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Sex, Work, And The Feminist Erasure Of Class, Brooke M. Beloso

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

In this essay, I trace the contemporary feminist debate on prostitution to the period in which Catharine MacKinnon and Gayle Rubin deemed Marxism inadequate to the task of theorizing women’s oppression. In seeking to surmount this perceived inadequacy, both thinkers counterposed alternative theoretical frameworks for analyzing women’s oppression that nonetheless relied upon certain of Marxism’s central tenets. In a reliance that took the form of strikingly similar translations of Marxism foregrounding what came to be known as radical feminism (in the case of MacKinnon) and queer theory (in the case of Rubin), both theorists problematically render class as, respectively, gender …