Diana Mulinari
Senior professor
A feminist re-reading of theories of late modernity: Beck, Giddens and the location of gender
Author
Summary, in English
This article is a critical reappraisal of the understandings of gender and the location of women within theories of late modernity. These theories, as articulated by Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck, have gained a wide use, not the least since they claim to account for changes in intimate relations. We will use four major feminist interventions for our argument – the problematization of the public-private divide, feminist theorizing of kinship, feminist understandings of labor, and the heterosexual matrix.
We argue that the late modern story is made through violently created presences – of the reinvention of the heterosexual matrix, the private sphere as the location of women/gender, reproduction coupled to biology, and gender as an intimate relation between women and men – and absences of analysis of reproductive and productive labor, of the role of the state, and of gender as a social relation constituted through and within other social inequalities.
We argue that the late modern story is made through violently created presences – of the reinvention of the heterosexual matrix, the private sphere as the location of women/gender, reproduction coupled to biology, and gender as an intimate relation between women and men – and absences of analysis of reproductive and productive labor, of the role of the state, and of gender as a social relation constituted through and within other social inequalities.
Department/s
- Department of Gender Studies
Publishing year
2009
Language
English
Pages
493-507
Publication/Series
Critical Sociology
Volume
35
Issue
4
Document type
Journal article
Publisher
Brill
Topic
- Gender Studies
Keywords
- gender
- feminist theory
- late modernity
- family
Status
Inpress
Project
- 2003-2165 Theorizing social change in feminist thinking
ISBN/ISSN/Other
- ISSN: 0896-9205