Les rapports de sexe comme rapports sociaux

Analysing the various contributions to the present volume, the article attempts to define the type of relations to be established between the concepts of class anf the concepts of gender. The purpose is not however to evaluate feminism according to the putative Marxist yardstick. The aim, on the contrary, is to weigh up both the contributions of the former to social theory and the limitations of the latter. It is the consideration of the interferences between the two fields of inquiry, and of the resulting two-way process of reinterpretation, which leads to the invention of what is both the most vital notion, and the one most difficult to apprehend: that of the social relations of sex.