifications are means for reinforcing the domination of the proletariat.
What Wittig tells us is that this is true of women as a class as well. An attempt to find a stable biological or bodily basis for answering the question “Who is a woman” is a means of naturalizing the class status of women. The entire point of shifting from thinking of women as a pregiven group to thinking of women as a class is to shift our thought in such a way that we can challenge naturalizing ideologies of womanhood which are attempts to justify the domination of women. Any debate that starts by asking “who counts as a woman in class analysis” misses the entire point of using materialist class analysis in the first place. We seek to displace and destroy gender and the coresponding class positions of man and woman. We won’t do that by endless arguing over definitions which themselves ideologically reinforce the divide.
To be a materialist, to define women as a class, is to deny the logic of “okay but who counts as a woman” in the first place
kaledo-art
turnnoffyourmind
blakekathryn
