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

NOTHINGNESS AND DE/GENERATION 25
is “analogous to, rather than isomorphic with” the movement of the working class
(1975, p. 203).
Rubin argues that the division of labour by sex exaggerates sexual difference,
creates gender, and enforces heterosexuality (1975, p. 178). This structural analysis
leaves Rubin at a loss to explain why “marital debts are reckoned in female flesh”
(1975, p. 182), or why constraints on homosexuality mean male dominance. Rubin
claims that Lévi-Strauss’s theory of kinship and the incest taboo is a theory of the
control of female sexuality. But this is not the case. In “Women on the Market,” a
section of This Sex Which Is Not One, Luce Irigaray critiques Lévi-Strauss 2 and
remarks: “Are men all equally desirable Do women have no tendency toward
polygamy The good anthropologist does not raise such questions” (1977/1985d,
p. 171). Why do women not exchange men to create social relationships among us
Clearly, this is because kinship is not an abstract concept for women: it is
experienced materially as well as socially in the process of birth (O’Brien: 1981).
Rubin sees structuralism and psychoanalysis as feminist theories manqué. Her
critique remains superficial and wholly immanent because she does not challenge the
profound masculinity of the epistemological and ontological presuppositions in these
works. Rubin’s anti-intellectualism replaced the need for a thorough investigation of
the partiality of the conceptual tools she was thrilled to highjack. Geraldine Finn
(1989), however, provides a thoroughly anti-sexist reading of Lévi-Strauss in
“Natural Woman, Cultural Man: the Anthropology of Male Hysteria and Father
Right,”. Finn begins with the nature/culture split as masculine ideology and then
shows how “culture’ is a mechanism for “men’s insertion in systems of kinship”
(1989, p. 24). Lévi-Strauss’s search for a material infrastructure to the exchange of
women is part of the operation of this “magical thinking” (1989, p. 24). Drawing
from The Politics of Reproduction, 3 Finn shows the designs of Lévi-Strauss’s laws:
to replace the “natural links of kinship which privilege women in general and
mothers in particular, with the artificial links of alliance governed by rules which
privilege men in general and fathers in particular” (1989, p. 27).
Miriam Johnson is critical of Gayle Rubin’s and Juliet Mitchell’s “phallo-centric
analyses” (1987, p. 122). Both “ignore women’s mothering and attempt to link
Freud’s description of Oedipus complex to Lévi-Strauss’s theories about the
consequences of incest taboos for the exchange of women” (1987, p. 122).
According to Johnson, unexamined Freudian assumptions lead Rubin to the
conclusion that “kinship arrangements which put women at a disadvantage depend
on heterosexuality in both men and women” (1987, p. 125).
2. For a critique of Lévi-Strauss, see also Nancy Hartsock (1983) and Trinh T.Minh-ha’s (1989)
section, “The Language of Nativism: Anthropology as a Scientific Conversation of Man with Man.”
It is curious that a work which targets the Great Masters and “has a grandmother in its belly”, like
Trinh Minh-ha’s does, should be taken over/up as poststructuralist, and marketed as “Post-
Feminism”.
3. “The custodianship of magic is not, as Lévi-Strauss thinks, an innate masculine attribute. It is the
first historical attempt to mediate the contradictions within the male process of reproduction”
(O’Brien: 1981, p. 157).