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A feminist re-reading of theories of late modernity: Beck, Giddens and the location of gender

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Author

Summary, in English

This article is a critical reappraisal of the understandings of gender and the location of women within theories of late modernity. These theories, as articulated by Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck, have gained a wide use, not the least since they claim to account for changes in intimate relations. We will use four major feminist interventions for our argument – the problematization of the public-private divide, feminist theorizing of kinship, feminist understandings of labor, and the heterosexual matrix.

We argue that the late modern story is made through violently created presences – of the reinvention of the heterosexual matrix, the private sphere as the location of women/gender, reproduction coupled to biology, and gender as an intimate relation between women and men – and absences of analysis of reproductive and productive labor, of the role of the state, and of gender as a social relation constituted through and within other social inequalities.

Publishing year

2009

Language

English

Pages

493-507

Publication/Series

Critical Sociology

Volume

35

Issue

4

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Brill

Topic

  • Gender Studies

Keywords

  • gender
  • feminist theory
  • late modernity
  • family

Status

Inpress

Project

  • 2003-2165 Theorizing social change in feminist thinking

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 0896-9205