Materialist feminism and composition studies the practice of critique and activism in an age of globalization

As a doctoral student in rhetoric and composition in the early nineties, my interest in Marxism and materialist feminism was peaked in a course on critical theory. As I read the assigned critical theory texts, I was most intrigued by the theories that attempted to connect the intellectual work of theory to the struggle for material resources. Throughout the course, I attempted to understand what Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have deemed the shift from Marxism to post-Marxism, which they characterize as a gradual flow in other directions, "in the way that river waters, having originated at a common source, spread in various directions and mingle with currents flowing from other sources" (5). A year later, as the fall merged into winter, I proposed an independent study on the discourses of radical feminists, Marxist feminists, and socialist feminists that emerged out of the New Left: Shulamith Firestone, Michele Barrett, Christine Delphy, Zillah Eisenstein, and others. The year before my doctoral exams, over winter break, huddled in front of the heat vent in my family's farmhouse in eastern Washington, I struggled through Robert Tucker's Marx-Engels Reader and later through volume 1 of Capital.