Bio: (1949-) British sociologist and feminist. Michèle Barrett taught sociology at the City University of London, where she also led the Center for Research on Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Change. In her work, she represents neo-feminist and Marxist-socialist views of feminism. In the book Women’s Oppression Today (1980b), Barrett states that it is not only capitalists but also men from working-class families that benefit from the economic exploitation of women. She believes that the root of the oppression of women lies in the alliance of men and capitalists in the nineteenth century, which resulted in women being excluded from the sphere of work and pushed into the domestic sphere. The key element in the process of oppression of women is the "family-household system". In this system, all household income is earned by men, and all household members depend on that money. On the other hand, all work within the household is done by women. Such a system produces an ideology that justifies this gender division of labor as normal and natural.

Barrett co-authored the book The Anti-Social Family (1982) with Mary McIntosh, in which the authors criticize the ideology that idealizes the family. The family, as promoted by this ideology, is "antisocial" because it supports the capitalist exploitation of women's labor, but also because it destroys life outside the family. This ideology stigmatizes people living outside the family (singles, people living in institutions). The authors believe that the social idea of ​​the family represents the family as the only place where love and care prevail, thus denying the existence of these relationships in other spheres, masking the true nature of family life, and enabling domestic violence and abuse. In the book The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault (1991), the author, using Marxist and Foucault's concepts, examines the complex matrices of women's subordination.

Barrett examined contemporary feminist theory in her book Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates (1992). She notes that modern feminists are increasingly rejecting major theoretical systems such as liberalism and Marxism, and instead adopting a poststructuralist and postmodernist approach. She calls this process of rejecting macro-theoretical systems "destabilization of theory". In her later work, she identifies female subordination in the family-household system as something that serves to organize the relations of production of a social formation as a whole. Thus, the family-domestic system of subordination provides a uniquely effective mechanism for ensuring the maintenance of the continuity of the entire social system. Barrett believes that the concept of patriarchy has analytical limitations. Gender inequality is not simply a product of women's experience, but it springs from ideology, that is, the way women and the family are represented in the media and culture.

Main works

Ideology and Cultural Production (1980a);

Women’s Oppression Today: The Imagination in Theory: Culture, Writing, Words, and Things (1980b);

The Anti-Social Family (1982);

Marxist/Feminist Encounter (1989);

The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault (1991);

Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates (1992);

Imagination in Theory: Culture, Writing, Words, and Things (1999).