Dismantling the gender binary is an anti-capitalist, decolonising act, I hear you cry!? YES, and let me tell you how!

ok, so how is feminism linked to capitalism, Polanyi’s argument of inherently flawed free markets and where on earth does the gender binary come in?

“society resists being thought as a natural unity (like an organism or body) or as one that is closed by a structure, like patriarchy or capitalism, around a central antagonism or fundamental relation. Rather society can be seen as transiently and partially unified by temporary fixings of meaning” – The End of Capitalism as We Knew It by Gibson-Graham

Here Graham and Gibson are introducing the idea of plurality of identity. We are not just one fixed thing but instead, both individually and societally transient. This is where can start to talk about the similarities between feminism and anti-capitalism. The authors go on to explore the idea that when the identity of man is defined rigidly and with dominance (patriarchy) then it becomes possible to create woman in opposition to man. Woman can no longer stand alone as an identity, woman is instead created as non-man, a singular definite opposite, and thus is born THE GENDER BINARY.

However, when the identity of man is created as plural and indefinite, Man can be anything. Logically non-man can’t exist, neither as a singular opposite, nor as a subordinate of man (or at all really). Woman can become its own plural identity, capable of anything as well!

it’s not coincidental that the people in these images are white. Western binary gender norms and beauty standards have been a central method of control in colonial domination. Here bell hooks attests to the plurality of the functions of gender binary not just contributing to holding power over women but simultaneously complicit as a tool of upholding a white supremacist society.

 

TOP TIP!

Currently at the Tate Britain is an exhibition including Keith Pipers “go west young man” social and cultural readings of the black male body and investigating the production of gendered racial stereotypes during and after slavery.

discussing

Keith Piper

Lead initially by Maria Lugones’s essay the Coloniality of Gender we come to The Invention of Women by Oyéronké Oyewùmí where she writes that she

“understands gender as introduced by the West as a tool of domination that designates two binarily opposed and hierarchical social categories…Women are defined in relation to men, the norm.”

Oyewùmí, hooks and Piper all attest to the colonial aspect of gender binaries as a tool of control. Gibson-Graham discuss how gender binaries are used as a method of control to keep the production of labour rolling in a capitalist system. e.g. men working, women at home raising children.

So wait! How does this all link to capitalism and free markets?

The next point that Gibson-Graham make is that capitalism has created a singular unified narrative around its self. “The global (capitalist) economy is the new realm of the absolute…” “capitalism becomes the everything, everywhere of contemporary cultural representation.”

Capitalism forms its self-identity (like our example of man) singularly, not as a multi-faceted economic discourse among other discourses, but as THE economic discourse!

In the same way that woman in binary opposition to man becomes non-man, so other economic discourses become non-capitalism and subordinate in relation to capitalisms dominance.

So in order to understand the links here, we can call on Polanyi’s argument as proof of the plurality of capitalism. Polanyi says that the capitalist free market is inherently flawed, being built on the fictitious commodities of labour, land and money. This statement highlights a contradiction in capitalisms singular identity as a functioning economic model. To be a contradiction you must be at least two things, so therefore free market capitalism has pluralities! When capitalism is read as plural, then other economic discourses are re-legitimised as viable and not just oppositional to capitalism.

In order to even the playing field, we must deconstruct the mutually supporting structures of patriarchy, expressed as gender binary and the singularity of a capitalist free market as a dominant narrative. Thus, re-contextualising capitalism as just another economic discourse and  gender binaries, not a tool of control but instead gender being a expression on a diverse spectrum.