Gender Abolitionists Theorize the State

• In Event: Revolution, Resistance, and the State

Abstract

A group of 1970s and 1980s Anglo-American feminists, whom I label “second wave gender abolitionists,” theorized the elimination of the dominant gender structure as a necessary precondition for achieving gender justice. They formed a heterogenous group, one comprised of radical, Marxist, and liberal feminists. Although united by a shared hope for a future social order absent gender, these feminists held divergent and at times incommensurate attitudes toward the role the state could or should play in achieving gender abolition. For example, while Shulamith Firestone looked forward to a feminist revolution that would herald the abolition of both economic and sex classes, the destruction of the nuclear family, and the withering away of the state, Susan Moller Okin rested her hopes in the power of the liberal state to create (and destroy) gendered subjectivities. This paper thus rejects Catharine MacKinnon’s 1983 assertion that “Feminism has no theory of the state” through a careful reconstruction of second wave gender abolitionists’ theories of the role of the state in achieving gender justice. Along the way, I engage more recent debates about the relationship between feminism and the state—including recent worries about feminism’s “carceral turn”—and conclude with thoughts on how contemporary gender abolitionists ought to view the state’s role in the struggle to dismantle our contemporary hegemonic gender regime.

Author

• Ophelia Vedder, Princeton University