by Laura Bear, Karen Ho, Anna Tsing and Sylvia Yanagisako
This article is part of the series Generating Capitalism
1. What is Gens?
Our title signals a major redefinition of the multilayered historical meanings of the term gens. Gens began as the Roman concept of a family unit descended from a common male ancestor and was scaled up to social distinctions like aristocratic lineage. It was transformed by Lewis Henry Morgan to found the anthropological study of kinship and reveal the “original” matriarchal origins of community (Trautmann 1992; Feeley-Harnik 2002). Friedrich Engels then drew on Morgan to argue that the patriarchal form of gens led to the end of matriarchal systems. Gens is also, of course, the etymological root of gender, genus, genre, generations, and generate. We find this term broadly helpful because it carries a long history of the appropriation of human and non-human life-forces by social forms. Its varied usage inspires reflection on the depictions of these life-forces that in turn contribute to forms of social inequality. Moreover, it specifically refers to a history of contradictions between male authority and female kinship ties that signals the mix of capture and generativity that characterizes all social power. Finally, by adopting this term, we play with the irony that a patriarchal unit provides the root for the word gender even as we found our approach to capitalism on a more liberating (but hidden) ancestry of feminist analyses of gender, kinship, and race, as well as other forms of epistemological insights garnered from the margins.
Gens is a capacious, flexible term that references our interest in the generative powers of capitalism and the inequalities these powers create. In this sense, we are particularly focused on the generative aspect of the term that is centrally concerned with the means and mechanisms—the very processes of generation—through which systems and socialities are made.
Gens: A collective with feminist ancestry for the study of capitalist inequality.
2. Why a Feminist Manifesto?
It is through a deep engagement with feminist approaches that we recognize the need to challenge the boundedness of the domain of “the economic.” Our alternative approach focuses on the full range of productive powers and practices through which people constitute diverse livelihoods (and from which capitalist inequalities are captured and generated) as they seek to realize the potentialities of resources, money, labor, and investment. We see this conversation as revitalizing feminist substantivist approaches to “the socio-economic” (e.g., Kondo 1990; Mills 1999; Ong 1987; Rosaldo 1980; Strathern 1988; Weiner 1992; Wilson 1999; Wolf 1992). While historically, feminist substantivists recognized that the narrow domaining and disembedding of “market” and “non-market” relations were illusions and used these insights to critique dominant analyses, they did not articulate a more comprehensive approach to capitalism. Redeploying and expanding these tools of analysis not only help us displace other models in which the world of the household, kinship, and “non-capitalist” institutions are radically different in their forms of sociality from the world of the market, but also allow us to develop a “generating capitalism” approach to the inequalities of capitalist social relations.
Feminism challenges the discursive representations of “the economic” as a domain.
This article is part of the series Generating Capitalism
1. What is Gens?
Our title signals a major redefinition of the multilayered historical meanings of the term gens. Gens began as the Roman concept of a family unit descended from a common male ancestor and was scaled up to social distinctions like aristocratic lineage. It was transformed by Lewis Henry Morgan to found the anthropological study of kinship and reveal the “original” matriarchal origins of community (Trautmann 1992; Feeley-Harnik 2002). Friedrich Engels then drew on Morgan to argue that the patriarchal form of gens led to the end of matriarchal systems. Gens is also, of course, the etymological root of gender, genus, genre, generations, and generate. We find this term broadly helpful because it carries a long history of the appropriation of human and non-human life-forces by social forms. Its varied usage inspires reflection on the depictions of these life-forces that in turn contribute to forms of social inequality. Moreover, it specifically refers to a history of contradictions between male authority and female kinship ties that signals the mix of capture and generativity that characterizes all social power. Finally, by adopting this term, we play with the irony that a patriarchal unit provides the root for the word gender even as we found our approach to capitalism on a more liberating (but hidden) ancestry of feminist analyses of gender, kinship, and race, as well as other forms of epistemological insights garnered from the margins.
Gens is a capacious, flexible term that references our interest in the generative powers of capitalism and the inequalities these powers create. In this sense, we are particularly focused on the generative aspect of the term that is centrally concerned with the means and mechanisms—the very processes of generation—through which systems and socialities are made.
Gens: A collective with feminist ancestry for the study of capitalist inequality.
2. Why a Feminist Manifesto?
It is through a deep engagement with feminist approaches that we recognize the need to challenge the boundedness of the domain of “the economic.” Our alternative approach focuses on the full range of productive powers and practices through which people constitute diverse livelihoods (and from which capitalist inequalities are captured and generated) as they seek to realize the potentialities of resources, money, labor, and investment. We see this conversation as revitalizing feminist substantivist approaches to “the socio-economic” (e.g., Kondo 1990; Mills 1999; Ong 1987; Rosaldo 1980; Strathern 1988; Weiner 1992; Wilson 1999; Wolf 1992). While historically, feminist substantivists recognized that the narrow domaining and disembedding of “market” and “non-market” relations were illusions and used these insights to critique dominant analyses, they did not articulate a more comprehensive approach to capitalism. Redeploying and expanding these tools of analysis not only help us displace other models in which the world of the household, kinship, and “non-capitalist” institutions are radically different in their forms of sociality from the world of the market, but also allow us to develop a “generating capitalism” approach to the inequalities of capitalist social relations.
Feminism challenges the discursive representations of “the economic” as a domain.
