Beyond the Master/Subject Model: Reflections on Carole Pateman's Sexual Contract
1993; Duke University Press; Issue: 37 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/466266
ISSN1527-1951
Autores Tópico(s)Political Economy and Marxism
ResumoI take enormous pleasure in boldness and originality of Carole Pateman's Sexual Contract. Yet I am ultimately not persuaded by several of its central claims. In trying to understand why, I have found myself returning again and again to book's core conception of dominance and subordination. As I read her, Pateman conceives dominance and subordination on model of mastery and subjection. Women's subordination is understood first and foremost as condition of being subject to direct command of an individual man. Male domination, then, is a dyadic power relation between two individuals in which a (male) superordinate commands a (female) subordinate. It is a master/subject relation. This, at any rate, is conception I find explicit in Pateman's account of what she calls the contract. That idea appears in two different guises in her analysis, but, in both, master/subject model is presupposed. In one guise, contract is shadow myth behind classical social contract theory's official account of foundation of power-or, as I would prefer to say, it is suppressed gender subtext of that theory. Here it is associated with Pateman's claim that even as apparently antipatriarchal contract theorists like Locke rejected paternal as model for political right, they continued to assume husbands' conjugal rights over wives, while redefining such rights as nonpolitical. The contract, in this guise, then, establishes and democratizes male sex-right, right of individual men to command individual women-in and especially in sex. It institutes a series of male/female master/subject dyads. The contract also appears in another guise in Pateman's book, in real-life contracts in contemporary society. The contracts in question involve property in person and thus include wage-labor contract, marriage contract, surrogate motherhood contract, and what Pateman calls the prostitution contract. All such contracts, she claims, necessarily establish relations of subordination, since they involve odd commodities such as labor sexual services, and gestational services, which are not detachable from persons of their owners. The use of these commodities thus requires presence, and subordination, of their owners, latters' subjection to a user's command. Contracts involving power, etc., thus establish master/subject dyads; boss acquires right of command over worker, husband over wife, john over prostitute, and so on. When Nancy Fraser
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