Volume 10, Issue 1, 2007
Kathryn Russell
Pages 33-54
Feminist Dialectics and Marxist Theory
Both feminists and Marxists have realized that it is necessary to avoid reductionism and recognize the intersections between gender, race, and class. But we do
not have a methodology sufficient to develop this idea. I argue that Bertell Ollman’s book Dance of the Dialectic provides a way to think about intersectionality using
Marx’s methodology of abstraction and his theory of internal relations. As a relational abstraction, gender is intersectional. We may legitimately focus on it, as long
as we treat it dialectically. We can recognize that it is not homogeneous but stands in relations of identity and/or contradiction with other social relations.