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Historical Materialism

Gender and Ideology


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Full Title: Gender and Ideology

Short Title: For a Marxist critique of gender ideology

Article Type: Review Article

Corresponding Author: Nildo Viana


Universidade Federal de Goias
Goinia, Gois BRAZIL

Corresponding Author's Institution: Universidade Federal de Goias

First Author: Nildo Viana

Order of Authors: Nildo Viana

Abstract: Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to discuss the issue of gender ideology in a
critical and Marxist perspective. Criticism of the gender ideology is now a must, as well
as present their social roots and their relationship to a particular historical period.
Based on the critical analysis of the work of Joan Scott and his inspiring sources,
especially Bourdieu, it seeks to show the ideological roots of gender conception.

Keywords: Gender, Ideology, category, Marxism, Poststructuralism, domination, sex.

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Gender and Ideology


For a Marxist critique of gender ideology
Nildo Viana*
Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to discuss the issue of gender ideology in a critical and Marxist
perspective. Criticism of the gender ideology is now a must, as well as present their social roots and their
relationship to a particular historical period. Based on the critical analysis of the work of Joan Scott and
his inspiring sources, especially Bourdieu, it seeks to show the ideological roots of gender conception.

Keywords: Gender, Ideology, category, Marxism, Poststructuralism, domination, sex.

The present paper aims to discuss the issue of gender


ideology. We wont do an archeology of genre term, as some have
done1, nor will pursue its etymological roots, nor its past uses, but
only its recent use and its ideological character. The critique of
gender ideology is, nowadays, a necessity as well as present its
social roots and its bond with a certain historical period.
Before we begin, lets clarify what we mean by ideology, since
this is a polysemic term. Here we use the Marxist conception of
ideology2, according to which it is a systematization of false
consciousness, that is, a illusory thinking system. Ideology is a
systematic way of false consciousness produced by the ideologists.
What we term as gender ideology is the conception that places the
construct3 gender as a fundamental term of the analysis of the
issue of women and even of society as a whole.
We won't present here the most diverse works that discuss and
use the construct gender. We will elect one of the most cited and
influential works on this issue for analysis, although other references
are made throughout this text. It is the text of the historian Joan
* Professor, School of Social Sciences of the Federal University of Gois and PhD in Sociology
from the University of Brasilia. Postdoctoral fellow at the University of Sao Paulo. Email:
nildoviana@ymail.com
1 Stolke, 2004.
2 Marx and Engels, 1991.
3 A constructor is a false concept, and this is a correct expression of reality, while that is its

distorted expression. See in Viana, 2007.


Scott4, Gender: A Usefull Category of Historical Analysis. Joan Scott
presents in her text an overview of different conceptions of feminist
thought and of the use of the construct (which she denominated
category) genre. The various concepts are presented descriptively,
with superficial observations, and the author's point of view is
presented peripherally, with a minimum contribution to the
discussion around the issue that is proposed to treat. In fact, this
defect to take long descriptions of feminist conceptions, consisting of
all or almost all of the text, is quite common and is repeated in
Scott's article. She states that the term gender in its most recent use
occurred among American feminists, who wanted to insist on the
fundamentally social quality of distinctions based on sex. This use
was aiming to reject biological determinism that would be implicit in
the use of the terms sex and sexual difference. The term gender
would present a relational view and would present men and women
in reciprocal terms, preventing the separate study of both. But the
author points out that more important than that is that gender was a
term offered by those who claimed that womens scholarship would
fundamentally transform disciplinary paradigms5. A new
methodology and epistemology would be with the term gender,
giving it meaning. However, this position did not come right away:

For the most part, the attempts of historians to theorize about


gender have remained within tradicional social scientific
frameworks, using longstanding formulations that provide
universal causal explanations. These theories have been
limited at best because they tend to contain reductive or overly
simple generalizations that undercut not only historys

4 Scott, 1986.
5 Scott, 1986, p. 1054.
disciplinary sense of the complexity of social causation but also
feminist commitments to analyses that will lead to change.6

After that, the author criticizes the descriptive uses of those who
use the term gender, as well as analyzes the feminist conceptions
starting from the perspective of the origin of patriarchy, of Marxism,
until reach the post-structuralism and the American and British
approach of relation of object. She makes some pertinent
criticisms of some of these conceptions, but is rather superficial and
does not connect more effectively with her own conception.
However, what interests us here is precisely Scott's position. In this
context, it is crucial her definition of gender:

My definition of gender has two parts and several subsets. They


are interrelated but must be analytically distinct. The core of the
definition rests on an integral connection between two
propositions: gender is a constitutive elemento of social
relationships based on perceived differences between the
sexes, and gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of
power. Changes in the organization of social relationships
Always correspond to changes in representations of power, but
the direction of change is not necessarily one way.7

According to Scott, this definition involves four related


elements: 1) the culturally available symbols evoke symbolic
representations; 2) there are normative concepts that present
interpretations regarding the meaning of the symbols, in order to
reduce and contain their metaphoric possibilities; 3) the new
conception task is to overcome the notion of fixity and timelessness
of the binary gender representation, revealing its connection with
politics, with the institutions and social organization; 4) The
subjective identity or the gendered identities are built, and it's

6 Scott, 1986, p. 1055.


7 Scott, 1986, p. 1067.
needed to relate it to a range of activities, social organizations, and
historically specific cultural representations8. She reveals the key to
her conception (Scott, 1986, p. 1069):

The first part of my definition of gender consists, then, of all four


of these elements, and no one of them operates without the
others. Yet they do not operate simultaneously, with one simply
reflecting the others. A question for historical research is, in
fact, what the relationships amont the four aspects are. The
sketch I have offered of the process of constructing gender
relationships could be used to discuss class, race, ethnicity, or,
for that matter, any social process. My point was to clariy and
specify how one needs to think about the effect of gender in
social and institutional relationships, because this thinking is
often not done precisely or sistematically. The theorizing of
gender, however, is developed in my second proposition:
gender is a primary field within which or by means of which
power is articulated. Gender is not the only field, but it seems to
have been a persistent and recurrent way of enabling the
signification of power in the West, in Judeo-Christian as well as
Islamic tradicions.
Thus here we have a particular ideology of genre that will be
widely used by researchers of various human sciences and become
a great reference, both in academic thinking in this area as of
feminist thought. Thereby, this ideology arises of the refusal of
biological determinism, of essentialism, and ends up proposing a
paradigmatic transformation, presenting gender as a cultural
construction and is in the founder field of power relations. This
conception is ideological, that is, false, although, like every ideology,
has moments of truth.
The refusal of biologism is important and necessary, however,
when extrapolating this and presenting a rejection of biological (we
would say, of corporeality and its importance) although this was

8 Scott, 1986, p. 1068.


not explicitly stated, but it was practiced in the rest of the speech ,
we have an ideological production. The social status of women in
modern society is not exclusively derived from its physical/organic
constitution and this is true, but is false from there to deny its
existence or relation to this process. Obviously this will be the
starting point for other ideologies even more misleading and
bordering the absurd9. The criticism of biologism, with regard to
women's issues, moreover, is nothing new as it was born with
Simone de Beauvoir10 in the 40s of the 20th Century and
contemporary references add nothing and not go beyond the level
presented by her, unless in a retrograde direction.
What she denounces in the other approaches is precisely what
she does. She provides a universal causal explanation and held
reductive generalizations and overly simple. The determinism of
gender is an ideological creation not only simplistic, but dogmatic, as
it does not question and reflect on its own fundamentals. It is a
determinism and a reductionism. And it is nonetheless revealed the
disregard of historical materialism or, as is common, reduce it to
more simplistic and dogmatic formulations, ie exchange it for what
it's called vulgar Marxism, far short of Marx.
9 The most explicit example of this ideological exasperation is Butler's thesis (2003), according
to which sex is an effect of gender and society is based on compulsory heterosexuality. That
is, the determinant is the genre (cultural building) and not sex (organism) and the dominant
sexual practices, heterosexuality, is compulsory, product of power relations, according to his
inspiration in Foucault. This hyper culturalist thesis does not realize that cancels itself and falls
into many contradictions. If it's the genre that produces sex (woman has no sex, according to
the epigraph of Irigaray used by Butler) then it is merely a cultural construction. So whats the
problem? In what a cultural construction is better than the other? The answer is provided in the
second thesis, the thesis of compulsory heterosexuality (not to mention the
phallocentrism...). If heterosexuality is compulsory, then people are forced to be heterosexual,
which means they are not naturally so. But if they are forced to be heterosexuals then it is
because they are naturally homosexuals... an inversion (gender determines sex) is
complemented by other (normal and natural is homosexuality...). This conception, besides
having no basis in concrete reality, ends up falling into essentialism and biologism that it
intended to fight (Only reverses/exchange heterosexual by homosexual essence and the sole
basis for such essentialism can only be biological... After all, for what reason, other than
biological, people would naturally be homosexual?).
10 Beauvoir, 1978.
However, the most problematic element of Scott's conception is
in her pursuit of paradigmatic transformation, which is based on the
idea that gender is the primary way to give meaning to the relations
of power. The basis of such a theory is not held anywhere.
References to Eve and Mary (Christian tradition), or any stereotype
of women, outside the context in which it occurs, not establish
nothing. The quotes of thinkers considered representatives of
conservative thought, contrary to the French Revolution, as Burke,
Bodin, among others, can not be generalized, if only because it is a
critique of the Enlightenment and the bourgeois revolution of pre-
bourgeois point of view. And it is nonetheless interesting as several
women authors derive their ideas in the speeches of other women
authors (or men authors, in rare cases) and not in concrete reality11.
These conceptions are based on a unquestioned and
unquestionable, that is, a dogma, which reveals a metaphysical
abstraction and that does not explain anything. Taking the specific
case of Scott, we have gender as primary field in which or through
which power is articulated. In addition to the statement, no
justification, other than a brief reference to the sociologist Pierre
Bourdieu. The genre here is a priori unquestioned, a dogma, without
any justification.
The term gender is a metaphysical abstraction when seeking to
transform it from category to concept12, and so loses all its value.
And this is even more serious when one want to put it as the
determination of power relations. Obviously, no substantiated
reasons is given for such priority to gender while instituting concept

11Scott, 1986; Stolke, 2004; Butler, 2003.


12A category is a resource without mental existence in the concrete reality, while a concept is
an expression of reality therefore has concreteness. The expression "gender", as relationship,
cause, effect, space, right, left, etc., falls within the first type, and to move to the second type
must have an increase of something real, concrete (Viana, 2007).
of social reality and power relationships. The author is content to
appeal to Bourdieu and his reflections. Bourdieu condemns the non-
historicity (naturalization, that is, make natural, something that is
history), and at the same time does it. This is due to the fact that he
never performs an analysis of the concrete reality of capitalist
society, but purely presents his metaphysical abstractions about
symbolic power, accompanied by his empiricism or its ideology of
fields which serves as a model to think the masculine
domination13, an undue extrapolation. In Bourdieu's approach, the
metaphysical abstraction meets the empirical that comes to confirm
it, creating a dichotomous but homologous vision where isolated
incidents of all serve as examples of metaphysical abstractions of
symbolic violence and the like.
One can not think man (male gender) and women (female
gender) as arbitrary cultural constructions. The representations, real
or illusory, according to Marx14, are given from concrete social
relations. Everyday representations and ideologies about female
gender (and male gender), are not arbitrary products of culture or
power, these two metaphysical entities that dominate the
anthropological contemporary discourse or post structuralist,
whereas both culture and power of this ideology appears as
something non-historical, indeterminate, asocial. The perception of
the female gender consists historically and socially, but it's needed
to discuss in which historical period and social context it occurs, as
well as understand what is the class position of whom presents it.
Let's see what Bourdieu says:

13 Bourdieu, 2002.
14 Marx and Engels, 1991.
The divisions constitutive of the social order and, more
precisely, the social relations of domination and exploitation that
are instituted between the sexes thus progressively embed
themselves in two different classes of habitus, in the form of
opposed and complementary bodily hexis and principles of
vision and division which lead to the classifying of all the things
of the world and all practices according to distinctions that are
reducible to the male/female opposition. It falls to men, who
belong on the side of all things external, official, public, straight,
high and discontinuous, to perform all the brief, dangerous and
spectacular acts which, like the sacrifice of the ox, ploughing or
harvesting, not to mention murder or war, mark breaks in the
ordinary course of life; women, by contrast, being on the side of
things that are internal, damp, low, curved and continuous, are
assigned all domestic labour, in other words the tasks that are
private and hidden, even invisible or shameful, such as the care
of the children or the animals, as well as all the external tasks
that are attributed to them by mythic reason, that is to say,
those that involve water, grass and other green vegetation
(such as hoeing and gardening), milk and wood, and especially
the dirtiest, most monotonous and menial tasks.15
This quotation can be an example to analyze Bourdieu's
procedure and its risks. First, we have a generalization: on one side
men, on the other, women. Men, according to Bourdieu, are on
the official side, of the right. All the men? The proletarians? The
lumpen proletarians? The peasants? And women are all on the
other side, thus there is no woman who holds power, that is in the
state, etc. Women often are left with the dirty work, they take care of
children. The women of the bourgeoisie do this? They do not hire
other women to do it for them? In this approach, it seems like
domestic workers work only for men, and the women of the
bourgeoisie care for children, working in monotonous and menial
tasks. We do not know which country and epoch refers Bourdieu.
He refers to an abstract-metaphysical world that does not exist

15 Bourdieu, 2002, p. 30.


concretely. Women, in the plural and in general, has as task the
invisible, shameful work, such as child care. Ora, Only from certain
values that caring for children is "shameful", as well as other
examples cited by Bourdieu, ie, humility, shame, etc., is not an
attribute of activities but a valuation or devaluation of activities.16
In Bourdieu's analysis, phenomena such as social classes,
values, capital accumulation, class struggle, etc., do not exist. The
capitalist domination and the mercantile, competitive and
bureaucratic world also do not exist in his approach. The masculine
domination to Bourdieu has a structural homology to the various
camps that he says exist in reality (artistic field, political field
economic field scientific field etc.)17 and so has the same fantastic
isolation and similar logic, since Bourdieu was able to invent a male
illusio18. But here doesn't fit a general critique of Bourdieu's
sociology, that we'll do another time, but point out that his
methodological procedure and his approach to the issue of women
is tied to his abstract-metaphysical building, or ideological.
Thus, Scott complement to her analysis appealing to Bourdieu
does not hold. But it is nonetheless interesting this appeal and how
a metaphysical approach to the genre in Scott can be supplemented
with other metaphysical approach, Bourdieu's approach. The
rejection of all or reducing it to a sector of reality, arbitrarily chosen
as essential, since there was no justification, is a post-structuralist
procedure reproduced by Scott and by gender ideologues.

16 About the values and process valuation and its social character, check Viana, 2008.
17 For a critical and distinct analysis of the analysis presented by Bourdieu about the fields, see
Viana, 2015a.
18 The illusio is an expression originally used by Bourdieu to portray the art of fetishism, in

which agents of the artistic field endow value to works of art and transform them into fetishes
(Bourdieu, 1996). It is a great extrapolation use this expression to speak of masculine
domination.
We can conclude this analysis of the construct gender putting
his abstract-metaphysical character, coming from the culturalist fad
derived from post-structuralism19, just is a word used to uses and
abuses, but that does not explain anything and does not lend itself
to the struggle for social transformation because instead of
unmasking power, hides. The gender construct is a unit of an
ideological discourse. This ideological discourse or perform a
fantastic isolation of relations between the sexes or considers such
relations as founders of the social, or, as they say, power or, even,
the power conceived metaphysically goes on to explain such
relations. Thus, culture and power are transformed into
metaphysical abstractions that come to explain and determine
everything. In this last case, the indeterminate (culture, power)
becomes the determinant of social relations, and this ideology that
explains nothing becomes hegemonic in certain circles. In the first
case, relations between the sexes (of gender) are determinant,
though never substantiated the source of this determination. That's
why the work of Bourdieu is well received by some of the genre
ideologues, because the isolation of these relations is the same type
as they do, however, much is talked about culture or power,
always in an abstract way.
Another characteristic that reproduces the gender ideology is
the lack of references to concrete human beings, concrete social
relations. The books of the genre ideologues are full of references to
other works, that is, we are in a bookish world in which a book refers
to several other books (not for them extract concrete social relations,
but only other theses), and a thesis refers to several other theories,

19What we call post-structuralism is what is commonly called postmodernism and includes the
group of emerging ideologies from the 1970s, and that became hegemonic in the following
decades, including the most varied ideologies.
a vicious and self-referential circle of ideological world. No doubt,
there may be exceptions (Bourdieu does not enter in this group, for
example, although his approach of concrete reality is fragmentary
and reversed and he is not exactly one of the representatives of this
trendency), but this is the rule of the gender ideologies.
But what is the source of Scott and gender ideologues? She
herself reveals: concern with gender as an analytic category has
emerged only in the late twentieth century. It is absent from the
major bodies of social theory articulated from the eighteenth to the
early twentieth centuries20. The use of the word occurs in a
particular historical context: The term gender is part of the attempt
by contemporary feminists to stake claim to a certain definitional
ground, to insist on the inadequacy of existing bodies of theory for
explaining persistente inequalities bewteen women and men21.
This mutation occurs in a moment of great epistemological
effervescence:

In the space opened by this debate and on the side of the


critique of Science developed by the humanities, and of
empiricism and humanism by post-structuralists, feminists have
not only begun to find a theoretical voice of their own but have
found scholarly and political allies as well. It is within this space
that we must articulate gender as an analytic category.22
The date of the predecessor studies is the 60s, the time of the
counterculture of the hippie movement, the feminist movement, of
Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique, as well as the works of
Kate Millet, Sexual Politics and Germaine Greer, The Female
Eunuch, which already begin to use the term gender but without the
subsequent connotation. It is from the cultural counter-revolution,

20 Scott, 1986, p. 1066.


21 Scott, 1986, p. 1066.
22 Scott, 1986, p. 1066.
Which began after the defeat of the student rebellion of May 1968
expressed in the post-avant-garde (art) and poststructuralism
(science)23, that begins the ideological production which will be the
basis of gender ideologies, such as the work of Michel Foucault, the
largest poststructuralist ideology in his critical tendency and the
other representatives of this ideology (Guattari, Deleuze, etc.). The
ideology of gender is strengthened and systematized in the 80s. The
mutation begins at the 70s: In an article in 1973 that documents the
terminological change of sex to gender, Strathern anticipates his
conception of gender as a symbolic system24. In 1988, she
launched a book which deepens her conception. But it is in the 80s
that feminist analysis about gender relations is more sophisticate.
With the emergence of neo-liberalism, poststructuralism becomes
hegemonic and dominant and the gender ideology is one of its
products.
The intellectual productions from the 70s called postmodern
are actually reformed and depoliticized versions of critical trends of
the 60s. The struggles of the end of the 60s (that ranges from the
counterculture to the student and workers' struggles in
Germany/France, and the workers' struggles in Italy, etc.) and
critical intellectual production (Debord and the Situationist
International, Henri Lefebvre, Marcuse, Sartre, etc.). Capitalism's
mutation occurs from the 60s and is realized in the 80s, with the
emergence of the full regime of accumulation25, which means a
cultural transformation that seeks to appropriate the previous

23 Ideologically called postmodernism. A critique of the construct postmodernism and a


comprehensive review of post-structuralism can be seen in Viana, 2009. Another criticism of
post-structuralism can be seen in Eagleton, 1998.
24 Stolke, 2004, p. 91.
25 Viana, 2009; Viana, 2015b.
oppositional culture to disarm it and cause it to lose strength and
effect.
Poststructuralism has as its fundamental point the criticism of
the approach of the whole, or, as says one of its main ideologues, of
the meta-narratives.26 It is precisely this aspect that enables the
non-politicisation or micro-reformism, depending on the approach.
Some poststructuralist, when denying all, start to perform purely
descriptive approaches (non-politicisation) of everyday elements
and other reference to power, but purely in everyday scale, isolating
the power relations in a certain place or social relationship and after
this isolation, presents isolated fights and makes its praise, refusing
all forms of articulation and expansion of the fight. This procedure is
used initially by Foucault27 and Guattari28, and, afterwards is
performed by gender ideologues, which create a set of constructs
ahistorical and isolated, as the so-called gender relations, and
address some social phenomena creating a small world reified that
references to culture and power, but taken as metaphysical entities
and solely linked to this reified world.
Gender ideology arises in this context. And nothing more
revealing than the vicissitudes of feminists who have embraced this
concept and elect power relations as a fundamental and at the
same, time hide or are unaware that these relationships are
products of this same reality and therefore power relations. The
masculine domination revealed by Bourdieu is harmless against
him, perhaps by reason of being a sociologist, an intellectual,
although he says that intellectuals are a dominated fraction of the

26 Lyotard, 1986.
27 Foucault, 1989.
28 Guattari, 1981.
dominant class29. Joan Scott, Judith Butler and all others are above
this masculine reality marked by power relations and they are
female specimens, but do not suffer the determinations and
oppression of other mortals. In a nutshell, the ideologues think they
are as Baron of Munchausen and thus can be pulled by the hair and
become immune to what exists (culture, power relations,
phallogocentrism, male illusio, etc.). The references also have the
same immunity and therefore Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, are the
great inspirers of the new ideology.
Thus the archeology of the term genre is only a description of
its uses, but never of its genesis and its relationship with the social
and historical changes. And so once again, it reproduces the
evolutionary and unilinear conception of development of human
thought, which occurs since Comte and Hegel, and reaches today
with "ingenuous" gender ideologues. The ideology has no
independent history, stand-alone30, except in the very ideological
discourse, which reverses the reality and presents itself as a product
of a breakthrough and improvement of the previous idea or as a
false break with the predecessor conceptions, but always going
towards the absolute truth.
Thus, the gender ideology is so dated historically and socially
determined as any other ideology, and its ideological sources
(poststructuralism) as its content, demonstrate the limits of such
approach, revealing only another form of false consciousness
systematized.

References

29 Bourdieu, 1990.
30 Marx and Engels, 1991.
Beauvoir, Simone 1978. O Segundo Sexo. Rio de Janeiro:
Francisco Alves.

Bourdieu, Pierre 1996. As Regras da Arte. So Paulo: Companhia


das Letras, 1996.

Bourdieu, Pierre 2002. Maculine Domination. Stanford: Stanford


University Press.

Butler, Judith 2003. Problemas de Gnero. Feminismo e Subverso


da Identidade. Rio de Janeiro: Civilizao Brasileira, 2003.

Eagleton, Terry 1998. As Iluses do Ps-Modernismo. Rio de


Janeiro: Jorge Zahar.
Foucault 1989, Michel. Microfsica do Poder. 8 edition, Rio de
Janeiro: Graal.
Guattari, Flix 1981. Revoluo Molecular: Pulsaes Polticas do
Desejo. So Paulo: Brasiliense.
Lyotard, Jean-Franois 1986. O Ps-Moderno. Rio de Janeiro: Jos
Olympio, 1986.

Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich 1982. A Ideologia Alem


(Feuerbach). 3a edition, So Paulo: Lech.

Scott, Joan 1986. Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.


The American Historical Review, Vol. 91, No. 5. (Dec., 1986),
pp. 1053-1075.

Stolke, Verena 2004. La Mujer es Puro Cuento: La Cultura del


Gnero. Estudos Feministas. Vol. 12, no 02. may/aug. 2004.

Viana, Nildo 2007. A Conscincia da Histria. Ensaios Sobre o


Materialismo Histrico-Dialtico. 2 edition, Rio de Janeiro:
Achiam.
Viana, Nildo 2008. Os Valores na Sociedade Moderna. Braslia:
Thesaurus.

Viana, Nildo 2009. O Capitalismo na Era da Acumulao Integral.


So Paulo: Ideias e Letras.

Viana, Nildo 2015a. As Esferas Sociais. A Constituio Capitalista


da Diviso do Trabalho Intelectual. Rio de Janeiro: Rizoma.

Viana, Nildo 2015b. Estado, Democracia e Cidadania. A Dinmica


da Poltica Institucional no Capitalismo. 2 edition, Rio de
Janeiro: Rizoma.
Manuscript (anonymized)

1
Gender and Ideology
2
3 For a Marxist critique of gender ideology
4
5
6 Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to discuss the issue of gender ideology in a critical and Marxist
7 perspective. Criticism of the gender ideology is now a must, as well as present their social roots and their
8
relationship to a particular historical period. Based on the critical analysis of the work of Joan Scott and
9
his inspiring sources, especially Bourdieu, it seeks to show the ideological roots of gender conception.
10
11
Keywords: Gender, Ideology, category, Marxism, Poststructuralism, domination, sex.
12
13
14 The present paper aims to discuss the issue of gender
15
16 ideology. We wont do an archeology of genre term, as some have
17
18 done1, nor will pursue its etymological roots, nor its past uses, but
19
20
21
only its recent use and its ideological character. The critique of
22
23 gender ideology is, nowadays, a necessity as well as present its
24
25 social roots and its bond with a certain historical period.
26
27 Before we begin, lets clarify what we mean by ideology, since
28
29 this is a polysemic term. Here we use the Marxist conception of
30
31 ideology2, according to which it is a systematization of false
32
33 consciousness, that is, a illusory thinking system. Ideology is a
34
35 systematic way of false consciousness produced by the ideologists.
36
37
38
What we term as gender ideology is the conception that places the
39
40 construct3 gender as a fundamental term of the analysis of the
41
42 issue of women and even of society as a whole.
43
44 We won't present here the most diverse works that discuss and
45
46 use the construct gender. We will elect one of the most cited and
47
48 influential works on this issue for analysis, although other references
49
50 are made throughout this text. It is the text of the historian Joan
51
52
53
Scott4, Gender: A Usefull Category of Historical Analysis. Joan Scott
54
55
56 1 Stolke, 2004.
57 2 Marx and Engels, 1991.
58 3 A constructor is a false concept, and this is a correct expression of reality, while that is its
59
distorted expression. See in Viana, 2007.
60 4 Scott, 1986.
61
62
63
64
65
presents in her text an overview of different conceptions of feminist
1
2 thought and of the use of the construct (which she denominated
3
4 category) genre. The various concepts are presented descriptively,
5
6
7
with superficial observations, and the author's point of view is
8
9 presented peripherally, with a minimum contribution to the
10
11 discussion around the issue that is proposed to treat. In fact, this
12
13 defect to take long descriptions of feminist conceptions, consisting of
14
15 all or almost all of the text, is quite common and is repeated in
16
17 Scott's article. She states that the term gender in its most recent use
18
19 occurred among American feminists, who wanted to insist on the
20
21 fundamentally social quality of distinctions based on sex. This use
22
23
24
was aiming to reject biological determinism that would be implicit in
25
26 the use of the terms sex and sexual difference. The term gender
27
28 would present a relational view and would present men and women
29
30 in reciprocal terms, preventing the separate study of both. But the
31
32 author points out that more important than that is that gender was a
33
34 term offered by those who claimed that womens scholarship would
35
36 fundamentally transform disciplinary paradigms5. A new
37
38 methodology and epistemology would be with the term gender,
39
40
41 giving it meaning. However, this position did not come right away:
42
43
44 For the most part, the attempts of historians to theorize about
45 gender have remained within tradicional social scientific
46
47 frameworks, using longstanding formulations that provide
48 universal causal explanations. These theories have been
49
50
limited at best because they tend to contain reductive or overly
51 simple generalizations that undercut not only historys
52 disciplinary sense of the complexity of social causation but also
53
54 feminist commitments to analyses that will lead to change.6
55
56
57
58
59 5 Scott, 1986, p. 1054.
60 6 Scott, 1986, p. 1055.
61
62
63
64
65
After that, the author criticizes the descriptive uses of those who
1
2 use the term gender, as well as analyzes the feminist conceptions
3
4 starting from the perspective of the origin of patriarchy, of Marxism,
5
6
7
until reach the post-structuralism and the American and British
8
9 approach of relation of object. She makes some pertinent
10
11 criticisms of some of these conceptions, but is rather superficial and
12
13 does not connect more effectively with her own conception.
14
15 However, what interests us here is precisely Scott's position. In this
16
17 context, it is crucial her definition of gender:
18
19
20 My definition of gender has two parts and several subsets. They
21
22 are interrelated but must be analytically distinct. The core of the
23 definition rests on an integral connection between two
24
25 propositions: gender is a constitutive elemento of social
26 relationships based on perceived differences between the
27 sexes, and gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of
28
29 power. Changes in the organization of social relationships
30 Always correspond to changes in representations of power, but
31
32 the direction of change is not necessarily one way.7
33
34 According to Scott, this definition involves four related
35
36 elements: 1) the culturally available symbols evoke symbolic
37
38 representations; 2) there are normative concepts that present
39
40
41 interpretations regarding the meaning of the symbols, in order to
42
43 reduce and contain their metaphoric possibilities; 3) the new
44
45 conception task is to overcome the notion of fixity and timelessness
46
47 of the binary gender representation, revealing its connection with
48
49 politics, with the institutions and social organization; 4) The
50
51 subjective identity or the gendered identities are built, and it's
52
53 needed to relate it to a range of activities, social organizations, and
54
55
56
57
58
59
60 7 Scott, 1986, p. 1067.
61
62
63
64
65
historically specific cultural representations8. She reveals the key to
1
2 her conception (Scott, 1986, p. 1069):
3
4
5 The first part of my definition of gender consists, then, of all four
6
7 of these elements, and no one of them operates without the
8 others. Yet they do not operate simultaneously, with one simply
9
10 reflecting the others. A question for historical research is, in
11 fact, what the relationships amont the four aspects are. The
12
13
sketch I have offered of the process of constructing gender
14 relationships could be used to discuss class, race, ethnicity, or,
15 for that matter, any social process. My point was to clariy and
16
17 specify how one needs to think about the effect of gender in
18 social and institutional relationships, because this thinking is
19
20 often not done precisely or sistematically. The theorizing of
21 gender, however, is developed in my second proposition:
22
23
gender is a primary field within which or by means of which
24 power is articulated. Gender is not the only field, but it seems to
25 have been a persistent and recurrent way of enabling the
26
27 signification of power in the West, in Judeo-Christian as well as
28 Islamic tradicions.
29
30
31 Thus here we have a particular ideology of genre that will be
32
33 widely used by researchers of various human sciences and become
34
35 a great reference, both in academic thinking in this area as of
36
37 feminist thought. Thereby, this ideology arises of the refusal of
38
39 biological determinism, of essentialism, and ends up proposing a
40
41 paradigmatic transformation, presenting gender as a cultural
42
43 construction and is in the founder field of power relations. This
44
45
46
conception is ideological, that is, false, although, like every ideology,
47
48 has moments of truth.
49
50 The refusal of biologism is important and necessary, however,
51
52 when extrapolating this and presenting a rejection of biological (we
53
54 would say, of corporeality and its importance) although this was
55
56 not explicitly stated, but it was practiced in the rest of the speech ,
57
58
59
60 8 Scott, 1986, p. 1068.
61
62
63
64
65
we have an ideological production. The social status of women in
1
2 modern society is not exclusively derived from its physical/organic
3
4 constitution and this is true, but is false from there to deny its
5
6
7
existence or relation to this process. Obviously this will be the
8
9 starting point for other ideologies even more misleading and
10
11 bordering the absurd9. The criticism of biologism, with regard to
12
13 women's issues, moreover, is nothing new as it was born with
14
15 Simone de Beauvoir10 in the 40s of the 20th Century and
16
17 contemporary references add nothing and not go beyond the level
18
19 presented by her, unless in a retrograde direction.
20
21 What she denounces in the other approaches is precisely what
22
23
24
she does. She provides a universal causal explanation and held
25
26 reductive generalizations and overly simple. The determinism of
27
28 gender is an ideological creation not only simplistic, but dogmatic, as
29
30 it does not question and reflect on its own fundamentals. It is a
31
32 determinism and a reductionism. And it is nonetheless revealed the
33
34 disregard of historical materialism or, as is common, reduce it to
35
36 more simplistic and dogmatic formulations, ie exchange it for what
37
38
39
it's called vulgar Marxism, far short of Marx.
40
41
42
43 9 The most explicit example of this ideological exasperation is Butler's thesis (2003), according
44 to which sex is an effect of gender and society is based on compulsory heterosexuality. That
45 is, the determinant is the genre (cultural building) and not sex (organism) and the dominant
46 sexual practices, heterosexuality, is compulsory, product of power relations, according to his
47 inspiration in Foucault. This hyper culturalist thesis does not realize that cancels itself and falls
48 into many contradictions. If it's the genre that produces sex (woman has no sex, according to
49 the epigraph of Irigaray used by Butler) then it is merely a cultural construction. So whats the
50 problem? In what a cultural construction is better than the other? The answer is provided in the
51 second thesis, the thesis of compulsory heterosexuality (not to mention the
52 phallocentrism...). If heterosexuality is compulsory, then people are forced to be heterosexual,
53 which means they are not naturally so. But if they are forced to be heterosexuals then it is
54 because they are naturally homosexuals... an inversion (gender determines sex) is
55
complemented by other (normal and natural is homosexuality...). This conception, besides
56
having no basis in concrete reality, ends up falling into essentialism and biologism that it
57
intended to fight (Only reverses/exchange heterosexual by homosexual essence and the sole
58
basis for such essentialism can only be biological... After all, for what reason, other than
59
biological, people would naturally be homosexual?).
60 10 Beauvoir, 1978.
61
62
63
64
65
However, the most problematic element of Scott's conception is
1
2 in her pursuit of paradigmatic transformation, which is based on the
3
4 idea that gender is the primary way to give meaning to the relations
5
6
7
of power. The basis of such a theory is not held anywhere.
8
9 References to Eve and Mary (Christian tradition), or any stereotype
10
11 of women, outside the context in which it occurs, not establish
12
13 nothing. The quotes of thinkers considered representatives of
14
15 conservative thought, contrary to the French Revolution, as Burke,
16
17 Bodin, among others, can not be generalized, if only because it is a
18
19 critique of the Enlightenment and the bourgeois revolution of pre-
20
21 bourgeois point of view. And it is nonetheless interesting as several
22
23
24
women authors derive their ideas in the speeches of other women
25
26 authors (or men authors, in rare cases) and not in concrete reality11.
27
28 These conceptions are based on a unquestioned and
29
30 unquestionable, that is, a dogma, which reveals a metaphysical
31
32 abstraction and that does not explain anything. Taking the specific
33
34 case of Scott, we have gender as primary field in which or through
35
36 which power is articulated. In addition to the statement, no
37
38 justification, other than a brief reference to the sociologist Pierre
39
40
41 Bourdieu. The genre here is a priori unquestioned, a dogma, without
42
43 any justification.
44
45 The term gender is a metaphysical abstraction when seeking to
46
47 transform it from category to concept12, and so loses all its value.
48
49 And this is even more serious when one want to put it as the
50
51 determination of power relations. Obviously, no substantiated
52
53 reasons is given for such priority to gender while instituting concept
54
55
56 11Scott, 1986; Stolke, 2004; Butler, 2003.
57 12A category is a resource without mental existence in the concrete reality, while a concept is
58
an expression of reality therefore has concreteness. The expression "gender", as relationship,
59
cause, effect, space, right, left, etc., falls within the first type, and to move to the second type
60
must have an increase of something real, concrete (Viana, 2007).
61
62
63
64
65
of social reality and power relationships. The author is content to
1
2 appeal to Bourdieu and his reflections. Bourdieu condemns the non-
3
4 historicity (naturalization, that is, make natural, something that is
5
6
7
history), and at the same time does it. This is due to the fact that he
8
9 never performs an analysis of the concrete reality of capitalist
10
11 society, but purely presents his metaphysical abstractions about
12
13 symbolic power, accompanied by his empiricism or its ideology of
14
15 fields which serves as a model to think the masculine
16
17 domination13, an undue extrapolation. In Bourdieu's approach, the
18
19 metaphysical abstraction meets the empirical that comes to confirm
20
21 it, creating a dichotomous but homologous vision where isolated
22
23
24
incidents of all serve as examples of metaphysical abstractions of
25
26 symbolic violence and the like.
27
28 One can not think man (male gender) and women (female
29
30 gender) as arbitrary cultural constructions. The representations, real
31
32 or illusory, according to Marx14, are given from concrete social
33
34 relations. Everyday representations and ideologies about female
35
36 gender (and male gender), are not arbitrary products of culture or
37
38
39
power, these two metaphysical entities that dominate the
40
41 anthropological contemporary discourse or post structuralist,
42
43 whereas both culture and power of this ideology appears as
44
45 something non-historical, indeterminate, asocial. The perception of
46
47 the female gender consists historically and socially, but it's needed
48
49 to discuss in which historical period and social context it occurs, as
50
51 well as understand what is the class position of whom presents it.
52
53 Let's see what Bourdieu says:
54
55
56
57
58
59 13 Bourdieu, 2002.
60 14 Marx and Engels, 1991.
61
62
63
64
65
The divisions constitutive of the social order and, more
1
2
precisely, the social relations of domination and exploitation that
3 are instituted between the sexes thus progressively embed
4 themselves in two different classes of habitus, in the form of
5
6 opposed and complementary bodily hexis and principles of
7 vision and division which lead to the classifying of all the things
8
9 of the world and all practices according to distinctions that are
10 reducible to the male/female opposition. It falls to men, who
11 belong on the side of all things external, official, public, straight,
12
13 high and discontinuous, to perform all the brief, dangerous and
14 spectacular acts which, like the sacrifice of the ox, ploughing or
15
16 harvesting, not to mention murder or war, mark breaks in the
17 ordinary course of life; women, by contrast, being on the side of
18
19
things that are internal, damp, low, curved and continuous, are
20 assigned all domestic labour, in other words the tasks that are
21 private and hidden, even invisible or shameful, such as the care
22
23 of the children or the animals, as well as all the external tasks
24 that are attributed to them by mythic reason, that is to say,
25
26 those that involve water, grass and other green vegetation
27 (such as hoeing and gardening), milk and wood, and especially
28
29
the dirtiest, most monotonous and menial tasks.15
30
31 This quotation can be an example to analyze Bourdieu's
32
33 procedure and its risks. First, we have a generalization: on one side
34
35 men, on the other, women. Men, according to Bourdieu, are on
36
37 the official side, of the right. All the men? The proletarians? The
38
39
40
lumpen proletarians? The peasants? And women are all on the
41
42 other side, thus there is no woman who holds power, that is in the
43
44 state, etc. Women often are left with the dirty work, they take care of
45
46 children. The women of the bourgeoisie do this? They do not hire
47
48 other women to do it for them? In this approach, it seems like
49
50 domestic workers work only for men, and the women of the
51
52 bourgeoisie care for children, working in monotonous and menial
53
54 tasks. We do not know which country and epoch refers Bourdieu.
55
56
57 He refers to an abstract-metaphysical world that does not exist
58
59
60 15 Bourdieu, 2002, p. 30.
61
62
63
64
65
concretely. Women, in the plural and in general, has as task the
1
2 invisible, shameful work, such as child care. Ora, Only from certain
3
4 values that caring for children is "shameful", as well as other
5
6
7
examples cited by Bourdieu, ie, humility, shame, etc., is not an
8
9 attribute of activities but a valuation or devaluation of activities.16
10
11 In Bourdieu's analysis, phenomena such as social classes,
12
13 values, capital accumulation, class struggle, etc., do not exist. The
14
15 capitalist domination and the mercantile, competitive and
16
17 bureaucratic world also do not exist in his approach. The masculine
18
19 domination to Bourdieu has a structural homology to the various
20
21
22
camps that he says exist in reality (artistic field, political field
23
24
economic field scientific field etc.)17 and so has the same fantastic
25
26 isolation and similar logic, since Bourdieu was able to invent a male
27
28 illusio18. But here doesn't fit a general critique of Bourdieu's
29
30 sociology, that we'll do another time, but point out that his
31
32 methodological procedure and his approach to the issue of women
33
34 is tied to his abstract-metaphysical building, or ideological.
35
36 Thus, Scott complement to her analysis appealing to Bourdieu
37
38 does not hold. But it is nonetheless interesting this appeal and how
39
40
41 a metaphysical approach to the genre in Scott can be supplemented
42
43 with other metaphysical approach, Bourdieu's approach. The
44
45 rejection of all or reducing it to a sector of reality, arbitrarily chosen
46
47 as essential, since there was no justification, is a post-structuralist
48
49 procedure reproduced by Scott and by gender ideologues.
50
51
52
53
54 16 About the values and process valuation and its social character, check Viana, 2008.
55 17 For a critical and distinct analysis of the analysis presented by Bourdieu about the fields, see
56
Viana, 2015a.
57 18 The illusio is an expression originally used by Bourdieu to portray the art of fetishism, in
58
which agents of the artistic field endow value to works of art and transform them into fetishes
59
(Bourdieu, 1996). It is a great extrapolation use this expression to speak of masculine
60
domination.
61
62
63
64
65
We can conclude this analysis of the construct gender putting
1
2 his abstract-metaphysical character, coming from the culturalist fad
3
4 derived from post-structuralism19, just is a word used to uses and
5
6
7
abuses, but that does not explain anything and does not lend itself
8
9 to the struggle for social transformation because instead of
10
11 unmasking power, hides. The gender construct is a unit of an
12
13 ideological discourse. This ideological discourse or perform a
14
15 fantastic isolation of relations between the sexes or considers such
16
17 relations as founders of the social, or, as they say, power or, even,
18
19 the power conceived metaphysically goes on to explain such
20
21 relations. Thus, culture and power are transformed into
22
23
24
metaphysical abstractions that come to explain and determine
25
26 everything. In this last case, the indeterminate (culture, power)
27
28 becomes the determinant of social relations, and this ideology that
29
30 explains nothing becomes hegemonic in certain circles. In the first
31
32 case, relations between the sexes (of gender) are determinant,
33
34 though never substantiated the source of this determination. That's
35
36 why the work of Bourdieu is well received by some of the genre
37
38 ideologues, because the isolation of these relations is the same type
39
40
41 as they do, however, much is talked about culture or power,
42
43 always in an abstract way.
44
45 Another characteristic that reproduces the gender ideology is
46
47 the lack of references to concrete human beings, concrete social
48
49 relations. The books of the genre ideologues are full of references to
50
51 other works, that is, we are in a bookish world in which a book refers
52
53 to several other books (not for them extract concrete social relations,
54
55
56
but only other theses), and a thesis refers to several other theories,
57
58 19What we call post-structuralism is what is commonly called postmodernism and includes the
59
group of emerging ideologies from the 1970s, and that became hegemonic in the following
60
decades, including the most varied ideologies.
61
62
63
64
65
a vicious and self-referential circle of ideological world. No doubt,
1
2 there may be exceptions (Bourdieu does not enter in this group, for
3
4 example, although his approach of concrete reality is fragmentary
5
6
7
and reversed and he is not exactly one of the representatives of this
8
9 trendency), but this is the rule of the gender ideologies.
10
11 But what is the source of Scott and gender ideologues? She
12
13 herself reveals: concern with gender as an analytic category has
14
15 emerged only in the late twentieth century. It is absent from the
16
17 major bodies of social theory articulated from the eighteenth to the
18
19 early twentieth centuries20. The use of the word occurs in a
20
21
22
particular historical context: The term gender is part of the attempt
23
24
by contemporary feminists to stake claim to a certain definitional
25
26 ground, to insist on the inadequacy of existing bodies of theory for
27
28 explaining persistente inequalities bewteen women and men21.
29
30 This mutation occurs in a moment of great epistemological
31
32 effervescence:
33
34
35 In the space opened by this debate and on the side of the
36
37 critique of Science developed by the humanities, and of
38 empiricism and humanism by post-structuralists, feminists have
39
40
not only begun to find a theoretical voice of their own but have
41 found scholarly and political allies as well. It is within this space
42 that we must articulate gender as an analytic category.22
43
44
45 The date of the predecessor studies is the 60s, the time of the
46
47 counterculture of the hippie movement, the feminist movement, of
48
49 Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique, as well as the works of
50
51 Kate Millet, Sexual Politics and Germaine Greer, The Female
52
53 Eunuch, which already begin to use the term gender but without the
54
55
56
subsequent connotation. It is from the cultural counter-revolution,
57
58 20 Scott, 1986, p. 1066.
59 21 Scott, 1986, p. 1066.
60 22 Scott, 1986, p. 1066.
61
62
63
64
65
Which began after the defeat of the student rebellion of May 1968
1
2 expressed in the post-avant-garde (art) and poststructuralism
3
4 (science)23, that begins the ideological production which will be the
5
6
7
basis of gender ideologies, such as the work of Michel Foucault, the
8
9 largest poststructuralist ideology in his critical tendency and the
10
11 other representatives of this ideology (Guattari, Deleuze, etc.). The
12
13 ideology of gender is strengthened and systematized in the 80s. The
14
15 mutation begins at the 70s: In an article in 1973 that documents the
16
17 terminological change of sex to gender, Strathern anticipates his
18
19 conception of gender as a symbolic system24. In 1988, she
20
21 launched a book which deepens her conception. But it is in the 80s
22
23
24
that feminist analysis about gender relations is more sophisticate.
25
26 With the emergence of neo-liberalism, poststructuralism becomes
27
28 hegemonic and dominant and the gender ideology is one of its
29
30 products.
31
32 The intellectual productions from the 70s called postmodern
33
34 are actually reformed and depoliticized versions of critical trends of
35
36 the 60s. The struggles of the end of the 60s (that ranges from the
37
38 counterculture to the student and workers' struggles in
39
40
41 Germany/France, and the workers' struggles in Italy, etc.) and
42
43 critical intellectual production (Debord and the Situationist
44
45 International, Henri Lefebvre, Marcuse, Sartre, etc.). Capitalism's
46
47 mutation occurs from the 60s and is realized in the 80s, with the
48
49 emergence of the full regime of accumulation25, which means a
50
51 cultural transformation that seeks to appropriate the previous
52
53
54
55
56 23 Ideologically called postmodernism. A critique of the construct postmodernism and a
57
comprehensive review of post-structuralism can be seen in Viana, 2009. Another criticism of
58
post-structuralism can be seen in Eagleton, 1998.
59 24 Stolke, 2004, p. 91.
60 25 Viana, 2009; Viana, 2015b.
61
62
63
64
65
oppositional culture to disarm it and cause it to lose strength and
1
2 effect.
3
4 Poststructuralism has as its fundamental point the criticism of
5
6
7
the approach of the whole, or, as says one of its main ideologues, of
8
9 the meta-narratives.26 It is precisely this aspect that enables the
10
11 non-politicisation or micro-reformism, depending on the approach.
12
13 Some poststructuralist, when denying all, start to perform purely
14
15 descriptive approaches (non-politicisation) of everyday elements
16
17 and other reference to power, but purely in everyday scale, isolating
18
19 the power relations in a certain place or social relationship and after
20
21 this isolation, presents isolated fights and makes its praise, refusing
22
23
24
all forms of articulation and expansion of the fight. This procedure is
25
26 used initially by Foucault27 and Guattari28, and, afterwards is
27
28 performed by gender ideologues, which create a set of constructs
29
30 ahistorical and isolated, as the so-called gender relations, and
31
32 address some social phenomena creating a small world reified that
33
34 references to culture and power, but taken as metaphysical entities
35
36 and solely linked to this reified world.
37
38 Gender ideology arises in this context. And nothing more
39
40
41 revealing than the vicissitudes of feminists who have embraced this
42
43 concept and elect power relations as a fundamental and at the
44
45 same, time hide or are unaware that these relationships are
46
47 products of this same reality and therefore power relations. The
48
49 masculine domination revealed by Bourdieu is harmless against
50
51 him, perhaps by reason of being a sociologist, an intellectual,
52
53 although he says that intellectuals are a dominated fraction of the
54
55
56
57
58 26 Lyotard, 1986.
59 27 Foucault, 1989.
60 28 Guattari, 1981.
61
62
63
64
65
dominant class29. Joan Scott, Judith Butler and all others are above
1
2 this masculine reality marked by power relations and they are
3
4 female specimens, but do not suffer the determinations and
5
6
7
oppression of other mortals. In a nutshell, the ideologues think they
8
9 are as Baron of Munchausen and thus can be pulled by the hair and
10
11 become immune to what exists (culture, power relations,
12
13 phallogocentrism, male illusio, etc.). The references also have the
14
15 same immunity and therefore Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, are the
16
17 great inspirers of the new ideology.
18
19 Thus the archeology of the term genre is only a description of
20
21 its uses, but never of its genesis and its relationship with the social
22
23
24
and historical changes. And so once again, it reproduces the
25
26 evolutionary and unilinear conception of development of human
27
28 thought, which occurs since Comte and Hegel, and reaches today
29
30 with "ingenuous" gender ideologues. The ideology has no
31
32 independent history, stand-alone30, except in the very ideological
33
34 discourse, which reverses the reality and presents itself as a product
35
36 of a breakthrough and improvement of the previous idea or as a
37
38 false break with the predecessor conceptions, but always going
39
40
41 towards the absolute truth.
42
43 Thus, the gender ideology is so dated historically and socially
44
45 determined as any other ideology, and its ideological sources
46
47 (poststructuralism) as its content, demonstrate the limits of such
48
49 approach, revealing only another form of false consciousness
50
51 systematized.
52
53
54
55
56
References
57
58
59 29 Bourdieu, 1990.
60 30 Marx and Engels, 1991.
61
62
63
64
65
1
2 Beauvoir, Simone 1978. O Segundo Sexo. Rio de Janeiro:
3
4 Francisco Alves.
5
6
7 Bourdieu, Pierre 1996. As Regras da Arte. So Paulo: Companhia
8
9 das Letras, 1996.
10
11
12 Bourdieu, Pierre 2002. Maculine Domination. Stanford: Stanford
13
14 University Press.
15
16
17 Butler, Judith 2003. Problemas de Gnero. Feminismo e Subverso
18
19 da Identidade. Rio de Janeiro: Civilizao Brasileira, 2003.
20
21 Eagleton, Terry 1998. As Iluses do Ps-Modernismo. Rio de
22
23
24
Janeiro: Jorge Zahar.
25
26 Foucault 1989, Michel. Microfsica do Poder. 8 edition, Rio de
27
28 Janeiro: Graal.
29
30 Guattari, Flix 1981. Revoluo Molecular: Pulsaes Polticas do
31 Desejo. So Paulo: Brasiliense.
32
33 Lyotard, Jean-Franois 1986. O Ps-Moderno. Rio de Janeiro: Jos
34
35 Olympio, 1986.
36
37
38
Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich 1982. A Ideologia Alem
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