Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse confronts the impasses in materialist
feminist work on rethinking 'woman'as a discursively constructed subject. The book looks at
the problem of examining critically the social dimensions on which theories of discourse are
premised: how such theories understand 'materiality'; the relation between 'women's
experience'and feminist politics, and that between history and discourse. Rosemary
Hennessy considers the work of Kristeva, Foucault, Laclau and Mouffe, and argues for a …

During the 1980s, capitalism triumphantly secured its global reach, anti-communist
ideologies hammered home socialism's inherent failure, the New Left increasingly moved
into the professional middle class--and many of feminism's earlier priorities were
marginalized." Identity politics", often formulated in terms of social reconstructionism or
multiculturalism, has increasingly suppressed materialist feminism's systematic perspective,
replacing it with discourse analysis or cultural politics. Materialist Feminism: A Reader …