Rosemary Hennessy – författare

Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse confronts the impasses in materialist feminist work on rethinking ‘woman’ as a discursively constructed subject. The book looks at the problem of examining critically the social dimensions on which theories of discourse are premised: how such theories understand ‘materiality’; the relation between ‘women’s experience’ and feminist politics, and that between history and discourse. Rosemary Hennessy considers the work of Kristeva, Foucault, Laclau and Mouffe, and argues for a materialist feminist re-articulation of discourse as ideology. Concerns over identity and difference are incorporated into a rewriting of materialist feminism's analysis of women's oppression across capitalist and patriarchal structures. In adapting postmodernist theories in this way, Hennessy develops a project of social change, where feminism, while maintaining its specificity, is necessarily aligned with other emancipatory movements.

First Published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

During the 1980s, capitalism triumphantly secured its global reach, anti-communist ideologies hammered home socialism's inherent failure, the New Left increasingly moved into the professional middle class--and many of feminism's earlier priorities were marginalized. "Identity politics", often formulated in terms of social reconstructionism or multiculturalism, has increasingly suppressed materialist feminism's systematic perspective, replacing it with discourse analysis or cultural politics. Materialist Feminism: A Reader argues against the retreat to multiculturalism for keeping invisible the material links among the explosion of meaning-making practices in highly industrialized social sectors, the exploitation of women's labor, and the appropriation of women's bodies that continues to undergird the scramble for profits and state power in multinational capitalism.

The history of the maquiladoras has been punctuated by workers’ organized resistance to abysmal working and living conditions. Over years of involvement in such movements, Rosemary Hennessy was struck by an elusive but significant feature of these struggles: the extent to which organizing is driven by attachments of affection and antagonism, belief, betrayal, and identification.What precisely is the “affective” dimension of organizing for justice? Are affects and emotions the same? And how can their value be calculated? Fires on the Border takes up these questions of labor and community organizing-its “affect-culture”-on Mexico’s northern border from the early 1970s to the present day. Through these campaigns, Hennessy illuminates the attachments and identifications that motivate people to act on behalf of one another and that bind them to a common cause. The book’s unsettling, even jarring, narratives bring together empirical and ethnographic accounts-of specific campaigns, the untold stories of gay and lesbian organizers, love and utopian longing-in concert with materialist theories of affect and the critical good sense of Mexican organizers. Teasing out the integration of affect-culture in economic relations and cultural processes, Hennessy provides evidence that sexuality and gender as strong affect attractors are incorporated in the harvesting of surplus labor. At the same time, workers’ testimonies confirm that the capacities for bonding and affective attachment, far from being entirely at the service of capital, are at the very heart of social movements devoted to sustaining life.

This new edition of Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism explores how sexual identities have been shaped, differentiated, and commodified through the cultural and economic logics of capitalism.Examining the interrelations among labour, value, consumption, and social reproduction, the book offers a materialist account of how bodies and desires are organized within shifting historical conditions. It brings together key concepts such as totality, overdetermination, and the social reproduction of labour to illuminate the structural forces that shape sexual subjectivities, demonstrating why these dynamics remain central to understanding contemporary sexual politics. In this new edition, a substantial Afterword extends this analysis into the twenty first century, addressing the heightened politicization of transgender life and situating this development within broader crises of capitalist reproduction and state power.This foundational text is essential reading for students and scholars of feminist studies, queer and trans studies, cultural theory, and social and political thought who seek a rigorous materialist framework for understanding the historical and contemporary formations of sexuality.

This new edition of Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism explores how sexual identities have been shaped, differentiated, and commodified through the cultural and economic logics of capitalism.Examining the interrelations among labour, value, consumption, and social reproduction, the book offers a materialist account of how bodies and desires are organized within shifting historical conditions. It brings together key concepts such as totality, overdetermination, and the social reproduction of labour to illuminate the structural forces that shape sexual subjectivities, demonstrating why these dynamics remain central to understanding contemporary sexual politics. In this new edition, a substantial Afterword extends this analysis into the twenty first century, addressing the heightened politicization of transgender life and situating this development within broader crises of capitalist reproduction and state power.This foundational text is essential reading for students and scholars of feminist studies, queer and trans studies, cultural theory, and social and political thought who seek a rigorous materialist framework for understanding the historical and contemporary formations of sexuality.

Profit and Pleasure, Second Edition is a classic intervention into the relationship between capitalism and sexual identity. Rosemary Hennessy boldly reorients queer theory toward an up-close analysis of the structures of consumption, labor, and commodification, revealing how sexual identity—in the varied ways it has been culturally differentiated and lived—has been fundamentally affected by these principles of capitalism.In this second edition, a new introduction by the author reasserts a Marxist feminist standpoint as the most theoretically developed feminist analysis of capitalism’s cultural logics. She presents a range of key concepts—among them totality, overdetermination, social reproduction—outlining their evolution and continued relevance to analysis of sexuality since the book’s first publication in 2000. The introduction addresses important developments in materialist approaches to sexuality during the past two decades and concludes by returning to the notion of "love" as defined in the original edition, making a call for the common potential of human collaboration and action to ignite a radical sexual politics.This seminal text will appeal to students and scholars of feminist studies, gay and lesbian studies, and cultural and literary studies.

Profit and Pleasure, Second Edition is a classic intervention into the relationship between capitalism and sexual identity. Rosemary Hennessy boldly reorients queer theory toward an up-close analysis of the structures of consumption, labor, and commodification, revealing how sexual identity—in the varied ways it has been culturally differentiated and lived—has been fundamentally affected by these principles of capitalism.In this second edition, a new introduction by the author reasserts a Marxist feminist standpoint as the most theoretically developed feminist analysis of capitalism’s cultural logics. She presents a range of key concepts—among them totality, overdetermination, social reproduction—outlining their evolution and continued relevance to analysis of sexuality since the book’s first publication in 2000. The introduction addresses important developments in materialist approaches to sexuality during the past two decades and concludes by returning to the notion of "love" as defined in the original edition, making a call for the common potential of human collaboration and action to ignite a radical sexual politics.This seminal text will appeal to students and scholars of feminist studies, gay and lesbian studies, and cultural and literary studies.

Recovering the bold voices and audacious lives of women who confronted capitalist society’s failures and injustices in the 1930s-a decade unnervingly similar to our own  In the Company of Radical Women Writers rediscovers the political commitments and passionate advocacy of seven writers-Black, Jewish, and white-who as young women turned to communism around the Great Depression and, over decades of national crisis, spoke to issues of labor, land, and love in ways that provide urgent, thought-provoking guidance for today. Rosemary Hennessy spotlights the courageous lives of women who confronted similar challenges to those we still face: exhausting and unfair labor practices, unrelenting racial injustice, and environmental devastation.As Hennessy brilliantly shows, the documentary journalism and creative and biographical writings of Marvel Cooke, Louise Thompson Patterson, Claudia Jones, Alice Childress, Josephine Herbst, Meridel Le Sueur, and Muriel Rukeyser recognized that life is sustained across a web of dependencies that we each have a duty to maintain. Their work brought into sharp focus the value and dignity of Black women’s domestic work, confronted the destructive myths of land exploitation and white supremacy, and explored ways of knowing attuned to a life-giving erotic energy that spans bodies and relations. In doing so, they also expanded the scope of American communism.By tracing the attention these seven women pay to “life-making” as the relations supporting survival and wellbeing-from Harlem to the American South and Midwest-In the Company of Radical Women Writers reveals their groundbreaking reconceptions of the political and provides bracing inspiration in the ongoing fight for justice.