Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism

OUT OF OBLIVION 135
in the social relations of reproduction. O’Brien’s work is original in that she sees
male domination as stemming not from the control of women’s sexuality, but from
male reproductive experience—not sexual politics, but the politics of reproduction. 28
Public/private, mind/body, subject/object: these are the dualisms that spring from the
brotherhood’s war against and alienation from nature. The Politics of Reproduction
discusses the potency principle and ideologies of male supremacy, with specific
reference to the work of Plato, Hegel, Marx and Freud. Mary O’Brien’s reading of
The Second Sex illuminates the question of masculine and feminine values.
Gestation, for de Beauvoir, is woman eternally in thrall to contingency. Her
analysis suggests that the denial of this contention, the assertion by woman of
creative pride and satisfaction in the birth of her child, or an understanding of
nurture and child-rearing as authentic project, are simply evasions. They are
defensive contentions, at best merely sentimental, perhaps rationalization of
necessity, at worst an act of bad faith…. The implication of de Beauvoir’s
model of human development is not only that parturition is non-creative
labour, but that the product, the human child, has no value, that the value of
children must wait to be awarded by the makers of value, men…
It is man, de Beauvoir insists, who turns his productive labour to the creative praxis
whose product is value in the normative sense. She does not note that those who
create values can also negate values. The low value of reproductive labour is not
necessarily immanent in that form of human labour, but may well be assigned to it
by those who are excluded from it…. Uncritical acceptance by women of the male
deprecation of reproductive process, however garbed by the moth-eaten cloth of
venerated Motherhood, becomes itself an instance of bad faith. The low social and
philosophical value given to reproduction and to birth is not ontological, not
immanent, but socio-historical, and the sturdiest plank in the platform of male
supremacy (1981, p. 75, italics in original).
The centrality of existentialism to de Beauvoir’s work is well known. Less well
understood is the significance of her reliance on structuralism, and the implications
of this for subsequent French feminist philosophy. Lévi-Strauss’s theory of kinship
and— exogamy was the cornerstone for her section on primitive culture and the
origin of the oppression of women. She accepted without question this patriarchal
anthropological perspective on the power and position of women in her fatalistic
view of the female without history or values (De Beauvoir: 1974, pp. 79–84). It is
this oppositional, violent approach to the Other and to matter which figures in the
28. There is interesting work to be done through a reading of Spivak and O’Brien on motherhood
and the production of value. Both write from a materialist, feminist perspective and take issue with
the revisionist socialist-feminism which reduces socio-symbolic and material relations of
reproduction to the domestic labour debates (see Spivak: 1987, pp. 247–252, the reflection upon her
translation of Mahasweta Devi’s “Breast Giver” [in Spivak, 1987]; O’Brien: 1981, pp. 223–244).
Spivak argues that it “is necessary to interpret reproduction within a Marxian problematic” (1987,
p. 79) and remembers with pleasure O’Brien’s “excellent book” (1987, p. 278). Spivak notes that
O’Brien’s work contrasts with the liberal-feminist object-relations theorizing of mothering.