Feminist Dialectics and Marxist Theory

Both feminists and Marxists have realized that it is necessary to avoid reductionism and recognize the intersections between gender, race, and class. But we do not have a methodology sufficient to develop this idea. I argue that Bertell Ollman’s book Dance of the Dialectic provides a way to think about intersectionality using Marx’s methodology of abstraction and his theory of internal relations. As a relational abstraction, gender is intersectional. We may legitimately focus on it, as long as we treat it dialectically. We can recognize that it is not homogeneous but stands in relations of identity and/or contradiction with other social relations.