Hostname: page-component-cb9f654ff-p5m67 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-08-25T02:53:02.789Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Looking Backwards: A Feminist Revisits Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2020

Nancy J. Holland
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper reconsiders Marcuse's Eros and Civilization from the perspective of Gayle Rubin's classic article “The Traffic in Women.” The primary goals of this comparison are to investigate the social and psychological mechanisms that perpetuate the archaic sex/gender system Rubin describes under current conditions of post-industrial capitalism; to open possible new avenues of analysis and liberatory praxis based on these authors’ applications of Marxist insights to cultural interpretations of Freud's writings; and to make clearer the role sexual repression continues to play in all forms of oppression, even in a public world seemingly saturated with sex.

Information

Type
Original Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , Winter 2011 , pp. 65 - 78
Copyright
Copyright © 2011 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Chodorow, Nancy. 1989. Feminism and psychoanalytic theory. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Epps, Brad, and Katz, Jonathan. 2007. Monique Wittig's materialist utopia and radical critique. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13 (4): 423–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1978. The history of sexuality: Volume one, Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. 1961. Civilization and its discontents, Trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Irigaray, Luce. 1985. This sex which is not one, Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Lévi‐Strauss, Claude. 1969. The elementary structures of kinship, Trans. James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Marcuse, Herbert. 1951. Eros and civilization: A philosophical inquiry into Freud. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
Marx, Karl. 1994. “Selections from the German ideology part I” inSelected writings, ed. Simon, Lawrence H.Indianapolis: Hackett, pp. 102–156.Google Scholar
Rubin, Gayle. 1997. The traffic in women: Notes on the “political economy” of sex. In The second wave: A reader in feminist theory, ed. Nicholson, Linda. New York: Routledge, pp. 27–62.Google Scholar
Rubin, Gayle, and Butler, Judith. 1994. Sexual traffic: An interview with Judith Butler. Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6 (2/3): 62–99.Google Scholar
Sender, Katherine. 2003. Sex sells: Sex, class, and taste in commercial gay and lesbian media. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 9 (3): 331–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zakin, Emily. 2000. Bridging the social and the symbolic: Toward a feminist politics of difference. Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 15 (3): 19–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar