Refounding Gay Liberation

From Freedom Road:

It is interesting that you said that gender oppression exists within capitalism but not because of capitalism. Orthodox Marxists say something similar to this. Engels wrote that patriarchy arose due to the advent of private property. Men needed to control women so that they could ensure inheritance benefited them. Private property predates capitalism2. But the thing that always bugged me about that shit is that it already assumes there was a binary gender system in place. It already assumes that there were two genders (men/women) and one gender just needed to oppress the other and try to own them. We know from research and theory that has come out since the 90s, that the way we understand gender now is not the same as even 25 years ago. It is a historical category that has evolved. All places during all times didn't have just two genders that were constructed in the same way where women=weak, men=strong. There were differences in how gender was enacted in other historical periods and societies. Perhaps, it would be more accurate to say that the rise of class systems imposed a rigid binary gender system because it required greater control over every aspect of individuals' lives and gender was one of those aspects, not that it created patriarchy. But who knows. I think it is dangerous to search for an "origin" of patriarchy because that kind of thinking leads to the assertion that if we just overthrow the class system then gender oppression will end. Well, it ain't that simple and patriarchy will never end until we stop thinking of men/women as opposites on a binary gender system.

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