PARTISAN!

While the Left correct to identify patriarchy as a weapon of oppression against women, many remain confused on what role heterosexuality and the family plays in patriarchy, exactly. Anthony Furia explains.

Since the emergence of the new left in the 1960s, debates have raged surrounding the position of patriarchy and heterosexuality in relation to one another, in relation to gender, and in relation to queer and women’s struggle. Here, we attempt to clarify the nature of some of these relations through an appeal to the relations of labour, and thus the social division of such labour, upon which social production and reproduction are based. In moving to define what, precisely, ‘patriarchy’ and ‘heterosexuality’ are in this context, we can begin to comprehend their relationship, and thus the relationship of the struggles mounted for emancipation from them; the queer and women’s movements.

Patriarchy here can be understood as the total structure which reifies and enforces relations of social reproduction/production and an exploitative division of labour, thereby defining and imposing gender itself in terms of this material basis. Patriarchy, as with any exploitative social division of labour and its accompanying relations, operates in both ideological and repressive terms. In a repressive sense, patriarchy is embodied in the state and social structures which place women within the domestic sphere, encouraging their isolation in the home and dependence upon the family form. Such structures further reify and define woman as domestic Other through the oft-subliminal imposition of ‘feminised’ labour; work paid at lower rates, pertaining to labour often performed domestically with the primary aim of social reproduction (cleaning, cooking, nursing, teaching, rendering sexual and ‘romantic’ or emotional services).

Ideologically speaking, patriarchy is intertwined with the underlying ideology of production/reproduction defined by contemporary capital. Here, it serves the needs and ends of such a system in presenting the woman’s role as simultaneously particular and unique – a necessary other, and in fundamental distinction to the role of man – the subject, the self, the essential, primary market actor. Woman and man are thus interpolated in wholly distinct, yet necessarily mutually defining and dependent ways by patriarchal ideology. The subjects that operate in feminized labour, in the domestic sphere, and those that work in the sphere of ‘true’ production, who drive economic activity and (supposedly) market orientation, are shaped and created based on gender, itself determined and defined by such a division of labour. In repressive, material terms, a woman is a woman because she performs a particular role and social function – and, ideologically speaking, she performs this particular role and function because she is a woman.

The lines, of course, are far from as clear cut as they are outlined here. The specific role of a woman in social production and the division of labour is, in practice, defined by a vast collection of relations, and thereby functions – some of which may be absent, or some particularly present, in each case. Yet the overarching qualitative distinction between the position of man and woman (on the basis of, and as the basis of, their manhood and womanhood) remains in play; defined by their relation to the domestic and public spheres, and thereby their overall role in production and reproduction.

Heterosexuality occupies a similar position in relation to social reproduction as the question of patriarchy. Demonstrably, heterosexuality depends upon gender, and thereby patriarchy, for its composition and meaning. Any interrogation of this distinction between sex, gender, and sexuality will ultimately come up against (in the abstract) the superficial imposition of the contemporary lines drawn between the three. Heterosexuality, understood at its most basic, is the complex through which social reproduction in terms of the production of labour-power is assured under a capitalist mode of production.

Heterosexuality maintains its hegemony as the normative mode, the agent, of sexual relations precisely on the basis of the bourgeois family unit, with which it exists in a reciprocal relation. For capital, the most effective means to ensure both the reproduction of a gendered division of labour (and thereby gender), and labour-power itself is through a necessarily hierarchical organisation of domestic life. The family, in placing the father in a position of supreme control and worth relative to the mother (in ideal terms a stay-at-home carer confined to the private realm) and the children (property of both mother and father), is the very form such an organisation takes.

Thus, the hegemonic position of heterosexuality serves to ensure the continuation of the family form itself, through playing a critical role in the ideological interpolation of man and woman as gendered subjects. Man is defined in part by his sexuality, by his violent, controlling attraction to women. Woman, for her part, is defined by her attraction to men in a position of simultaneous subordination and, often, unattainability.

Yet simultaneously, the perfectly heterosexual woman is desirable for her capacity as a carer, as a mother, for her fulfilment of the very relations that define ‘woman’ to begin with. The perfectly heterosexual man is similar; he is ‘desired’ (when this is permitted, in particular forms) by the woman because of his position as a ‘breadwinner’, a successful, independent, driving agent of economic productivity and market action, who can facilitate the confinement of the woman to the private domestic sphere. A heterosexual complex thus operates and carries out patriarchy (patriarchal relations and thus patriarchal ideology), in the realm of partnership – in sexual and romantic relations necessarily embodying productive and reproductive ones – and in turn within the family unit.

In clarifying and sharpening the two of them, we see here that their necessary entanglement is undeniable: Where the heterosexual regime works to extend and reinforce patriarchy, it is also utterly dependent on patriarchy for its content and form. Heterosexuality relies upon the patriarchal division of labour, upon the isolation of the woman in the domestic sphere and her definition on the basis of such labour relations, for its own justification in the same instance as it perpetuates such a division. If there is no woman or man, no gender predicated on a particular division of labour, there can be no heterosexuality. Yet, in contemporary capitalist society, without a hegemonic heterosexuality which enforces the family as the primary unit of social reproduction, the particular division of labour that the family unit imposes comes under question itself. Thus, the patriarchy as it manifests itself concretely leans upon heterosexuality, just as heterosexuality finds its very identity in patriarchy.

This, however, does not absolve ‘homosexual’ relationships of the possibility of participating in the heterosexual regime, at least in the bourgeois democracies of the western world. In institutionalizing ‘gay’ marriage as such, bourgeois liberal democracies have done their best to co-opt and sublate those aspects of supposedly subversive sexual identities deemed palatable enough to social reproduction and heterosexuality generally. The homosexual monogamous couple who has kids (one way or another), who conforms in some sense to the patriarchal division of labour, in which one partner is ‘feminised’ in terms of the tasks of social reproduction and domesticity, resides semi-comfortably within the liberal democracies of the imperial core. Semi-comfortably, of course, as they are only acceptable so long as social reproduction is not threatened existentially, and so long as they conform precisely to the expectations of patriarchal heterosexuality in all but sex.

What, then, does this mean for the relation between the emancipatory struggles precisely associated with the struggles against heterosexuality and patriarchy respectively? The queer and women’s struggles are as mutually inter-dependent as their respective enemies. If a heterosexual regime is irreversibly intertwined and defined by a patriarchal order, and vice versa, the revolutionary struggle against both shares a common enemy on the very basis of their entanglement; gender. Gender, and thereby the social division and relations of labour upon which it is defined, must be overcome for the emancipation of women (the revolutionary subject defined precisely by such a force) and queer people (those who defy gender, either explicitly or in defying the heterosexual regime).

If a democratic society is to be built, if exploitation is to be brought to an end and society freed from class, gender must itself be overturned. In basing our analysis in the material, in the concrete in the form of relations of production and reproduction, we make possible the end to such relations – and thus to the exploitation and repression they produce and are defined by. Historically, the ‘mainstream’ of women’s and queer movements have not acknowledged this political truth, or have done so only partially, or in vague terms. The queer movement of the 21^st century has contented itself largely with the struggle of the sexual and the romantic – of the elements most capable of assimilation into a heterosexual regime of social reproduction and thereby a patriarchal division of labour.

The greatest struggle of the homosexual couple in the 21^st century has been the struggle for the right to perform heterosexuality, to perform gender, to participate in social reproduction. Similarly, the struggles of the contemporary women’s struggle have remained uneven and divided in goals and intentions. Some proclaim woman as biologically sacred, as defined by an innate, unchanging sex, and worthy of ‘equal treatment’ precisely because of their position in terms of social reproduction. Such a position is highly regressive, and antithetical to the emancipation of women in its very positing of the exploitative position of women in labour relations as somehow worth preserving or maintaining. What is bad for such feminists is only the material ‘excesses’ that result from this position; the domestic violence, murders, and sexual assault. Others in the women’s movement openly refute such a position on the sanctity of womanhood, yet hold to it in practice, in centring struggle solely upon the aforementioned ‘excesses’, and not on the very basis of women’s oppression; the imposition of gender, and thus womanhood itself, in a patriarchal division of labour.

All of this is, of course, far from satisfactory for queer or women’s liberation. The true proliferation and acceptance of identities that defy and are in fact antithetical to the particulars of the family form and the gendered division of labour can only take place through an end to such a division of labour, and thus through an overcoming of exploitation itself; through proletarian revolution, and the governance of society by itself. It is up to communists to show the road forward and take the first step.