Marxist Feminism in Flight

The twenty-three white men and six "others" who taught courses or presented papers at the Marxist Literary Group Summer Institute in 1983 occasionally acknowledged the importance of feminism, postcolonial criticism, and ethnic studies but also, not surprisingly, often marginalized these lines of inquiry.For the editors of the 1988 anthology drawn from the proceedings, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, "protest movements centered around blacks, distinctly privileged and middle-class college students, and women" had "failed : : : to produce broad and pervasive political change" (Nelson and Grossberg, "Territory" 4).These "failures," asserted rather than demonstrated, were seen to require a rededication to a totalizing theory, but this time taking representation and culture into account more fully.Sensing the nascent pressures of globalization that they can't quite register, these thinkers seek a Marxism that can "reterritorialize itself" (11).Today, one hears the settler-colonial, not just Deleuzian, implications of this language, firmly inside rather than outside the machinations of racial capitalism and its gendered distribution of power.The feminist thinking about labor, capital, and materialism that would prove most influential in the 1980s was often happening in other places.But at least two enduring feminist statements were published in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?," an instant classic of postcolonial feminism, and Catharine A. MacKinnon's "Desire and Power: A Feminist Perspective," which had a different fate.In part because of MacKinnon's association with Andrea Dworkin and their collaboration on various antipornography municipal ordinances