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From “Rematerializing Feminism”, 2005

A goal I’ve had here and in general is developing a reading toolbox for better feminist theory and what effective practice looks like going forward. I think for anti-idpol to become accepted in current feminist thought there has to be evidence of precedent and a body of work to base understanding on. Marxist feminists have been the best place to turn, Teresa is my very favorite.

Teresa L. Ebert is a Marxist feminist who, put concisely, argues the true feminist task as emancipation through material and economic means, viewing cultural politics as a secondary issue that occurs due to the former.

Her fundamental work, “Ludic Feminism and After: Postmodernism, Desire, and Labor in Late Capitalism” defines ludic feminism, which is according to her: “a feminism that is founded upon poststructuralist assumptions about linguistic play, difference, and the priority of discourse and thus substitutes a politics of representation for radical social transformation [that] has become dominant in [academia] in the wake of poststructuralism.” Ebert states ludic feminists substitute Marx for Foucault in their work, ideology for discourse, and embrace post-structuralist approach that abandons materialism. She calls this the theory of the upper middle class while falsely claiming to employ social change for all women. Ludics position “women” as one body that all feminist theory services but lack basis in economic, historical, and disadvantaged reality making this impossible. For example, literature for abortion activism fundamentally can’t be the same for America as El Salvador. The all encompassing “women” doesn’t exist.

”Ludic theorists, in short, are troping the social. in so doing, they de-materialise various social realities, cutting them off from the material relations of production, and turn them into a superstructural matrix of discursive processes.”

I find her critique of ludic feminism hugely relevant today and applicable to most mainstream feminist discourse and effort in the left. Her damnation of Foucault, Judith Butler, and Derrida in shaping theory is thoughtfully harrowing. Due to its debt to postmodernism she cites at length a ludic feminist betrayal of political materialism as a language fixation in popular theory:

”If the "matter" of social reality is "language," then changes in this reality can best be brought about by changing the constituents of that reality — namely, signs. Therefore, politics as collective action for emancipation is abandoned, and politics as intervention in discursive representation is adopted as a truly progressive politics.”

Ebert states discursive fixation can’t enact social change, instead having to follow emancipation as a resulting side effect. This resonates with me, I talk a lot about linguistics being a separate consequence from the political act and where identity politics finds its battleground. Ludic feminist conception of misogyny today is entirely based on discursive phenomena. It fails to address risk factors. I come to think through her analysis that patriarchy is a tree. Ludic discursive cultural fodder as activism is cutting off branches. Addressing economic and political injustices is the trunk materialism seeks to saw where the branches would then come down with it.

She goes at length against identity politics as part of this:

“...what is at stake in this displacement of the economic by discourse is the elision of issues of exploitation and the substitution of a discursive identity politics for the struggle for full social and economic emancipation. Marx and Engels' critique of the radical ... applies equally to ludic cultural materialists:

‘they are only fighting against 'phrases.' They forget, however, that to these phrases they themselves are only opposing other phrases, and that they are in no way combating the real existing world when they are merely combating the phrases of this world.’

This is not to say that the conflicts over ideology, cultural practices and significations are not an important part of the social struggle for emancipation: the issue is how do we explain the relation of the discursive to the non-discursive, the relation of cultural practices to the "real existing world"-whose objectivity is the fact of the "working day"-in order to transform it? Obviously this relation is a highly mediated one. But for [ludics] the relation is so radically displaced that it is entirely suppressed: mediations are taken as autonomous sites of signification and consequently the actual practice of [cultural analysis] is confined entirely to institutional and cultural points of mediation severed from the economic conditions producing them.”

We can use this to explain contemporary focus on sexism perceived as colloquial occurrence without engagement in the mechanisms in that inform women’s oppression. American feminists especially ignore global realities, often even local. It makes sense why so many of them are ludics. Like Ebert says it’s thought pursuit of the upper middle managerial class, they aren’t victims of the most immediate consequences of patriarchy: economic disparity creating poor women’s exploitation.

If ludic feminism is obsessed with the freedom of the entrepreneurial subject, a large number of feminists on the left find a home there. Her work is a fantastic dismantling and urgent for leftist feminists to inform their practice & political work.

Read Teresa L. Ebert further:

Untimely Critiques for a Red Feminism, from Post-Ality, Marxism and Postmodernism, 1995.

Ludic Feminism and After: Postmodernism, Desire, and Labor in Late Capitalism, 1996

Left of Desire, on Post Soviet societies, 2001

The Task of Cultural Critique, 2009 where Eberts expands upon “a new cultural critique committed to the struggles for human freedom and global equality. Demonstrating the implosion of the linguistic turn that isolates culture from historical processes.” A focus of hers I find very in line with Adolph Reed’s focus on historicism of black political diligence divorced from literary criticism. Also has a great essay on metaphor and metonymy.

Class in Culture, 2007

Patriarchy, Ideology, Subjectivity: Towards a Theory of Feminist Critical Cultural Studies, 1988

Found within:

Post-ality: Marxism and Postmodernism, 1995

Marxism, Queer Theory, Gender, 2001

Political Semiosis in/of American Cultural Studies, found with “The American Journal of Semiotics”, 1991

Bonus:

Apparently Ebert wrote a review of Camille Paglia’s “Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson” called “Politics of the Ridiculous” which I desperately wish I could read but I can’t find it anywhere lol