ABSTRACT
Gender is a concept developed to contest the naturalization of sexual difference in multiple arenas of struggle. Feminist theory and practice around gender seek to explain and change historical systems of sexual difference, whereby men' and women' are socially constituted and positioned in relations of hierarchy and antagonism. Since the concept of gender is so closely related to the Western distinction between nature and society or nature and history, via the distinction between sex and gender, the relation of feminist gender theories to Marxism is tied to the fate of the concepts of nature and labour in the Marxist canon and in Western philosophy more broadly. The version of the nature/culture distinction in the gender identity paradigm was part of a broad liberal reformulation of life and social sciences in the post-Second World War, Western, professional and governing lites' divestment of pre-war renditions of biological racism.
