Ziarek, Ewa Plonowska. “The Abstract Soul of the Commodity and the Monstrous Body of the Sphinx: Commodification, Aesthetics, and the Impasses of Social Construction” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 16:2 (2005)
We may wonder at this point whether feminist theories of social construction are not vulnerable to a similar critique of the ideology of labor, which sets up production as “absolute.” Insofar as these theories consider any “outside” to the abstract mediation of bodies as the remnant of essentialism, they turn social construction into a “metaphysical principle pure and simple,” to use Adorno’s term—that is, into a metaphysics of autonomous production that knows no limits.
Let us notice here in particular a parallel between the speculative “soul” of the commodity produced through the reiteration of market exchanges and the speculative character of sex constituted by the reiteration of gender norms, as analyzed by Butler. According to Butler, “ ‘[S]ex’ is a regulatory ideal whose materialization is compelled, and this materialization takes place [. . .] through certain highly regulated practices” (1). By extending Butler’s influential argument, we could say that sex, like the soul of the commodity, is the most ideal effect of the economic formation of gender, though it nonetheless appears as the most material property of the body.
As Marx’s famous definition of commodity fetishism similarly suggests, the “phantom” immediacy of value is a speculative effect of the dialectic of capital, which reflects the social relations among men and their labor as the “fantastic” properties of things.
Yet to expose the illusory immediacy of sex as the most speculative result of social mediation is merely the first step of the critique of the commodification of bodies. The second necessary move is to contest the abstraction of social mediation/social construction as an equally illusory autonomy from every residue of materiality and nonidentity.