F408 Christine Delphy FRA – geboren in 1941 - Studium der Soziologie an der Universität in Paris – arbeitete für das Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) – Soziologin an der Universität von Paris - Direktorin der „Nouvelles Questions Feministes“ (mitgebründet zusammen mit Simone de Beauvoir) – war Teil des Mouvement Liberation des Femmes (MLF) – spricht sich offen gegen Essentialismus aus - christine.delphy@wanadoo.fr –
http://www.regards.fr/local/cache-vignettes/L132xH100/delphy-f301c.jpg

Die Einstellung des New Yorker Strafverfahrens gegen den ehemaligen Leiter des IMF markiert nicht das Ende, setzt aber doch eine gewichtige Zäsur in der Affäre Strauss-Kahn. Marc Zitzmann sprach in Paris mit der französischen Feministin Christine Delphy über die Lehren, die man heute aus dem Fall ziehen kann.
Frau Delphy, morgen Donnerstag erscheint bei den Pariser Editions Syllepse ein von Ihnen herausgegebener Sammelband, der die hiesigen Reaktionen auf die am 14. Mai in New York erfolgte Verhaftung des damaligen Leiters des Internationalen Währungsfonds Dominique Strauss-Kahn beleuchtet. Was für ein Buch ist das?

«Un troussage de domestique» vereint die Beiträge von gut zwanzig Feministinnen und feministischen Vereinigungen, die fast alle in den drei Wochen nach Strauss-Kahns Festnahme verfasst wurden. All diese Texte sind beflügelt von der Empörung über die sexistischen Reaktionen

Es gibt aber auch Falschanzeigen. Die Feministin Marcela Iacub äusserte dieser Tage die Meinung, es sei besser, hundert Täter laufen zu lassen, als einen Unschuldigen ins Gefängnis zu sperren.
Ich streite nicht ab, dass es – in seltenen Fällen – Falschanzeigen gibt. Was Vergewaltigungen angeht, wird ihr Anteil auf 2 bis 8 Prozent der Anzeigen geschätzt. Man kann sich natürlich auf solche Ausnahmefälle fokussieren.

http://www.nzz.ch/nachrichten/kultur/aktuell/das_gesetz_des_schweigens_ist_aufgehoben_1.12247438.html

My proposition is that marriage is the institution by which unpaid work is extorted from a particular category of the population, women-wives. This work is unpaid for it does not give rise to a wage but simply to upkeep. These very peculiar relations of production in a society that is defined by the sale of work (wage-labour) and products, are not determined by the type of work accomplished. Indeed they are not even limited to the production of household work and raising children, but extend to include all the things women (and also children) produce within the home, and in small-scale manufacturing, shopkeeping or farming, if the husband is a craftsman, tradesman or farmer, or various professional services if the husband is a doctor or lawyer, etc. The fact that domestic work is unpaid is not inherent to the particular type of work done, since when the same tasks are done outside the family they are paid for. The work acquires value – is remunerated – as long as the woman furnishes it to people to whom she is not related or married.
The valuelessness of domestic work performed by married women derives institutionally from the marriage contract, which is in fact a work contract. To be more precise, it is a contract by which the head of the family – the husband – appropriates all the work done in the family by his children, his younger siblings and especially by his wife, since he can sell it on the market as his own if he is, for example, a crafstmand or farmer or doctor. Conversely, the wife’s labour has no value because it cannot be put on the market, and it cannot be put on the market because of the contract by which her labour power is appropriated by her husband. Since the production intended for exchange – on the market – is accomplished outside the family in the wage-earning system, and since a married man sells his work and not a product in the system, the unpaid work of women cannot be incorporated in the production intended for exchange. It has therefore become limited to producing things which are intended for the family’s internal use: domestic services and the raising of children.

http://inastrangeland.wordpress.com/2009/01/16/friday-feminist-christine-delphy/

Christine Delphy proposes that there is a parallel mode of production - domestic production - alongside capitalism.
The analysis of patriarchy in our society that I have been developing for the last fifteen years has a history I would like to detail. I came to my use of the concept and to the model growing out of it by way of two projects whose theoretical concerns might seem unrelated. One project was to study the transmission of family property (patrimony), and the other was to reply to criticisms of the women’s liberation movement that come from the Left.
As it happened, when I started to do research on these two topics, I found that lack of relatedness was only apparent. This might have been predictable from the coherent commitment that had led me to these topics: I had wanted to work “on women,” which is to say, for me, on women’s oppression. Yet my director of studies at the time told me this was not possible, so I chose to study the inheritance of property instead, eventually to get back to my initial interest by an indirect route. In my research I first discovered what a great quantity of goods change hands without passing through the market; instead, these goods were passed through the family, as gifts or “inheritance.” I also discovered that the science of economics, which purports to concern itself with everything related to the exchange of goods in society, is in fact concerned with only one of the of systems of production, circulation, and consumption of goods: the market.
At the time (between 1968 and 1970) I was also participating in the activities of one of the two groups that historically helped create the new feminist movement in France. I was very annoyed – and I was not alone, though like the hero of Catch 22 I thought I was being personally got at! – by one of the men in this mixed group. He claimed that the oppression of women could not be as severe or as important as the oppression of the proletariat because although women were oppressed, they were not “exploited.”
I was well aware that something was wrong with his position. In that group, at least, we recognized that women earned half as much as men and worked twice as hard, but apparently women’s oppression nevertheless had, in theory, no economic dimension! While we knew at the time that housework existed, we saw it principally as a question of an unfair division of boring tasks; and since we did not ask the relevant questions about the problem, not surprisingly we got no relevant answers. However my work on patrimony – that is, on the economic aspects of the nonmarket sphere; or, to put it another way, on the nonmarket sphere of the economy – served to help me find and pose certain of these questions. Others, at the time, were also discovering the theoretical as well as the practical importance of housework, but they came to it by different routes and therefore arrived at rather different conclusions.
Analysis of gifts and the inheritance of property within the family allowed me to demystify the market. This prevented my getting caught in the classic trap of opposing exchange value and use value, an opposition that had led the pioneers (Benston and Larguia), as well as those who came later, into a number of impasses, or, if you will, into a circular route from which they could find no way out. By showing that this opposition only makes sense if one adopts the viewpoint of the market, I was able to propose a theory in which non-market value, instead of being a problem in understanding housework, is one of the clues to elucidating the specific nature of housework. By taking this non-value as a constitutive element of housework I was able to show that (a) housework’s exclusion from the market was the cause, and not the consequence, of its not being paid for; (b) this exclusion involved not only housework, nor only particular types of work, but rather social actors as well, or, to be more precise, work done within certain social relations; and (c) in seeking to understand housework, it is a mistake to see it merely as a particular set of tasks, whether one is seeking to describe them or to explain them in terms of their “intrinsic usefulness.” I have taken up all these points again in my recent work, but they were present, at least in germ, in “The Main Enemy.”1 From this time on I have been able to propose a theoretical rather than an empirical analysis of housework, which I see as a particular part of the much larger category of “domestic work,” thanks to my initial creation of the concept of the “domestic mode of production.”
Since 1970 I have also used the term “patriarchy,” and in all my work I have tried to specify and delimit this word and to state precisely the relations between patriarchy and the domestic mode of production. I am still working on this. If I have used a fairly vague term, it has been so as to show from the start that I consider the oppression of women to be a system. But the question is, what are the system’s components and how is it constituted? The notion has to be fined in, and this can only be done bit by bit.
I have, however, since entering the field, restricted the meaning I attach to the term “patriarchy.” For many, it is synonymous with “the subordination of women.” It carries this meaning for me, too, but with this qualification: I add the words “here and now.” This makes a big difference. When I hear it said, as I often do, that “patriarchy has changed between the stone age and the present,” I know that it is not “my” patriarchy that is being talked about. What I study is not an ahistoric concept that has wandered down through the centuries but something peculiar to contemporary industrial societies. I do not believe in the theory of survivals – and here I am in agreement with other Marxists. An institution that exists today cannot be explained by the fact that it existed in the past, even if this past is recent. I do not deny that certain elements of patriarchy today resemble elements of the patriarchy of one or two hundred years ago; what I deny is that this continuance – insofar as it really concerns the same thing – in itself constitutes an explanation.
Many people think that when they have found the point of origin of an institution in the past, they hold the key to its present existence. But they have, in fact, explained neither its present existence nor even its birth (its past appearance), for one must explain its existence at each and every moment by the context prevailing at that time; and its persistence today (if really is persistence) must be explained by the present context. Some so-called historical explanations are in fact ahistorical, precisely because they do not take account of the given conditions of each period. This is not History but mere dating. History is precious if it is well conducted, if each period is examined in the same way as the present period. A science of the past worthy of the name cannot be anything other than a series of synchronic analyses.
The search for origins is a caricature of this falsely historical procedures and is one of the reasons why I have denounced it, and why I shall continue to denounce it each and every time it surfaces – which is, alas, far too frequently. (The other reason why I denounce the search for origins is the use of its hidden naturalistic presuppositions.) But from the scientific point of view, it is as illegitimate to seek keys to the present situation in the nineteenth century as in the Stone Age.
Since 1970, then, I have been saying that patriarchy is the system of subordination of women to men in contemporary industrial societies, that this system has an economic base, and that this base is the domestic mode of production. It is hardly worth saying that these three ideas have and been, and remain, highly controversial.
Like all modes of production, the domestic mode of production is also a mode of circulation and consumption of goods. While it is difficult, at least at first sight, to identify in the capitalist mode of production the form of consumption that distinguishes the dominant from the dominated, since consumption is mediated by wage, things are very different in the domestic mode. Here consumption is of primary importance and has this power to serve as a basis for making discriminations, for one of the essential differences between the two modes of production is that domestic is not paid but rather maintained. In this mode, therefore, consumption is not separated from production, and the unequal sharing of goods is not mediated by money. Consumption in the family has to be studied if we want not only to be able to evaluate the quantitative exploitation of various members but also to understand what upkeep consists of and how it differs from a wage. Too many people today still “translate” upkeep into its monetary equivalent, as if a woman who receives a coat receives the value of the coat. In so doing they abolish the crucial distinction between a wage and retribution in kind, produced by the presence or absence of a monetary transaction. This distinction creates the difference between self-selected and forced consumption and is independent of the value of the goods consumed.
Every mode of production is also a mode of circulation. The mode of circulation peculiar to the domestic mode of production is the transmission of patrimony, which is regulated in part by the rules of inheritance but is not limited to them. It is an area that has been fairly well-studied in some sectors of our society (e.g., farming) but completely ignored in others. Here we can also see, on the one hand, the difference between the abstract model and the concrete society and, on the other hand, the consequences of the fact that our social system (or more precisely the representation that has been made of it, i.e., the model of our social system) is composed of several subsystems.
The intergenerational circulation of goods is interesting in that it shows the mechanisms at work that produce complementary and antagonistic classes: the division between owners and nonowners of the means of production. The effect of the dispossession is clear in the agricultural world: those who do not inherit – women and younger siblings – work unpaid for their husbands and inheriting brothers. Domestic circulation (the rules of inheritance and succession) leads directly into patriarchal relations of production. But patrimonial transmission is equally important at another level in reconstituting, generation after generation, the capitalist mode of production. It not only creates possessors and nonpossessors within each family, but it also creates this division among families. This is the only aspect of patrimonial transmission that has really been studied to date. The former, the division into classes of a kin group, is passed over in silence by many sociologists and anthropologists, who pretend, against all the evidence and in particular against all the evidence on the division of society into genders-that all the children in a family inherit equally the goods and status of the head of the family. But being the only effect of patrimonial transmission recognized by (traditional) sociology makes its reconstituting of capitalist classes no less real, and this is, indeed, one of the times when the domestic mode of production meets the capitalist mode and where they interpenetrate.
Depriving women of the means of production is not the only way in which women are dispossessed of direct access to their means of subsistence, if only because many families do not have any family property not to transmit to them. The same effect is produced by the systemic discrimination women face in the wage-labor market (let us for the moment call it the “dual labor” market). This too pushes women to enter domestic relations of production, mainly by getting married. The situation of women on the labor market has been well-studied, and the only originality in my approach has been to invert the direction of the links usually established. While ordinarily it is seen as the family situation that influences the capacity of women to work outside, I have tried to show that it is the situation created for women on the labor market that constitutes an objective incentive to marry; hence, the labor market plays a role in the exploitation of women’s domestic work.
How should this fact be conceptualized? How should we interpret its meaning with regard to the relations between patriarchy and the domestic mode of production? Can we talk of capitalist mechanisms serving the domestic mode of production, or must we speak of domestic mechanisms at work in the labor market? Whatever the reply – and the question will stay open for a long time – one thing is clear: whether it concerns patrimonial transmission (which assists, if not creates, relations of production other than those that are strictly domestic) or the capitalist labor market (which assists, if not creates, relations of production other than capitalist ones), the two systems are tightly linked and have a relationship of mutual aid and assistance. Moreover, the relations between patriarchy and the domestic mode of production are not simple relations of superposition. The domestic mode of production in places overruns patriarchy and in places is slighter. The same is true also of the capitalist mode of production: one of its institutions, the labor market, is in part ruled, or used, by patriarchy.
Thus, the domestic mode of production does not give a total account of even the economic dimension of women’s subordination. And it does not account for other dimensions of this subordination, in particular the oppressions that are just as material as economic exploitation, including all the varieties of sexual violence. Some of these forms of violence can be attached to the appropriation of women’s labor power. For example, C. Hennequin, E. deLesseps, and I attached them to the prohibition of abortion.2 Since the bringing up of children is labor extorted from women, it could in fact be thought that men fear women will seek to escape from the labor of child-rearing, notably by limiting births, and that men therefore accord themselves the means to withdraw such control from women by prohibiting abortion. The constraint to be heterosexual and the “choice” within sexuality of practices that result in impregnation can also be seen as a means to withdraw control over fertility from women and give it to men. The same sort of reasoning has been applied to marital violence3 and rape.4 However, to be fair, the links so established are too abridged to be called full explanations. There remain whole sections of women’s oppression that are only very partially, if at all, explained by my theory. This can be seen as a shortcoming, but not an involuntary one; rather, it is a consequence of certain refusals and choices of a methodological kind which I have made.
I distrust theories that seek from the outset to explain as a totality all the aspects of the oppression of women. The first, general reason I distrust them is that such theories themselves remain particular. In being too glued to their object, to its specificity, they become specific, unable to locate their object among other similar things (e.g., among other oppressions), because they do not possess the tools to make it comparable. However, the explanatory power of a theory (or a concept or a hypothesis) is tied to its capacity to discover what is common to several phenomena of the same order, and hence to its capacity to go beyond the phenomenal reality (i.e., what is immediately present) of each case. The idea that the raison d’etre of things is to be found beyond their appearance, that it is “hidden,” is part of scientific procedure (though it can, of course, be contested).
Thus, one of the objections that has been made to my use of the concepts “mode of production” and “class” has been that these concepts were created to describe other situations and that in using them I deny the specificity of our oppression. But analysis proceeds by a kind of logical “butchery.” To understand a phenomenon, one begins by breaking it down into bits, which are later reassembled. Why? So that the bits will be the same for all instances of the phenomenon studied. (Here the phenomenon under study is the subordination of one group by another, the oppression of women being one instance.) The recompositions later obtained are then comparable. With a few concepts a geographer can describe any landscape. To understand is first to compare. This is how all sciences proceed, and it is how we proceed in everyday life: how you and I describe a person, a place, a situation to people who are not able to have direct experience of them.
But these nonspecific concepts are made not so much to describe things as to explain them. (Although all description requires a classification and hence at the start is an explanation, all explanation is also a description insofar as it can itself be further explained.) This is the ambition of analysis. The bits into which a phenomenon is broken are also not those of immediate perception. The economic dimension, for instance, is not an “obvious” category for thinking about the family today, but then it was also not an obvious one for thinking about any phenomenon whatsoever a few centuries ago even those our current language now calls “the economy.”
It follows that when the bits are gathered together, the assemblages so obtained are in no way restitutions of the objects initially treated but rather models: images of what it is suggested are the realities underlying and causing the objects. The initial “objects” are also not themselves “pure” facts but rather the immediate perception of things, informed in a nonexplicit fashion by a certain view of the world (what Feyerabend referred to as “natural evidences”). Thus, it could be said, on the one hand, that the more a theory pretends to be “general” (its object), the more it has descriptive power and the less it has explanatory power; and, on the other hand, the more it is intended to account for immediate perception, precisely because to have a descriptive power it must stick to the “facts,” the more it is ideological.
The other reason for my distrust of theories that wish to be “total” is that even when they do not aim to “cover” everything, they still aim to explain everything by a single “cause”; and when their concern is women’s oppression, this thirst for a single cause generally leads straight into the arms of naturalism. Naturalism is a major sin of which we are not responsible since it is the indigenous theory – the rationalization – for oppression. Today it is applied to the oppression of women and people “of color,” but it was also used to explain the oppression of the proletariat scarcely a century ago. It is not sufficiently recognized that the exploitation of the working class was justified, in the nineteenth century, by the “natural” (today one would say “genetic”) inferiority of its members. And naturalism continues to infect our thought. This is most obvious in antifeminist thinking, but it is still present, in large measure, in feminism itself.
Feminists have been shouting for more than a decade whenever they hear it said that the subordination of women is caused by the inferiority of our natural capacities. But, at the same time, the vast majority continue to think that “we must take account of biology.” Why exactly? No one knows. Science has thrown out one after another, all the “biological explanations” of the oppression of proletarians and nonwhites, so it might be thought that this type of account would be discredited. This century has seen the collapse of such racist theories, even though one-quarter of primatologists keep trying to save them from annihilation. But the role that biology never merited historically it does not merit logically either. Why should we, in trying to explain the division of society into hierarchical groups attach ourselves to the anatomy of the individuals who compose, or are thought to compose, these groups? The pertinence of the question (not to speak of the pertinence of the replies furnished) still remains to be demonstrated as far as I am concerned.
Naturalist “explanations” always choose the most convenient biology of the moment. In the last century it was the (feeble) muscles of women; in the 1950s it was the (deleterious) influence of our hormones on our moods; today it is the (bad) lateralization of our brains. Feminists are outraged by such “theories,” but no one has yet explained to me how these theories differ fundamentally from the explanation in terms of women’s ability to gestate which is so in favor today under the name of “reproduction.”
One of the axioms, if not the fundamental axiom, of my approach is that women and men are social groups. I start from the incontestable fact that they are socially named, socially differentiated, and socially pertinent, and I question these social practices. How are they realized? What are they for? It may be (again, this remains to be proved) that women are (also) females and that men are (also) males, but it is women and men who interest me, not females and males. Even if one gives only minimal weight to the social construction of sexual difference, if one contents oneself with merely stating the pertinence of sex for society, then one is obliged to consider this pertinence as a social fact, which therefore requires an equally social explanation. (Just because Durkheim said it does not make this any less true.) This why an important part of my work is devoted to denouncing approaches that seek a natural explanation for a social fact, and why I want to dislodge all approaches that implicitly bear the stamp of this reductionism.
A considerable theoretical step forward was taken ten years ago with the creation of the concept of “gender.” The term is, however, unfortunately little used in French and not systematically used in English, with the result that we continue to get entangled by the different meanings of the word “sex” or are constrained to use paraphrases (e.g., “sexual divisions in society”). The concept of gender carries in one word both a recognition of the social dimension of the “sexual” dichotomy and the need to treat it as such, and its consequent detachment from the anatomical-biological aspect of sex. But it only partially detaches the social from the anatomical. If gender identifies a social construction, it is, however, not arbitrarily built on no matter what: it is constituted by anatomical sex, just as the beret is set on the head of the legendary Frenchman. And, since its creation, the concept of gender, far from taking wing, has seemed always to function in composite expressions such as “sex and gender” or “sex/gender” – the “and” or the slash serving to buttress rather than separate the two. When two words are always associated, they become redundant; when, in addition, the association is not reciprocal – when sex can happily dispense with gender – the optional addition of the second term seems but a cautious form of speech that lacks real meaning.
The concept of gender has thus not taken off as I would have wished, nor has it given rise to the theoretical development it carried in germ. Rather, gender now seems to be taken at its most minimal connotation. It is accepted that the “roles” of the sexes vary according to the society, but it is this variability that is taken to sum up the social aspect of sex. Gender is a content of which sex is the constraining container. The content may vary from society to society, but the container itself does not. Gayle Rubin, for example, maintains that sex inevitably gives birth to gender. In other words, the sexual dimorphism of the human species contains in itself not only the capacity but also the necessity of a social division. The very existence of genders – of different social positions for men and women (or, more correctly, for females or males) – is thus taken as given, as not requiring explanation. Only the content of these positions and their (eventual, according to Rubin) hierarchy are a matter for investigation. Those who, like me, took gender seriously find themselves, today, pretty isolated.
I give above my reasons for mistrusting “specific” explanations. They may, perhaps, not totally explain for readers my use of the term “class.” Beyond responding to the needs of analysis as described above – though, perhaps, no better than another concept might (namely, breaking down an object – here the oppression of women – into small sections, or more precisely, into nonspecific dimensions) – the concept of class has the advantage of being the only one I know that at least partially responds to the strict requirements of a social explanation. It is perhaps not totally satisfying, but it is the least unsatisfying of all the terms used to analyze oppression.
The term “groups” says nothing about their mode of constitution. It can be thought that the groups – the dominant and the dominated – each have an origin that is sui generis; that having already come into existence, they later enter into a relationship; and that this relationship, at a still later time, becomes characterized by domination. The concept of class, however, inverts this scheme. It implies that each group cannot be considered separately from the other because they are bound together by a relationship of domination; nor can they even be considered together but independent of this relationship. Characterizing this relationship as one of economic exploitation, the concept of class additionally puts social domination at the heart of the explanation of hierarchy. The motives – the material profit in the wide sense – attributed to this domination can be discussed, and even challenged or changed, without changing the fundamental scheme.
Class is a dichotomous concept and thus has its limitations. But we can also see how class applies to the exhaustive, hierarchical, and precisely dichotomous classifications that are internal to a given society, such as the classification into men or women (adult/child, white/nonwhite, etc.). The concept of class starts from the idea of social construction and specifies its implications. Groups are no longer sui generis, constituted before coming into relations with one another. On the contrary, it is their relationship that constitutes them as such. It is, therefore, a question of discovering the social practices, the social relations that, in constituting the division by gender, create the groups of gender (called “of sex”).
I put forward the hypothesis that the domestic relations of production constitute one such class relationship. But this relation does not account for the whole of the “gender” system, and it also concerns other categorizations (e.g., by age). I would put forward as another hypothesis that other systems of relationship constitutive of gender divisions also exist and these remain to be discovered. If we think of each of these systems as a circle, then gender division is the zone illuminated by the projection of these circles onto one another. Each system of relations, taken separately, is not specific, either of gender division or of another categorization. But these systems of relations do combine in various ways, each of which is unique. According to this hypothesis, it is the particular combination of several systems of relationships, of which none is specific, that gives singularity to the division.
Is it the specificity of this combination that is meant when we say that patriarchy is a system? Or does this combination, in addition to being unique and noncontingent possess a meaning? And is it this meaning that makes patriarchy a system? Above all, what are the other systems that articulate with the domestic mode of production to form patriarchy? These some of the questions I think we must pursue

http://libcom.org/library/patriarchy-domestic-mode-production-gender-class-christine-delphy

Du Mouvement de libération des femmes (MLF) à l’affaire DSK, la sociologue Christine Delphy est une théoricienne majeure du féminisme. Son livre L’ennemi principal demeure encore aujourd’hui un ouvrage de référence. Cette féministe de la première heure publie aujourd’hui Un troussage de domestique, recueil de textes autour de l’affaire DSK (*).
Aucune réaction|

Regards.fr : Dans votre livre L’ennemi principal vous expliquez l’oppression des femmes sur le même mode que l’oppression des prolétaires : par l’exploitation économique. Pourquoi avoir choisi cet angle matérialiste et quelles étaient les positions des marxistes de l’époque sur les questions féministes ?
Christine Delphy : Mon ambition était donc de mettre au jour l’exploitation économique des femmes. Contrairement aux gauchistes et aux marxistes de l’époque, pour qui l’exploitation des femmes relevait simplement de leur surexploitation sur le marché du travail, j’ai démontré que l’exploitation principale des femmes est le travail domestique gratuit. Et par travail domestique je n’entends pas uniquement le travail ménager, mais l’ensemble du travail qu’elles faisaient- et qu’elles font toujours- au sein des entreprises familiales. Dans les deux cas, il s’agit d’un travail qui est vendu- ou qui pourrait être vendu- sur le marché des biens et des services et pour lequel elles ne reçoivent rien. Dès lors qu’elles travaillent pour leur mari, la même logique est à l’oeuvre. L’argument régulièrement avancé pour justifier cet état de fait est que la production du travail des femmes n’a pas de valeur d’échange. Mais c’est faux. Une femme qui travaille avec son conjoint sur une exploitation agricole produit des biens qui sont vendus sur le marché, sauf que l’argent ainsi gagné va directement dans la poche du mari. Tout cela n’a rien à voir avec l’exploitation capitaliste. C’est une conséquence du statut d’épouse. Dans le cadre de l’exploitation capitaliste, la personne qui travaille perçoit un salaire. Marx fait d’ailleurs une longue démonstration dans Le capital pour expliquer qu’en dépit du fait qu’ils étaient payés, les ouvriers étaient néanmoins, exploités. Il a donc inventé les notions de plusvalue, de surtravail, etc. Mais dans le système d’exploitation patriarcale, il n’y a pas de salaire, ni de vol d’une partie du salaire, il s’agit d’une appropriation du travail des femmes à la source. Le mari peut s’approprier le travail de sa femme et le mettre au service de la tâche qu’il souhaite. C’est lui qui décide.
Regards.fr : L’exploitation patriarcale est donc antérieure au capitalisme...
Christine Delphy : Oui. C’est aussi le mode de production le plus répandu, si on l’envisage au niveau mondial et pas seulement à l’aune des pays dits développés. Certes, dans les pays occidentaux, la part des agriculteurs est très faible, mais dans les pays dits du tiers monde, ils représentent encore 80 % de la population active, et fonctionnent sur un mode de production familiale. Les femmes font partie de cet ensemble que les Romains appelaient la familia. Il ne s’agit pas ici d’une acception sentimentale de la famille, mais d’un ensemble très large incluant l’épouse, les frères et sœurs non marié-e-s, les enfants et les esclaves. Les femmes et les esclaves font donc partie de la même classe, ils doivent non seulement leur obéissance mais aussi leur travail au chef de famille. Évidemment, ce mode de production coexiste très bien avec le capitalisme.
Regards.fr : Le capitalisme bénéficie t-il directement de l’exploitation patriarcale ?
Christine Delphy : Non. Ça, c’est l’argument des marxistes orthodoxes. Selon eux, le travail ménager est utile, voire nécessaire, au capitalisme parce que le travail ménager des femmes permettrait à l’Etat de faire des économies en matière d’équipements collectifs et au patronat de payer moins cher ses salariées. Cela suppose, si l’on suit cette logique, que les salarié-e-s célibataires soient payés plus cher que leurs collègues mariés, pour compenser le fait qu’ils n’ont pas de femme. Or, force est de constater qu’il n’en est rien.
Regards.fr : Toujours dans L’ennemi principal, vous n’hésitez pas à parler de la « classe des femmes ». Comment pensez-vous l’articulation entre classe et genre ?
Christine Delphy : Lorsque je parle de la « classe des femmes », j’emploie le mot « classe » au sens économique du terme. Le fait de former une classe dans ce mode de production domestique est un des nombreux traits du genre. Le genre est une construction sociale, qui partitionne l’humanité en deux catégories de personnes. Le genre prescrit quelle sera votre classe sociale, de la même façon que la race le prescrit aussi. Vous avez davantage de chance de vous retrouver dans une classe inférieure si vous êtes une femme, si vous êtes noire ou arabe... Grâce à l’influence des féministes américaines, qui ont découvert cela bien avant nous, on parle maintenant de la trilogie « classe, race, genre ». Cependant, le concept de classe des femmes n’a pas été beaucoup repris dans les théories féministes. Sans doute en raison de sa connotation marxiste, mais aussi parce qu’il semblait trop agressif envers les hommes.
Regards.fr : Quelles sont les stratégies que les féministes devraient mettre en oeuvre pour réveiller cette conscience de classe ?
Christine Delphy : Le problème majeur auquel sont souvent confrontés les mouvements féministes a toujours été l’éparpillement des femmes dans leur couple, dans leur famille. A cela s’ajoute les discours produits dans les années 1980-1990 affirmant que les femmes avaient tout gagné. Pour que les femmes s’unissent, il faut qu’elles puissent définir elles-mêmes leur oppression, et pour cela il faut absolument privilégier les groupes non-mixtes. La mixité est une arme du patriarcat, car enfin, est-ce que les patrons se retrouvent dans les mêmes groupes que les syndicalistes ? Il faut que les femmes se retrouvent entre elles sans être sous le regard de celui qui est un copain, un petit ami, mais qui appartient aussi à la classe qui opprime, à la classe ennemie, bien qu’il ne soit pas ennemi dans toutes les dimensions. A terme, on risque le conflit d’intérêt. C’est très difficile pour les femmes d’admettre cela, parce que ces hommes sont souvent des personnes avec lesquelles elles souhaitent entretenir une relation individuelle privilégiée.
Regards.fr : Selon-vous quelles sont les enjeux du féminisme aujourd’hui ?
Christine Delphy : Ils sont nombreux... Un des enjeux majeurs est de combattre l’idée que l’égalité homme-femme est acquise et que les combats féministes sont dépassés. De fait, depuis les années 1980, les mouvements féministes ont été écrasés. Et ce, d’une façon insidieuse. Pour exemple, cette année, à l’occasion du 8 mars [1], j’ai de nouveau entendu parler de la Journée de La femme, du statut de La femme. On s’est battu pendant des années afin qu’on parle Des femmes, on croyait que c’était acquis, et bien non ! J’ai cette impression terrible que nous sommes revenus à l’époque des années 1970, voire avant. En matière de violences sexuelles par exemple, l’affaire DSK a souligné le retard de la France dans la prise en charge de ces questions, notamment par rapport à d’autres pays tels que les États Unis. De manière plus générale, la sexualité est un domaine dans lequel nous avons perdu. Il y a bien eu une révolution sexuelle, mais pas au sens où nous l’entendions. Il s’est produit exactement l’inverse, c’est à dire la banalisation de la pornographie, et le rabattement de la sexualité sur la version pornographique qui est tout simplement une version sadique des rapports sexuels. Les femmes deviennent des biens que l’on s’approprie, et sont contraintes à une sexualité de service. On continu à envisager le désir masculin comme un désir impérieux. Et ce besoin n’est pas n’importe quel besoin, c’est le besoin d’avilir les femmes. Il n’y a pas eu de libération sexuelle, parce qu’on ne peut pas avoir une sexualité qui soit à la fois de service et réciproque. Et pour faire passer la pilule, on s’est arrangé pour que les filles fassent semblant de considérer les hommes de la même manière qu’ils les considèrent, comme dans la série télévisée « Sex and the City ». Les hommes ont regagné du terrain dans ce domaine, sans compter qu’ils n’en ont pas forcément perdu ailleurs. Il y a encore une dizaine d’années, on voyait une publicité où un homme tenait une bouteille de liquide vaisselle à la main, tout comme on parlait beaucoup des nouveaux pères alors qu’ils étaient une minorité. On savait très bien que ce n’était pas la réalité, mais on avait l’impression qu’il y avait une sorte d’encouragement. Aujourd’hui, on ne fait même plus semblant. Le partage des tâches n’est plus considéré comme un objectif à atteindre. Certes, dans la réalité les choses ont un peu bougé, les hommes en font un peu plus, mais si l’on regarde les enquêtes d’emploi du temps, on s’aperçoit que ces changements sont mineurs. Dans ce domaine comme dans celui du travail salarié, rien n’a vraiment changé.
Regards.fr : A propos de DSK, vous publiez ce mois-ci, un recueil de textes féministes sur l’affaire, intitulé Un troussage de domestique...
Christine Delphy : Pour moi, ce recueil a un intérêt historique. En consultant la presse au moment où l’affaire a éclaté, j’ai trouvé très intéressant que des femmes réagissent sur les mêmes thèmes. Tous les textes dénonçaient la confusion volontaire entre sexualité et viol- comme si le consentement n’avait pas de valeur- l’indifférence pour la victime, le retard de la France sur les questions de violences sexuelles, l’idée d’une solidarité d’hommes, la remise en cause de la parole de la victime, et l’effet de classe. Quand je pense qu’on a accusé la justice américaine d’avoir nui à l’image de la France... Pour moi, ce qui a nui à l’image de la France, c’est surtout la presse française. On accusait les Français, et les « latins » en général d’être sexistes, mais on ne pouvait pas imaginer à quel point la réalité était pire que les stéréotypes !
Ce recueil est très limité dans le temps : il s’arrête début juillet, et en général, bien avant. Toute la saga ne se déroule pas, car s’il avait fallu attendre son dernier chapitre, on n’aurait jamais rien publié. Or cette saga continue, avec son lot de scandales, du point de vue féministe bien sûr. Rien de la version des faits de la « victime présumée » n’est infirmé, mais le procureur hésite à aller au procès parce qu’elle serait « décrédibilisée ». Or pour les gens de sa classe sociale, avoir menti pour obtenir une carte de séjour n’est pas un signe de malhonnêteté, c’est un savoir indispensable pour survivre. Pour meilleur qu’il soit aux Etats-Unis, le traitement des victimes d’agressions sexuelles est encore la proie d’idéologies d’origine religieuse qui veulent que les personnes soit mentent tout le temps, soit ne mentent jamais, et surtout d’idéologies patriarcales qui permettent que le passé des victimes soit passé au crible, alors qu’il est interdit de mentionner quoi que ce soit de celui des prévenus. J’espère que d’autres recueils se feront, qui seront autant de bornes kilométriques, de points de repère historiques : car c’est notre propre histoire de féministes qui nous manque le plus. C’est à faire celle-ci, sur le moment, et avec ses actrices, qu’ Un troussage de domestique s’emploie.
(*) Sophie Courval, auteure de cet entretien, et Clémentine Autain, co-directrice de Regards ont chacune rédigé une contribution à cet ouvrage, en librairie depuis le 1er septembre. A lire sur regards.fr : Anne Sinclair, l’autre visage du sexisme de Sophie Courval et Affaire DSK : l’impensable viol de Clémentine Autain.

http://www.regards.fr/idees/christine-delphy-une-voix-pour-la,4984

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