This dissertation theorises the relationship between gender and property. The familiarity of ownership obscures the centrality of gender and sexual relations in keeping racial regimes of ownership alive. I focus on the social reproduction of property relations to de-familiarise ownership, the proprietary family and sex-gender. Colonial property relations remain the unacknowledged foundations of many of the (even liberatory) theories and arguments central to contemporary political struggles. My work intervenes in feminist theory and praxis, to show the shortfall, if not complicity, of approaches to gender violence that ignore the histories and presents of colonial dispossession and propriety. This analysis is undertaken form the specific vantage point of a globalised German history. Examining a constellation of stories from German colonial history, and the present, illuminates the making and remaking of race and gender, alongside the state-regulated family as an institution that privatises care, propertises intimacy and reproduces property. The four chapters, organised around the central figures of gendered ownership, familiar property ,proprietary childhood and ownership of body/self/sex, present different perspectives on a similar set of questions. They trace how hegemonic ownership relations inflect historical struggles from the turn of the 20th century to the present: these include socialist challenges to patriarchal property, colonial women’s expansion of ownership in the household, and feminist struggles over sexual propriety, childhood and proprietary personhood. My analysis underscores the dangers of respectability politics, the policing of propriety and complicity in statecraft, even in emancipatory approaches. It follows from the discussion of these constellations that a feminist politics aiming to liberate gender and sexual relations must articulate together those approaches that seek to abolish the regime of privatised property and care, including state-mandated (racialised) sex differentiation.
Familiar ownership: gender, property and colonial statecraft
Voegele, H. (Author). Aug 2024
Student thesis: Doctoral Thesis