Reactionary Feminism
11th February 2024
Reactionary feminism is a form of feminism that rejects the progressivist belief that human history is an ongoing arc of moral advancement and seeks to ground a defence of women’s interests in a contingent, materialist, and sex-realist position. The term originates in an article by the author Mary Harrington and popularized in her book Feminism Against Progress.
Reactionary feminism views men and women as equal in dignity and capacity for excellence but physiologically different in ways that, at scale, are materially and politically significant. Reactionary feminism argues from a materialist analysis of feminist history that the claim that males and females are interchangeabile is itself false, serves as a means of consolidating power by the managerial class, and is actively inimical to the interests of poorer women whose lives of necessity cannot be abstracted from the material.
Reactionary feminist arguments include a critique of modern abortion politics as serving to marginalise key issues raised by maternal feminism such as women’s embodiment and the importance of care, a re-read of the sexual revolution as primarily a technological transition whose externalities are under-counted, and an anti-capitalist framing of transgender politics as driven centrally by the post-1960s industrialization of the body via biotech. Though reactionary feminism is less hostile to religious faiths than liberal feminism, its adherents are by no means all religious. However it has some points of overlap with Catholic social teaching.