Dialiectics of Progress and Retrogression…
…is the opening section of the third chapter of Maria Mies’ canonical Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale – Women in the International Divison of Labor (Zed Books, 1986, 1998). It is a theoretical treatment of the whole business of the male-conquest theme, and how that theme maps onto the “civilized-backward” episteme that comes up again and again as an “explanation” of the world by both the right and (the ‘development’) left.
I am linking the chapter here from Google Books, should anyone like to read through it and have a discussion.
Mies also collaborated with Vandana Shiva on the book Ecofeminsm. Shiva has gone on to become a well-known international proponent of food-praxis politics.
Enjoy.
Charles:
I think I’ll get Mies’ book. I didn’t find her fuller analysis of the exploitative relationship of man-woman. There’s a certain complexity to it, in that there is also much exchange between women and men. In capitalism there is even the trope of “the man caring for the woman”, which Mies might breakdown for us. Overall lower pay for women in the workplace is a form of exploitation, although the exploiter is not usually the man with whom the woman is in a personal relationship with.
Wish I had a copy of the big reader on feminism by I think it’s Jaeger. I borrowed a copy years ago.
18 June 2007, 8:24 am