Subjected Subjects / Sexed Subjects: Philosophical Contributions of French Materialist Feminism on Body, Materiality and Power

Abstract

This article shows the contributions of French materialist feminism to the approach of subjection/subjectivation processes. It focuses on the categories of political anatomy and somatic marking formulated in the 1970s by Nicole-Claude Mathieu and Colette Guillaumin, respectively, as the basis for an original analysis linking subjectivation, corporeality, and relations of production. We show that the materialist feminist perspective considers the sex-gender dimension, absent in the French philosophies of the time, for which a counterpoint with Foucault and Bourdieu is presented. We argue that materialist feminism lays the foundations for a critical materialism that avoids both somatophobia –often attributed to post-structuralist feminisms– and biologicism –often present in orthodox Marxist feminist approaches–.