Investigating the Influence of Socialist Feminism on Martha Rosler:

As an artist, photographer, and critic, Martha Rosler (1943-) has developed critical practices from a materialist feminist standpoint. In the early 1970s, she cultivated her thought and artistic practices by critically engaging with conceptual art and photography history in the postgraduate school of the University of California, San Diego, being also active both in the Marxist Literary Group led by Fredric Jameson and in a socialist feminist group. Influenced by Marxism and socialist feminism, her feminism is sharply differentiated from that of other feminist artists such as Judy Chicago, who was also active in the West Coast in the same period. Rosler's feminism is socialist one and different from Chicago's cultural feminism, according to which there is a female nature or essence rooted in biological sex, but how it is so has rarely been investigated in depth. This relative lack of explanation seems partly related to the problem of the historiography of US “second-wave feminism,” which often ignores the history of socialist feminism. Paying attention to the movement's history and the influence it exerted on the artist, this essay rereads Rosler's critical writings and reinterprets her artistic works in the light of Social Reproduction Theory. By doing so, this paper shows that many of the wide-ranging themes of her artworks—the constraint of female bodies, women's labor, war and the domestic sphere, international politics and the everyday, etc.—can be understood coherently as a critique of capital in general from the social reproductive vantage point.