Straight combinatorics. Race, class, sex and political economy: materialistic analyzes and decolonial

Abstract

This article starts by reviewing the contributions of francophone materialist feminists – mainly Guillaumin, Wittig, Tabet and Mathieu. They have transformed the concept of “labour”, by theorising the appropriation of bodies as “machines with labour power”. They have shown that sexuality can be understood as labour, in continuity with existing gender-related social relations, and they have profoundly denaturalised motherhood. The author then puts forward the concept of “straight matrix”. Governing at once union by marriage and filiation, and organising the simultaneous and historical dynamics of social relations connected to gender,
race and class, straight combinatorics constitutes a new tool for analysing social reproduction and analysing the historical development of capitalism, but also the current neoliberal reality, in a perspective that connects with parts of Latin-American
and Caribbean decolonial feminism.