Materialism and gender reification: a Butlerian interpretation of social reproduction

• Grant number: 22/00468-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: December 01, 2022
• Status: Discontinued
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy - Ethics
• Principal Investigator: Monique Hulshof
• Grantee: Julia Secaf Bistane
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 24/14729-7 - The material dimension of Butler's critique of gender ideology, BE.EP.DR

Abstract

This research project aims to support the hypothesis that the concept of performativity developed in Judith Butler's early work makes important contributions to contemporary Marxist feminist debate, since it provides a way of understanding gender identity as a reification of social relations in its different modalities. In the first place, the aim is to show how authors of social reproduction theory, such as Cinzia Arruzza and Tithi Bhattacharya, are reformulating the understanding of the capitalist order so as to integrate the dimension of social reproduction in its entirety. In doing so, these authors have included the production and reproduction of life as a key factor in this theorization, opening up space to think about modes of subjectivation, including gendered subjectivation. Second, it is about showing how, recovering her debate with Nancy Fraser in the 1990s, Butler was already linking gender and sexuality to social reproduction by questioning the separation between economy and culture. In this sense, it is important to recover the meaning that the materialization of norms assumes in her work to think about the mode of this articulation. Finally, gender as reification is taken up again from Cinzia Arruzza's reading, giving centrality to the notion of temporality in Butler's thought, in order to point to the possible radical implications of an analysis of the construction of gender and sexual regulation for thinking about social reproduction.