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Production and Its Others:

Gramsci's “Sexual Question”
Nelson J. Moe
Published online: 05 Jan 2009.

To cite this article: Nelson J. Moe (1990) Production and Its Others: Gramsci's “Sexual
Question”, Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society, 3:3-4,
218-237

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 Rethinking MARXISM Volume 3, Numbers 3-4 (Fall-Winter 1990)
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Production and Its Others:

Gramsci’s “Sexual Question”

Nelson J. Moe

Over the past three decades the writings of Antonio Gramsci have come to
form an integral part of the discourse of leftist cultural analysis in Great
Britain and the United States. The appearance of substantial portions of his
Quaderni del carcere in English in 1971 helped to inaugurate a new epoch of
cultural criticism in these countries which continues to this day. Certainly the
role of Louis Althusser-who followed Gramsci’s example in exploring
“civil society”1-was fundamental in directing attention to the realm of ide-
ology. But it was Gramsci who had already raised and discussed many of the
issues that became key ones for cultural studies in the seventies and eighties:
the status of popular culture and its relation to “high” culture, the political
role of the intellectual, the question of hegemony as a form of power based
not on domination but consent. It was in fact Gramsci who elaborated the
concept of “cultural politics,”2 destined, in its infinite variations (the politics
of “theory,” of “style,” of “history,” etc.), to become the title of choice for
publications in the eighties and, in a sense, the slogan of an entire critical
generation.
During these same decades another critical discourse has come into being,
one of no less significance for the political analysis of culture. Feminist cnt-
icism-a term I use in the most general sense to indicate a vast and
heterogeneous group of writings-has emphasized the gender of political
subjects, investigated human sexuality as a sphere of power relations, and
 Gramsci’s “Sexual Question ’I 219

examined culture as the domain in which the subject is constituted in terms of

a sexual difference which, in complex ways, always works as a differential of
power. In this work, feminist criticism has been particularly attentive to
questions of desire and pleasure and, like Gramsci’s thought, the best feminist
writings have complicated the field of cultural analysis, interrogating and
extending the concept of culture itself, showing it to be denser, more
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dynamic, and politically more significant than heretofore imagined.

Why, then, has Gramsci’s thought proven so resistant to an engagement
with feminist thought? Why is it that two modes of analysis, distinguished for
their insights into the production of political subjects within ideology and
culture, have proved so impervious to one another?3 In the following pages I
will attempt to clarify this question by examining the status of sexuality, sex-
ual difference, and “woman” in one section of Gramsci’s Americanism and
Fordism (notebook 22) titled “Some aspects of the sexual question.” This
section is one of the few texts in the Quaderni that simultaneously concerns
itself with sexuality and with women. While we have grown accustomed to
this elision of sexuality and woman in texts by male authors, it is an elision
that, in Gramsci, is full of theoretical implications which have yet to be care-
fully analyzed. My primary aim in this essay is therefore to open discussion
on the question of sexuality and woman in Gramsci, beginning where these
issues converge in a few pages of the Quaderni. It seems, too, that this
endeavor must necessarily be of a preliminary nature, for while the ultimate
aim of this investigation is to approach an understanding of how Gramscian

1. See Althusser (1984, 16): “To my knowledge, Gramsci is the only one who went any
distance in the road I am taking. He had the ‘remarkable’ idea that the State could not be
reduced to the (Repressive) State Apparatus, but included, as he put it, a certain number of
institutions from ‘civil society’ : the Church, the Schools, the trade unions, etc.
Unfortunately, Gramsci did not systematize his intuitions, which remained in a state of
acute but fragmentary notes.”
2. See, for example, Gramsci (1975, 2193; 1985, 122). When an English translation
exists for a citation of Gramsci’s I will include the date and page number of the English
edition after those of the Italian edition, as in the preceding example.
3. Anne Showstack Sassoon’s reflection on her attempt to connect feminist analysis and
Gramscian thought is indicative of this lacking encounter between the two approaches:
“Although it was possible to relate the work I had done on the Italian Marxist, Antonio
Gramsci, to the debate which was taking place about the state and about ideology, it was
far from obvious to see how one could think about women from a Gramscian perspective”
(1987, 16). She continues: “Did his approach, his categories, have anything to offer a
feminist analysis? The answer was ‘yes,’ if he is understood properly” (19). My question
in this essay is somewhat different from hers. I do not so much endeavor to assess the use-
fulness of Gramscian categories for feminist analysis, as to examine the ways in which the
questions of sexuality, sexual difference, and “woman” function within his thought.
 220 Moe

and feminist approaches to the politics of culture might productively feed off
one another, the task at hand involves a careful reading of the Gramscian
text, the “reconnaissance” that is the prerequisite for any future “war of
position.”4
Even before approaching this specific text, however, one factor in the
dialogue manque‘ between Gramsci and feminism must be mentioned, that is,
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psychoanalysis: Gramsci’s relationship to psychoanalysis and the crucial role

of psychoanalysis in the development of contemporary feminist thought.5
Gramsci’s texts on the one hand, and a great share of feminist texts on the
other are, in effect, written in different languages. Recent feminist thought is
steeped in the discourse of psychoanalysis. In particular, psychoanalysis has
dominated the work of those French intellectuals who have become the key
reference points in contemporary feminist thought both in the United States
and Great Britain: de Beauvoir, Kristeva, Irigaray, Cixous, Foucault et al.
By contrast, Gramsci had read very little psychoanalysis and tended to be
relatively suspicious of it. Though the present reading will not concern itself
with the reasons for this attitude towards psychoanalysis, with its “causes”-
the hostile reception of psychoanalysis among Italian intellectuals in the first
decades of its existence, Marxism’s tendency to view psychoanalysis as a
bourgeois pastime, the fact that Gramsci’s exposure to it came not so much
through reading as through his wife’s treatment, which became a bone of
contention between them-Gramsci’s discussions of sexuality and woman can
be counted among the “effects” of his antipsychoanalytic orientation. The
absence of a theory of the unconscious, of drives, desire and pleasure in
Gramsci is intimately related to his inability to offer an organic conceptual-
ization of sexuality and woman, not to mention of the desiring political
subject in general. To put it in terms of the discussion that will follow, the
discursive field in which the concept of production is constructed “is struc-
tured by its absences and repressions; it is equally a product of the territory it

4. Though, in my view, we have just begun to explore the possible graftings between
Gramsci and feminist thought, there have already been a few significant contributions to
this line of inquiry. Besides the work of Anne Showstack Sassoon, I would mention that
of Emma Fattorini, Teresa de Laurentis (who takes as her point of departure Adele
Carnbria’s “Nonostante Gramsci”), and Claudia Mancina. In her essay “Teoria dell’identith
e questione femminile,” Mancina convincingly argues for the potential utility of Gramsci’s
reflections on “conformism” “to those today-and, among these, first of all women-who
are seeking to understand and possibly govern, the processes of identity transformation”
(1987a, 193).
5. On the question of Gramsci’s relationship to psychoanalysis, see Stone (1984); see
also Mancina (1987b) for a consideration of the relationship between psychoanalysis and
Gramsci’s concept of “conformism.”
 Gramsci‘s “Sexual Question” 221

cannot represent” (Kipnis 1989, 152): a territory comprising sexuality,

woman, desire, pleasure, and “leisure.”

Some aspects of the sexual question. Obsession with the sexual question
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and dangers of that obsession?

Gramsci sets out upon his most elaborate discussion of the “sexual
question” in the Quaderni with this incipit, one that does a good deal more
than inform the reader of the subject to be discussed. This simple heading
marks out the beginning and end of Gramsci’s discussion of the question. For
though this passage is drafted twice by Gramsci, in notebooks 1 and 22-thus
suggesting that it was an issue that concerned him throughout his years of
prison writing-its concerns do not branch out into other areas, feed into
other arguments, in the way so many of his other discussions do. The “sexual
question” spills over, at most, into a few other areas of Americanism and
Fordism, and is absent from all but a few of Gramsci’s other texts: of the fif-
teen entries indexed under “la questione sessuale” in the Einaudi critical
edition, only two lie outside Americanism and Fordism. The second part of
this heading, “Obsession with the sexual question and dangers of that obses-
sion,” takes this rhetorical act of containment a step further. With this phrase
Gramsci adds a connotation to the previous denotative statement. The “sexual
question” is not just any question: it is an instance of obsession and a’unger.
Just why the sexual question in Gramsci’s view of it is obsessional and
dangerous is obviously bound up with what he intends by the term “sexual,”
something that his exposition in “Some aspects” makes only partially clear.
Turning for further elucidation to the 1917 theater review titled “In the
beginning was sex,” we can surmise that for Gramsci sexuality is not, or
should not be, something that invests the human subject in its entirety. It is
rather regional, conceived as one “element” of the subject. Gramsci thus
employs “sexual” in a restricted, non-Freudian sense to mean “sex” and the
“sexual instinct.” And with this compartmentalization the sexual tends to be
set up in opposition to intelligence and logic and associated, as we shall see
below, with “animality” and “bestiality.”7

6. Gramsci (1975, 2147; 1971, 294). For an annotated edition of this notebook I refer
the reader to Gramsci (1978).
7. In this review of a performance by the actress Lyda Borelli, Gramsci inveighs against
those individuals (women apparently) in whom “the sexual ‘element’ has so over-
whelmed...all the other atmbutes, all the other possibilities, that it becomes a kind of
 222 Moe

In the opening of “Some aspects of the sexual question” Gramsci focuses

on the question of “repression,” situating his discussion in relation to psycho-
analysis. While seeming generally to accept the idea that repression is
inherent to industrialized society, that in industrial life the sexual instincts
must be “regulated,” Gramsci criticizes the opposition of “natural” instincts
and “unnatural” social regulation. He thus presents “‘psychoanalytic’ litera-
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ture” as “a way of criticizing the regulation of sexual instincts in a sometimes

‘Enlightenment’ fashion, with the creation of a new myth of the ‘savage’ on
the basis of sexuality.” In order to further critique “utopian” notions of inno-
cent, unbridled passions he next turns his attention to the countryside: there,
he writes, “the most numerous and barbaric sexual offenses take place”-
bestiality, pederasty, incest (1975,2148; 1971,294-95).
The first two paragraphs of “Some aspects,” then, in however desultory a
fashion, and without asserting a positive position of their own, argue against
a nonregulative form of sexuality, against those who base their social pro-
gressivism on “sexual liberation.” At the end of this text Gramsci will argue
quite explicitly for “sexual regulation,” but before arriving at this proposi-
tion, a prescription for what he calls a future “sexual ethic which conforms to
the new methods of production and work” (1975,2150; 1971, 296), Gramsci
assesses two forms of sexuality.
The paragraph begins: “Sexuality as reproductive function and as ‘sport’:
the ‘aesthetic’ ideal of woman oscillates between ‘brood mare’ and ‘plaything’
(1975, 2148; 1971, 295)” It is here that the first significant elision occurs in
his discourse, between what stands on either side of the colon in this sentence,
between sexuality and woman. The punctuation, grammar, and syntax of
Gramsci’s prison writings have not received the critical attention they war-
rant. By examining them here in some detail we can concretely observe the
way issues of gender are devalued in Americanism and Fordism. Because the
Quaderni take the form of “notes and observations,” there is a tendency in
these texts towards a form of discursive parataxis, a movement of thought not
via subordinating conjunctions but by juxtaposition and apposition. Between)
the individual sections of notebooks, each clearly separated from the others
by headings, this is readily apparent. Especially in the early notebooks-
some, in fact, entitled “Miscellaneous”-the sequence of topics from section
to section appears quite disjunctive if not random. Later notebooks would be
organized according to a topic so that material in them would have a certain

seductive magic” (1982,875). He concludes: “Man has worked tremendously to reduce the
sexual ‘element’ to its proper limits. To let it expand again to the detriment of the intellect is
proof of bestialization, certainly not of spiritual elevation.”
 Gramsci’s “Sexual Question” 223

thematic cohesion. And yet, even the most focused notebooks are still,
notebooks-and the movement from section to section is not hierarchical and
subordinate.
The point I want to make here, however, is that this paratactic structure of
discourse is not limited to the rhetorical cornices separating sections from
one another, but that this tends to be the mode of argumentative progression
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between paragraphs, between sentences, and even, as we shall see below,

within sentences. If we consider the paragraph quoted above-“Sexuality as
reproductive function and as ‘sport”’--we can see how this incomplete,
verbless construction provides no syntactic relation with the paragraph that
precedes it. The textual effect of this discursive protocol is to allow for a plu-
rality of possible connections, conjunctions, disjunctions to be formulated
between concepts. It creates what a mechanic would call “play,” and a post-
modem philosopher “undecidability,” between paragraphs and concepts. It
also makes space for the formation of theoretically nonexplicit-and perhaps
unjustified-relationships, a field of almost poetic free-association.8
Returning to the sentence quoted above, we see just such “play” between
the two phrases on either side of the colon, which is to say between sexuality
and the figure of woman. The colon indicates some form of correspondence
between the two concepts on either side of it-it seems, in fact, a symmetrical
correspondence: to the two types of sexuality correspond two “‘aesthetic’
ideals” of woman. But the nature, and terms, of this correspondence are
unclear. What relationship obtains between these two types of sexuality con-
strued as real social phenomena and this oscillating “‘aesthetic’ ideal”? And
what does “‘aesthetic’ ideal” really mean? If it implies, as it seems to, the rep-
resentation of some “real” thing, then what is its specific modality of
representation? These are questions that themselves are clearly “oscillating”
in Gramsci’s text here. But, nevertheless, one effect of this loose correspon-
dence is quite determinate: to equate sexuality with woman, to condense it in
the figure of woman. Implicit in Gramsci’s text seems to be the following
equation: reproductive sexuality/”sporting” sexuality: woman as “brood
mare”/woman as “plaything.” Our conceptual access to sexuality is evidently

8. One has the suspicion moreover that the disjunctive character of this specific text is not
unrelated to the “obcessional” and “dangerous” quality of the subject matter under consid-
eration, and that Gramsci’s remarks in “In the beginning was sex” may, in fact, describe
the reader’s experience of Gramsci’s “Some aspects of the sexual question”: “Given as pre-
supposed a certain fact, you would expect another to occur which would be the logical
consequence of the first one. You see instead that this doesn’t happen, and that other,
nonlogical ones occur in its place; you see that new forces come into play, elementary,
instinctual forces, imponderable in the calculation of probability” (1982,874).
 224 Moe

through the figure of woman. To speak of sexuality, then, is to speak of

woman.
We will consider some of the implications of this equation below. But let
us first consider the contrast between Gramsci’s treatment of “sporting” sex-
uality and reproductive sexuality. Gramsci does not linger long on the
question of “sporting” sexuality. His minimization of its importance is sig-
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naled not only by his brief treatment of it in the text but also by his use of a
foreign, English term, set in quotation marks, to describe it. The whole status
of this sporting form is clearly secondary, existing in the form of citation and
reported speech. For, while reproductive sexuality is a “function,” and ana-
lyzed, as we shall see below, in the concrete terms of economics, sporting
sexuality in Gramsci’s summary treatment of it is not so much analyzed as
evoked in terms of the popular conception of it. Echoing his earlier demysti-
fication of the idea of a corrupt, unnatural city and an innocent, natural
countryside, Gramsci cites the two popular proverbs “man is a hunter,
woman a temptress [l’uomo d cacciatore, la donna d tentatrice]” and “who’s
got nothing better, goes to bed with his wife [chi non ha di meglio, va a letto
con la moglie]” in order to show “how widespread the conception of sex as
sport is even in the countryside and in sexual relations between members of
the same class” (1975,2148; 1971,295). Gramsci, then, does not so much tell
us what “sporting” sexuality is as how it is viewed.
What primarily concerns Gramsci, then, is the “economic function of
reproduction”-more than half of “Some aspects of the sexual question” is
devoted to it. From the outset of his treatment of this “aspect” Gramsci
emphasizes the widespread importance of reproduction and its relationship to
the economic-its significance both as a “general fact which concerns the
whole of society in its complexity” and as a “‘molecular’ fact, internal to the
smallest economic aggregations like the family” (1975, 2146; 1971, 295).
Gramsci views the economics of reproduction in terms of the balance of dif-
ferent age groups in society and in the family, and in terms of the way
improvements of hygiene have increased life expectancy, creating, in France,
a void at the economic base which must be filled by immigrant labor. He
notes, moreover, the “anti-economic consequences” of a low urban birth rate
in certain countries where industry must undergo great expenses to train
immigrant labor from the country, a process that, Gramsci writes, “brings
with it a continual mutation of the city’s socio-political composition, thus
continually changing the terrain on which the problem of hegemony is to be
posed” (1975,2149; 1971, 296).
We have thus come, via sexuality, to the crucial issue in Gramscian
thought, the problem of hegemony. But before we can understand the
 Gramsci’s “Sexual Question” 225

relationship between sexuality and hegemony it is necessary to note one other

thing about Gramsci’s conceptualization of sexuality in the reproductive-
economic mode. In his division of sexuality into the reproductive and the
“sporting,” Gramsci represented these two sexual modes through the two
feminine aesthetic ideals of “brood mare” and “plaything.” Then, in his brief,
evocative rendering of “sporting” sexuality he employed the two hetero-
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sexual popular sayings cited earlier, articulating that form of sexuality in

terms of sexual difference: “man is a hunter, woman a temptress” and
“whoever’s got nothing better goes to bed with his wife.” In Gramsci’s dis-
cussion of the economic function of reproduction, however, the gendered
quality of the sexual disappears. Reproductive sexuality, framed in terms of
demography, life expectancy, the work force, immigration, and finally
hegemony, is strangely neuter. Both recreational and reproductive sexuality
were initially inflected towards the feminine, but somehow that sphere so
traditionally associated with woman, the sphere of reproduction, is finally
stripped of its female specificity.
A series of displacements has thus occurred: sexuality has been reduced to
sex, and sex to woman, but Gramsci implies that this feminine sexual activity
is restricted to sport, while reproductive sexuality is not really sex at all, does
not have any status of its own, but exists solely as re-production-as
production’s supplement or, if you will, handmaiden.9
It is possible to view this discursive operation in “Some aspects of the
sexual question” as a variation on the act of figurative clitoridectomy
described by Gayatri Spivak. In Spivak’s view the clitoris can be figuratively
seen as “a short-hand for women’s excess in all areas of production and prac-
tice, an excess which must be brought under control to keep business going as
usual” (1987, 82).10 In Americanism and Fordism it is production that is
“business as usual” and that requires the excision (“regulation” and
“rationalization”) of orgasmic pleasure from the reproductive orbit.
It is then this “operation” in Gramsci’s argument, this cleansing of the
concept of the reproductive of all traces of the sexual and feminine, that leads

9. A striking analogue-and precedent-for this theoretical distinction between

unproductive female sexuality and desexualized male re-productioncan be found in nine-
teenth-century French political economy as described by Joan Scott (1988, 139-63). There,
Scott observes that “according to political economy, reproduction was an economic concept
not a biological function”; that “reproductionwas a synonym for production”;and that the
two concepts, fused together, were represented as a male activity. “By locating sexuality in
women’s bodies.. .[political economists] established a gendered contrast: between work
and sex, productivity and wastefulness, discipline and indulgence, male and female”
(1988, 144-46).
10. For Spivak’s discussion of clitoridectomy, see also (1987, 150-53).
 226 Moe

Gramsci to his bold conclusion at the end of this text, the statement of the
necessity “to create a new sexual ethics which conforms to the new [fordist]
methods of production and work,” the assertion “that the new type of man
required by the rationalization of production and work cannot develop until
the sexual instinct has been suitably regulated and until it too has been
rationalised” (1975,2150; 1971,297).
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This concluding statement represents an unusual moment of economism in

Gramsci’s thought or, better, productionism, in which the forces of produc-
tion themselves seem to have an ultimate determination. And he has reached
this point by splitting off the sexual from the reproductive, the same process
by which he reduces woman to sexuality and displaces sexuality (and woman)
from the field of the political.
And yet, has woman simply vanished from Gramsci’s discourse? It was
she who defined and figured the sexual at the beginning of his discussion,
falling out of sight, however, as reproduction became neuteredlneutralized,
became not so much a sexual question as an economic one. She does, how-
ever, reappear, rather startlingly, just after Gramsci raises the question of
hegemony. The end of the paragraph concluding the discussion on reproduc-
tion and the beginning of the text’s final paragraph read as follows:
The low birth-rate in the cities imposes the need for continual massive
expenditure on the training of a continual flow of new amvals in the city
and brings with it a continual change in the socio-political composition of
the city, thus continually changing the terrain on which the problem of
hegemony is to be posed.
The formation of a new feminine personality is the most important
question of an ethico-civil order connected with the sexual question. Until
women can attain not only a genuine independence in relation to men but
also a new way of conceiving themselves and their role in sexual relations,
the sexual question will remain full of unhealthy characteristics and caution
must be exercised in proposaIs for new legislation (1975,2149-150; 1971,
296).

It is again crucial that we examine this sequence of thoughts-the

connection between these two paragraphs, the relationship, in brief, between
the problem of hegemony and the question of woman. Does “the most impor-
tant question of an ethico-civil order” fall under the category of hegemony,
making this next paragraph a kind of subset, an example? Or does it concep-
tually move in another direction? It seems actually to do both, and its duality
is related to the duality of hegemony. The accent of the concept of hegemony
here, as in most other cases, falls precisely on the ethico-civil domain of
control exercised by a dominant class. So in some sense to speak of the most
 Gramsci’s “Sexual Question” 227

important ethico-civil question related to the sexual question is to speak of the

sexual question as having the greatest bearing on the problem of hegemony.
But there seems to be a discrepancy between what happens on either side
of the “problem of hegemony,” between the issues that lead up to it and those
that follow from it. Gramsci moves towards the problem of hegemony by
way of urban demographics, the formation and mutation of the working
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class-a politics of the base; he moves from the problem of hegemony to the
“formation of a new female personality,” to a problem of ideology--of self-
image-and finally of legislation.
At both ends then of a discussion of sexuality from which woman is
displaced, woman appears in terms of an “‘aesthetic’ ideal” and a “way of
conceiving oneself.”ll And it is hegemony, approached from the base, that
ushers in the last mention of woman. But woman does not possess full enfran-
chisement to the concept of hegemony. If it is true that hegemony is a concept
that deconstructs the traditional base-superstructure opposition, woman’s
place in the hegemonic seems limited to the superstructure, up there with
sexuality. The type of politics appropriate to her, the only one mentioned
here, is parliamentary-legislative politics, a notably unrevolutionary form.
As Gramsci suggests in another notebook, woman’s historiographical place
is, if not in the home, in the world of custom: “The question of the impor-
tance of women in roman history is similar to that of subaltern groups but
only up to a certain point; ‘sexism [maschilismo]’can only in a certain sense
be compared to class dominion, it has therefore more importance for the
history of social customs than for socio-political history” (1975,2286).
Another way of putting this problem is that Gramsci brings a split
theoretical vision to the prospect of revolutionary social change and woman’s
role in it. He continually reiterates the necessity of making the world of pro-
duction and work “the point of reference for the new world in gestation”
(1975, 863). But he treats the “woman’s question” as a primarily ethico-civil
issue, a question of legislation, and cultural stereotypes. His program for
revolution “rooted within productive life itself’ is thus limited to one half the
political subjects-the male workers. And his professed support for
“woman’s liberation” is, literally, unfounded, without a basis in the daily
work existence of women, unrooted “within productive life itself.” In
“existential” terms, Gramsci staunchly supports woman’s liberation, as his

1 1 . Gramsci’s own discourse apparently mirrors the conceptual level he is addressing:

writing of the ideological and popular conceptions he uses proverbs to make his point; by
the time he has reached the reproductive-economicstage of the discussion the proverbs dis-
appear, save one concerning, again, woman: “a mother raises a hundred children and a
hundred children can’t maintain a mother” (1975,2149; 1971,295).
 228 Moe

eloquent and passionate praise for Ibsen’s Nora demonstrates;lz in theoretical

terms, however, he is unable to liberate woman from the conceptual ghetto of
the ethico-civil, unable to grasp the full significance of women as productive
political subjects.13
Gramsci, then, repeatedly marks out the terrain of the productive base
versus superstructure (or the ethico-political) via the figuration of woman
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and, conversely, marks out masculine and feminine via the articulation of
base and superstructure. It seems just as difficult for Gramsci to think gender
outside the framework of production and its Other as it is for him to think
this latter opposition outside the framework of gender.
While it is not possible to cite all the instances of this discursive process in
Gramsci, one passage from Americanism and Fordism sheds further light on
this genderization of production and productivization of gender. In another
section that concerns sexuality, titled “Animality and Industrialism,”
Gramsci describes what he calls various “crises of libertinism,” when the
powerful mechanisms of coercion or repression give way to some form of
profligacy. “But,” he writes, “the crisis does not affect the working masses
except in a superficial manner, or it can affect them indirectly, in that it
depraves their women folk” (1975, 2162; 1971, 299). Here the question of
sexuality, in the guise of historical periods of unbridled passions, serves as
yet another occasion to distinguish between male and female (sexuality), pro-
duction and its Other. Indeed this one sentence lines these terms up

12. This theater review is an essential text for considering Gramsci’s relationship to the
question of sexuality and woman and merits much further critical attention. From this
review it might be argued that Gramsci does ground his views of women’s liberation in
productive life, writing as he does of “proletarian women, women who work, those who
produce more than pieces of new humanity and voluptuous shivers of sexual pleasure”
(1977, 346; 1985, 72). And yet, even in this formulation, production remains strictly
inflected as factory production, production of new goods.
13. While exploring the pitfalls of Gramsci’s ethico-civil articulation of the “woman’s
question,” it is also important to bear in mind the degree to which his approach to the ques-
tion represents a break with the previous economistic Marxist considerations of it. As
Emma Fattorini notes, in introducing the woman’s question as one of female idenrio
“Gramsci goes far beyond the Engelsian framework of The Origin of the Fumify (and its
Marxist derivations) insofar as there is no assimilation between sexual oppression and class
oppression. In Gramsci there is not a theoretical derivation of sexual conflict from class
conflict, quite in contrast to Marxist thought.” Fattorini also cites a related observation of
Franca Pieroni Bortolloti: “It is curious that Gramsci discovers the ‘question’ in the manner
of J. Stuart Mill (slavery as based upon juridical inequality) and not in the manner of
Fourier-Engels-Lenin (slavery as based upon the existence of domestic work)” (Fattorini
1987, 2-3). The strengths of Gramsci’s ethico-civil orientation to the problem have been
suggested by C. Mancina (1987a).
 Gramsci’s “SexualQuestion” 229

unequivocally, with the apodictic force of the unspoken: the “working

masses” are as surely male as they are impervious to the sexual, to sexual
“depravation.” Women, in fact, are the conduit of sexuality for men, their
point of access to it: it is a “superficial,” “indirect” experience for them.
If we compare this sentence with the way it was first drafted at the end of
Quaderno 1 , we find another semantic layering to this question. Here
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Gramsci writes: “the crisis of libertinism occurs.. .which, however, only

affects the working masses superficially or affects them sentimentally
because it depraves their women folk” (1975, 138, emphasis added). A lot is
unclear in this sentence, most of all the meaning of superficially and
sentimentally and the relationship between them. Both adverbs place the
object, the working masses, in a relationship of exteriority and contingency
to the acting subject, the crisis of libertinism (which, however, acts directly
upon “their women”). The two adverbs shield the working masses from its
libidinal force. And yet sentimentally gives rise to a slight ambiguity. For if
superficially unequivocally keeps the working masses at one remove from
the libido, on the surface, on the other side of the skin, sentimentally, how-
ever much it diminishes the force of the subject on the object, still allows it a
way into the working masses, lets it under the surface, under their skin.
Sentiments may rank relatively low in Gramsci’s hierarchy of political
effectivity in Americanism and Fordism, and yet the sentiments are still those
of the political subject.14 And thus, clearing up this point and editing out the
sentiments, in the second draft Gramsci reduces the relationship between the
libido and the working masses to an effect of the sulface.

2
We have seen how at various points in Americanism and Fordism
Gramsci defines production in terms of its female, sexual Other. Insofar as
they were rendered “other,” as they represented an antagonism or
“resistance” to production, the female and s e x u a l a e f i n e d in terms of one
another-took form, were given a form. But alongside this composite Other,
another question arises. For it seems in the nature of others to have an abyssal
structure-if the first term in the relationship, the self-identical subject, is
one, the Other is potentially infinite. The othering process, then, apparently

14. In the section that precedes Animality’ and industrialism,” Gramsci also associates
‘‘I

the “sentimental” with woman and, again, locates the politics appropriate to her in the realm
of legislation: “One should also study the origins of the legislation in the Anglo-Saxon
countries which is so favorable to women in a whole series of questions relating to
‘sentimental’ or pseudosentimental conflicts” (1975,2160; 1971,297-98).
 230 Moe

works like a tumor, spreading everywhere, threatening the very existence of

the self-identical host. In this section I will be considering the expansion of
the Other of production from its figuration in sexuality and woman to other
areas of the social totality.
Americanism and Fordism is unique among the prison notebooks in that
its self-proclaimed object of analysis is a form of economic organization. The
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problems to be examined in it are seen as “links of the chain marking the pas-
sage from the old economic individualism to the planned economy.” But it is
not so much the form of economic organization itself that interests Gramsci
as the “problems [arising] from the various forms of resistance to this evolu-
tion encountered by the process of development” (1975,2139; 1971,279). At
the outset of Americanism and Fordism Gramsci thus inscribes the structure
of production and its Other which will be explored through the rest of the
notebook. That is, Fordist production is posited as the unquestioned “process
of development” to which all other areas of the social can at best react, resist.
In the above discussion we took Gramsci, in some sense “literally,” reading
sexuality and woman as the primary others of production. Now we must seek
to articulate that wider sphere of “resistance” which sexuality and woman
metonymically represent.
In section 11 Gramsci examines the question of “the rationalization of
production and work,” which is also the title of that section. Though his ref-
erence point is the sphere of production, what concerns him most is what
happens outside the factory, the “private life” of workers and its relationship
to the sphere of production proper. As this outside is primarily viewed in
terms of resistance to production, he singles out production’s two main
“enemies”: alcohol and sex. He writes:
Someone who works for a wage, with fixed hours, does not have time to
dedicate himself to the pursuit of drink or to sport or evading the law. The
same observation can be made about sexuality. “Womanising” demands too
much “loisirs”. ..It seems clear that the new industrialism wants monogamy:
it wants the man as worker not to squander his nervous energies in the
disorderly and stimulating pursuit of occasional sexual satisfaction. The
employee who goes to work after a night of “excess” is no good for his
work. The exaltation of passion cannot be reconciled with the timed
movements of productive motions connected with the most perfected
automatism (1975,2167; 1971, 304).

This helps to fill out Gramsci’s relegation of “sporting” sexuality to the

margins of the social in “Some aspects of the sexual question.” It situates sex-
uality in the context of the worker’s relationship to production, his on- and
off-hours, linking it to the question of “loisirs.” But let’s consider the two
 Gramsci’s “Sexual Question” 231

expressions that Gramsci employs to indicate sexuality and leisure: “ f acaccia

alla donna [womanising]” and “foisirs[leisure].” With the phrase “fa caccia
alla donna” Gramsci constructs an image of sexuality as debauchery, as
“excess.” He sets up sexuality as a straw m a n - o r woman, rather-which he
may caricature and trivialize. The sexuality represented in this passage is thus
“disorderly,” an act of “squandering,” “occasional,” “excessive,” “an
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exaltation of passion.”
Corresponding to this “excessive” image of sexuality Gramsci posits an
excessive “foisirs.”Just as Gramsci reduces sexuality to excessive debauch-
ery, he reduces leisure to “loisirs.” Which is to say that he conceives of the
sphere outside of work either as an empty reverse of work, a negativity, or as
an “excessive” positivity. In this instance the Italian language itself seems to
contribute to this operation. Lacking the word and concept for leisure, which
is to say a concept of recreational free time with a certain popular diffusion,
Gramsci resorts to the French “foisirs”with a distinctively aristocratic ring.
As with the labeling of sexuality as “sport” in “Some aspects,” Gramsci thus
insinuates through the use of another, foreign tongue that these activities are
not native to the Italian working class, proper to them. Only the parasitic
upper classes can afford leisure, can afford alcohol, can afford sexuality, can,
indeed, afford an unconscious.~sAnd it is the figure of woman that is loaded
with this function, with representing this excessive complex.16
Thus in Americanism and Fordism the conceptualization of production as
factory work which “creates and accumulates new goods” empties a wide
range of other domains of positivity and determinative force-sexuality and
female subjectivity, and the male subject’s off-hours existence, his leisure, as
well. But the list of devaluated domains extends even further. For in these
same pages Gramsci denies full politico-productive status to another eco-
nomic sphere which, in his discussion of “if mister0 di Napofi,” he labels
“intermediary functions”: activities like commerce, trade, and transport
which he sees being favorably reduced in America “to the level of a gen-
uinely subordinate activity of production” (1975, 2145; 1971, 285). Here,

15. See Gramsci’s comment “that the ‘unconscious’ begins only after an income of so
many tens of thousands of lira” (1975, 1833).
16. See also Gramsci’s suggestive remarks on “idle women” and “deluxe mammals” at the
end of Americanism and Fordism (1975, 2169; 1971, 306). Gramsci’s whole discussion
of female sexualization and of woman’s ‘‘prevalentfunction” in the creation of “ever-greater
margins of social passivity” in this passage can be interestingly read alongside the follow-
ing observation by Michel Foucault: “It is worth remembering that the first figure to be
invested by the deployment of sexuality, one of the first to be ‘sexualized,’ was the ‘idle’
woman” (1980, 121).
 232 Moe

too, we see the type of exclusion involved in Gramsci’s attempt to specify the
productive, to establish a divide between it and its other (here referred to as
“semi-parasitic”). And we can readily speculate that one of the main pitfalls
of this process of discrimination is that in setting restrictions on what is
viewed as productive it restricts as well one’s vision of the field of hege-
monic, and counter-hegemonic, politics: “Hegemony [under Fordism] is born
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in the factory and requires for its existence only a minute quantity of profes-
sional, political and ideological intermediaries” (1975,2146; 1971,285).
This concludes the series of production’s primary “others” in
Americanism and Fordism, those categories that figure negatively in his map
of politico-economic effectivity in that text. I think it important, however, to
note one category that Gramsci doesn’t treat, but that can be seen as inti-
mately related to the questions considered thus far: that of domestic work. By
restricting the full valorization of work to factory work “which produces
new goods,” Gramsci also precludes the recognition of the work that pri-
marily women perform in the domestic sphere: raising children, managing
and maintaining a household, administering consumption. This nonvaluation
of domestic work has numerous implications for the theorization of produc-
tion in general. It excludes from the purview of production not only the
productionheproduction of social subjects but also the administration of con-
sumption over which women have traditionally presided and which makes
possible the ever-increasing levels of consumption that are the necessary
condition for the fordist regime.17 And, as with his undervaluation of
“intermediary functions,” by not conceiving of labor in the domestic sphere
as a form of production and by not attending to the nexus amongst domestic
work, consumption, and “production,” Gramsci neglects the politics of that
sphere and the possibilities for political mobilization within it.

17. In his “Consumption and the Concept of the Household,” John Kenneth Galbraith
argues that in the modern era “the conversion of women into a crypto-servant class was an
economic accomplishment of the first importance.. .critical for the expansion of consump-
tion in the modem economy.” That is, “if it were not for this service [the unpaid labor of
women in administering consumption, which is not valued in national income or product],
all forms of household consumption would be limited by the time required to manage such
consumption-to select, transport, prepare, repair, maintain, clean, service, store, protect
and otherwise perform the tasks that are associated with the consumption of goods” (1973,
33). In other words, without unpaid women’s work, the possibility of increasing con-
sumption would be severely limited. Fordism, understood as a historically specific
“articulation between process of production and mode of consumption” (Aglietta) would be
jammed.
 Gramsci’s “Sexual Question” 233

3
I have been arguing that, in Americanism and Fordism, Gramsci
articulates a heterogeneous ensemble of categories (“sexuality,” “woman,”
“loisirs,” “intermediary functions,” and, implicitly, the domestic sphere)
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which exist in some form of resistance to the primary site of economics and
politics, production within the factory. I have suggested moreover that this
exclusion of the nonproductive, this rendering of production’s “others,” not
only significantly affects Gramsci’s definition of production but conditions
the forms of politics that can be implicitly derived from it as well. In the
concluding section of this essay I wish to shift perspective from Gramsci’s
texts to the contemporary scene, from the Gramscian grid of “production and
its others” to the configuration of these five categories in the present. By
turning to the present I wish, first, to offer some idea of the socio-critical
matrix out of which my interpretation of Gramsci in this essay has taken
form. But secondly, and more importantly, I thus hope to offer evidence of
the urgent need for an encounter between Gramsci and feminism, or, more
precisely, for a critical approach which, taking form out of an exchange
between the discourses of Gramsci and feminism, would engage with the
productivity of the categories of “sexuality,” “woman,” “loisirs,” the
“intermediary,” and the domestic in the West today.
In the fifty-odd years since Gramsci’s death, questions related to these five
categories have assumed ever greater significance within diverse fields of
intellectual inquiry. The ascendency of these categories in critical discourse
is no doubt related to the increased importance of the subjects, domains, and
activities indicated by them within society itself. To cite just some of the most
relevant examples, since World War I1 the West (or “Euramerica”) has wit-
nessed the massive expansion of “intermediary functions” (the so-called
service sector, telecommunications, the mass media, transport), the rise (and
fall) of the welfare state, the massive entrance of women into the “official”
(extra-domestic) work force, and the emergence of sexual politics as one of
the key sites of politics in general (e.g., the issue of abortion in the United
States).
Given women’s particular relationship to these transformations, it is
hardly surprising that feminism has had much to say about problems associ-
ated with sexuality, the female condition, leisure, “intermediary” economic
activities, and the domestic sphere, often in relation to each other. Having
been the figures for and subjects of those categories conceptualized as non-
productive for so long, women have had a privileged perspective from which
 234 Moe

to theorize their expansion within contemporary society. The familiar femi-

nist dictum that “the personal is political” thus signals women’s awareness of
the need to rethink a whole series of relationships (between public and
private, political and subjective, productive and nonproductive) which have
undergone extensive transformations in recent decades.
This feminist awareness of nothing less than a crisis in the theoretical
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models used to analyze social reality has articulated itself in the most diverse
forms of intellectual production. The particular critical approach I wish to
outline here is that which endeavors to investigate the social processes and
mechanisms through which the subject is “gendered” and desire formed, and
to explore the specific sites where these processes of desire formation and
subject constitution take place.18 What distinguishes such investigations from
the greater part of previous work on ideology and situates them within the
parameters of the contemporary moment is that they do not conceive of
“ideology” and “culture” as secondary or supplemental to the “hard” world
of production but rather as integral elements of the productive process itself.
They take stock of the unprecedented symbiosis that has been achieved in
recent decades between commodity production on the one hand and the
spheres of the aesthetic, the cultural, and representation on the other. They
recognize that such activities as the design, styling, marketing, advertising,
and distribution of the product can no longer be viewed as posterior to the
product “itself” but rather as integral stages in its production. Conversely,
there is no cultural, aesthetic, or “leisure” activity that escapes the market and
its commodification of human experience. “Loisirs” has been swallowed up
in the market of leisure; orium assimilated to negorium.
Though the aetiology of this recent historical condition, seen by many as
“postmodem,” is complex, surely one of its main “causes” is the revolution in
the mass media and telecommunications. Of course, in narrowing down this
discussion of sexuality, the female condition, leisure, “intermediary” eco-
nomic activities, and the domestic sphere to the question of media I do not
wish to imply that the subjects, processes, and domains indicated by these five
categories have become “hyperreal” or “simulacral” 5 la Baudrillard, or that
the media provide the only perspective from which to view them. At the same
time it must be acknowledged that in recent decades these five areas have
been transformed by the media in some unprecedented way, and that for too
long the Left has ignored this terrain and left it to corporate market

18. The work of critics like Laura Mulvey, Tania Modleski, and Teresa de Lauretis in the
area of media studies offers an approximate idea of the kind of feminist critical perspectiveI
am describing here. I would add, however, that the approach outlined here is only in part a
descriptionof work already done; it is equally a proposal for future areas of investigation.
 Gramsci‘s “Sexual Question” 235

researchers to study (which they have done with the utmost diligence and
profit). A key aspect of the critical approach I am outlining therefore
involves the vigorous scrutiny of the effects of the media upon these five
areas and upon their role in contemporary processes of production.
Let us take, for example, the case of television advertising. We can begin
to appreciate the crucial political interest of television advertising when we
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consider the television screen as an interface between the advertising

corporation and the spectating subject.19 On one hand, the corporation must
represent its product, staging it on a scene whose sole purpose is to engage the
spectating subject. The advertiser must thus actively involve itself in the for-
mation of consumer desire, a desire that, in complex ways, is always
politically inflected and sexually differentiated. The product by no means
precedes its representation; it is made for representation, and billions of dol-
lars must be spent to ensure that subjects are produced who will purchase
these products. This is what we might call pure “postmodem” economics; but
it is equally “postmodem” hegemonic politics, for the screen has become a
key site in the exercise of capitalist hegemony. We have come a long way
indeed from Gramsci’s assertion that “hegemony is born in the factory and
requires for its existence only a minute quantity of professional political and
ideological intermediaries” (1 975, 2146; 1971,285).*0
But the advertising corporations and their media productions are only one
part of the story. The other, essential, part is of course the telespectator, the
subject who, in this emblematic case, is at home, in the domestic space of his
or her physical, affective, and “ideological” reproduction. And thus if one
part of the analytic task proposed here involves analyzing the productive
process and the exercise of hegemony through the media from the
“corporate” perspective, the other crucial part involves examining the sub-
ject’s active position in this process, which is to say the dynamics of desire

19. Corporations know full well that the television screen is the quickest way to the hearts
and minds of the consumer. According to the Nielson Ratings for 1987-88, the average
American household had its television turned on for an average of seven hours per day
(Television Advertising Bureau 1989, 3). Worth quoting along with this figure is the
Bureau’s estimate that, in 1990, there will be two television sets for every household in
America, and that 98.2 percent of households will have a television.
20. Cf. Paul Smith’s description of “a context in which capital’s claims for the legitimation
of contemporary social and economic structures are made largely at the level of the
consumer, who is never the consumer of just a commodity but equally of the commodity’s
text and ideology.. .the commodity-text far exceeds the mere function of advertizing the
commodity and instead legitimates both it and its underlying mode of production” (1989,
139).
 236 Moe

and pleasure at work in the subject’s experience of the media, all viewed
within the more general context of herhis daily and domestic existence.
Such a critical orientation would offer little hope for leftist political
strategy if its operating hypothesis weren’t that, while the subject is ideologi-
cally inscribed (or, to say it with Althusser, “interpellated”) by and
materially situated within the media-saturated structures of late capitalist
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production, herhis desires and pleasures are not wholly reduced to an

“effect” or “function” of them. The subject brings considerable capacities for
choice, organization, self-expression and, potentially, “politics” to this “new”
scene of production, the mechanisms and modalities of which are, more than
ever before, those of sexuality and sexual differentiation, leisure,
“intermediary” economic activities, and the domestic sphere. As the neo-
Gramscian Stuart Hall puts it, “far from there being no resistance to the
system there has been a proliferation of new points of antagonism, new social
movements of resistance organize around them and, consequently, a general-
ization of ‘politics’ to spheres which hitherto the Left assumed to be
apolitical” (1988, 24).
The aim of the type of analysis briefly sketched out here is, then, to open
up these “other” spaces to critical examination, seeking in them moments of
antagonism and resistance. Its aim, and inspiration, is no doubt Gramscian-
to understand the hegemonic moment in contemporary society so that
counter-hegemonic spaces and practices can be cultivated. But, at the same
time that this approach fruitfully draws upon Gramsci, it requires a re-
elaboration of his analytical priorities, a retrieval of the categories of
“sexuality,” “woman,” “foisirs,”the “intermediary,” and the domestic from
the shadows of Gramsci’s thought, and of Marxist theory generally, in order
to re-examine them in light of their centrality to the processes of production
and hegemony at work today. Such a critical endeavor will involve a constant
shuttling between Gramsci and feminism, a mutual exchange in which each
discourse interrogates and contributes to the other. From this critical
exchange, still in its early stages, we surely have much to learn: about
Gramsci and Marxism, about feminism, and about the possibilities for leftist
politics in the 1990s.

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