Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference, and Women's Lives

Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference, and Women's Lives by Hennessy, Rosemary. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780415916349.

During the 1980s, capitalism triumphantly secured its global reach, anti-communist ideologies hammered home socialisms inherent failure, the New Left increasingly moved into the professional middle class--and many of feminisms earlier priorities were marginalized. "Identity politics", often formulated in terms of social reconstructionism or multiculturalism, has increasingly suppressed materialist feminisms systematic perspective, replacing it with discourse analysis or cultural politics. Materialist Feminism: A Reader argues against the retreat to multiculturalism for keeping invisible the material links among the explosion of meaning-making practices in highly industrialized social sectors, the exploitation of womens labor, and the appropriation of womens bodies that continues to undergird the scramble for profits and state power in multinational capitalism.