Critical Sociology 35(4) 493507

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A Feminist Re-reading of Theories of Late Modernity:

Beck, Giddens and the Location of Gender

Diana Mulinari
Lund University, Lund, Sweden
Kerstin Sandell
Lund University, Lund, Sweden

Abstract
This article is a critical reappraisal of the understandings of gender and the location of women within
theories of late modernity. These theories, as articulated by Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck, have
gained a wide use, not the least since they claim to account for changes in intimate relations. We will
use four major feminist interventions for our argument the problematization of the public-private
divide, feminist theorizing of kinship, feminist understandings of labour, and the heterosexual matrix.
We argue that the late-modern story is made through violently created presences of the reinvention
of the heterosexual matrix, the private sphere as the location of women/gender, reproduction coupled
to biology, and gender as an intimate relation between women and men and absences of analysis of
reproductive and productive labour, of the role of the state, and of gender as a social relation consti-
tuted through and within other social inequalities.

Keywords
family, feminist theory, gender, late modernity

Introduction
More than 10 years have passed since feminist sociologist Martha Gimenez (1993)
reviewed Anthony Giddens book The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and
Eroticism in Modern Societies (1992). Gimenez asserts that the book explores the signifi-
cance of changes in intimate relations, such as the instability of marriage, the separation
between sexuality and reproduction, womens and homosexuals struggles for sexual free-
dom, and the growth in the number of stepfamilies, families headed by women, and other
alternative life-styles. She suggests that Giddens intervention can be re-read from a fem-

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494 Critical Sociology 35(4)

inist point of view as an androcentric interpretation of the male flight from commitment
and from a Marxist point of view as an uncritical account of alienated life. Gimenez also
suggests that the pure relationship may be understood as describing the ideology of capi-
tal labour regarding temporary workers. In her conclusion she underlines that despite the
fact that Giddens analysis is narrowed to a privileged few, the focus of his concern the
relation between intimate relationships and social change is central to social theory.
We both agree with and depart from Martha Gimenezs intervention, and in this article
we want to expand and deepen a feminist critique of theories of late modernity, by Anthony
Giddens and Ulrich Beck. There is an urgent need for this work for several reasons.
Giddens and Becks theoretical development provides for many, both within and outside
academia today, explanations for how intimate relations are changing. These explanations
include the statement that, as womens position is changing and the family is undergoing
radical transformations, patriarchal relations are weakening. Theories of late modernity have
also captured the European sociological imagination, providing what is experienced as rele-
vant sociological interpretations of changes in interpersonal relations many people live in
their everyday lives, in particular of how gender, family and community relationships have
been transformed in the last 20 to 30 years. Especially within the field of family studies the
use of Becks and Giddens theories are extensive, often both as broad, sweeping framing
statements about what world we live in and as tools for interpreting empirical accounts.1
It can be argued that sociology is the understanding of how society is possible, a way of
thinking about the social that Beck and Giddens share. But it can also be argued that soci-
ology is the understanding of the social through (as Marx could have it) the ways the social
comes into being, that is to say, through the doing of actual people in specific locations
(beyond our control). This understanding of the social poses the issue of social division at
the core of sociology, and forms the foundation for our inquiry: we will in this article focus
on the location of women and gender in theories of late modernity. We will do this
through the feminist identification of gender as an important social division locating
women in the world. We will use four major feminist interventions to explore this the
problematization and theorizing of the public-private divide, feminist theorizing of kin-
ship, feminist understandings of labour, and the heterosexual matrix.
We have operationalized our purpose through a selective reading of a number of sociolog-
ical texts by Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck. We chose them as central representatives for
the broad stream running through the social sciences that sees society as late modern. The
main focus of the analysis is on Giddens The Transformation of Intimacy (1992), supple-
mented with Modernity and Self-Identity (1991) and Ulrich Becks Risk Society (1992 [1986]).
The reading of Beck was supplemented with two books written in collaboration with
Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, The Normal Chaos of Love (1995) and Individualization (2002).2

Locating Gender in the Late Modernity Narrative

We want to start our critical inquiry of theories of late modernity by locating gender.
Theories of late modernity are about change, major and fundamental changes. According
to Beck and Giddens, late modernity is an account of the world in which society enters
 Mulinari and Sandell: A Feminist Re-reading of Theories of Late Modernity 495

a new phase: high/late modernity, or the risk society. It is a phase of (over)developed

modernity that to a certain extent undermines itself. This is because the traditional soci-
ety that preceded the modern, and in relation to which the modern was created, has now
been completely superseded/ruined. According to Beck, Today, at the threshold of the
twenty-first century, in the developed Western world, modernization has consumed and
lost its other and now undermines its own premises (1992 [1986]: 10).3
This change, according to the authors, brings with it two central processes: individual-
ization and reflexivity. Individualization takes place when the structures are dissolved and
people are forced more and more to shape their own biographies, choose and construct
their own lives without the compulsion/guidance of tradition. The choice is double: on
the one hand it is free, and the basis for the new kind of politics where choices are made
morally and politically. On the other hand, people are forced to make choices.
Both authors argue that processes of increased individualization and reflexivity in their
turn create changes in family and gender relations, this since women are (at last) individual-
ized. In the modern, now transcended, the family existed through women staying in the tra-
ditional, that is in the family, taking care of children, and the emotional, while men became
individuals working and participating in the public. The individualization (of women) in late
modernity thus means that the family as we knew it is no longer possible/viable/existing.
The conceptualization of the changes as a crisis in family and gender relations is why, we
would argue, academic and common sense concerns about divorce rates, fertility, stepfami-
lies and sexual practices can thrive in this theoretical framework.
Beck and Giddens thus perceive individualization and reflexivity as producing a crisis in
gender relations, a crisis they think must be resolved. Otherwise we are in for a long and bit-
ter battle risking a war between men and women (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1995: 14).
Both authors want, or see emerging, a solution/salvation where heterosexual relations will
remain the primary form of relationship, although they differ regarding which aspects they
stress. For Giddens the focus is on the link between love and sexuality in the heterosexual
relationship. He names the relationship he wants to see/is in the process of being formed the
pure relationship. It is a relationship of sexual and emotional equality (1992), which he sees
as a combination of confluent love (a love that is mutual, unconditional and active) and plas-
tic sexuality (an open sexuality disengaged from reproduction). Beck argues that it is above
all the labour market that threatens to invade and destroy the opportunities for the family,
which he equates with reproduction. He therefore believes that the state should intervene to
solve the inherent conflict between the family and paid work. The state (and companies)
should invoke family values for limiting and cushioning market relationships by, for
example, providing day nurseries, but also by obliging employers to give work to both adults
in the family, so that they can be (mobile) together (Beck, 1992 [1986]: 124).4
We want to point out that it is through women entering the public and becoming indi-
viduals that changes in gender relations occur in the family gender relations understood as
love, sexuality and reproduction are thus located in the family while the public seems to be
individual/neutral/equal. This goes against the main theoretical and analytical findings in the
feminist field: that gender and gender relations permeate all areas of society. The notion of
social processes as gendered grasps an understanding of gender as a principle for social organ-
ization that not only regulates the reproductive field but is a central regulatory principle for
496 Critical Sociology 35(4)

both the organization of work and the construction of nations and national belonging. In
exploring a time that presumably Beck and Giddens would label as emerging modernity,
where women were securely located within the private/family, Anne McClintock agues that
imperialism cannot be fully understood without a theory of gender power.

Gender power was not the superficial patina of empire, an ephemeral gloss over the
more decisive mechanics of class or race. Rather, gender dynamics were, from the
outset, fundamental to the securing and maintenance of the imperial enterprise.
(McClintock, 1995: 7)

She further argues that the cult of domesticity, that white women were located within the
heterosexual family outside the public, was one of the most central ideologies of colonialism.
Instead of embracing this knowledge, Giddens and Beck reintroduce an understanding of the
social that relocates gender (and women) as existing only within the realm of an isolated pri-
vate sphere linked to a specific place (the home) and to specific actors (women and men in
pair relationships/families). The private in their understanding is not seen as constituted in
interplay with the public and is, we would argue, an understanding that echoes earlier func-
tionalist sociological assumptions about the natural location of family and women (Thorne,
1982). Feminists have deeply interrogated these ideas, not the least through showing how the
state intervenes and regulates the private and the family, and through researching the central
role state institutions play in creating and maintaining the boundaries between the private
and the public: boundaries, feminists have argued, that are at the core of the reproduction of
gender inequalities. Carole Pateman even argues that The dichotomy between the private
and the public is central to almost two centuries of feminist writing and political struggle; it
is, ultimately, what the feminist movement is about (Pateman, 1989: 118).
The absence of a theorizing of state power in late modernity theories obscures the idea
that different groups of women and families are located in varying relations both towards
the state and towards the ideological boundaries between the private and the public
(Marchand and Runyan, 2000). This (serious) ignorance in the way the social is talked
about takes place in a (fortress) European context where immigrant and asylum restric-
tions and limitations are often legitimated by locating (migrant) women and children
within the realm of the private (Fink et al., 2001; Lutz, 1997).
In other words: the location of gender and women within the theory of late modernity
obscures state (patriarchal and racialized) power and naturalizes the boundaries between
the private and the public. Feminists have argued that traditional notions of the private
(and of privacy) as the ones evolving from Giddens and Beck are either inadequate or
actively harmful for women.

Family and Kinship

In this section we will use feminist anthropological theorizing on kinship to explore how
Beck and Giddens conceptualize family. In the introduction to the anthology Gender and
 Mulinari and Sandell: A Feminist Re-reading of Theories of Late Modernity 497

Kinship: Essays Toward a Unified Analysis (1987), Collier and Yanagisako argue that kinship
is always social, and that there are no facts, biological or material, that have social conse-
quences and cultural meanings in and of themselves (Collier and Yanagisako 1987: 39).
They further argue that feminist interventions should ask questions about the constitutive
assumptions in Western ideas on kinship that are about the naturalness of kinship being
based on biology and reproduction premised on the two sexes. When reading Beck and
Giddens through Yanagisako and Colliers intervention, we conclude that the authors
ground what a family is through giving it an origin in a historical narrative determined by
the transformation of society from traditional, via modern, to late modern. The notion of
the family, as a nuclear heterosexual reproductive unit, is naturalized through two moves.
First, the origin is securely linked to nature. According to Giddens and Beck, the family was
a given community in the traditional, uniting men, women and children, reproduction,
love and sexuality. Giddens expresses himself in the following way: Like gender, kinship
was once seen as naturally given, a series of rights and obligations which biological and mar-
riage ties created (Giddens, 1992: 96). Beck writes: Until recently ones family was a nat-
ural product, a blood relationship determining social and material heredity, establishing
kinships and so on (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1995: 158).
Second, the origin is naturalized through the contrasting dramatization of todays
state as unnatural and unrecognizable, where the former indisputable and intimate link
between biology and reproduction is made the precondition for understanding the
present. That nature and reproduction was inseparably connected makes the untying
of the two the major sign of todays changes. Both authors separate the hetero-relation-
ship from reproduction by reducing reproduction to the actual biological fertilization,
and by arguing that reproductive technology has made this process, and thus nature,
completely social: The end of reproduction as fate is closely tied to the end of
nature (Giddens, 1991: 219). Beck argues that with the introduction of birth control
and reproduction technology an unnatural world is being produced in which the
ancient link between nature and family is being severed and the consequences cannot
yet be measured (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1995: 158).5 The way the story is orches-
trated produces an understanding of the changes as a threat, a threat to what the
authors ultimately see as central to the continued existence of society: community, order
and kinship (ontologically present in the traditional society and sustained through women
in the modern).
This meta-account of the traditional and the modern family has been called into ques-
tion by a growing body of historical and anthropological research. Researchers have shown
that the nuclear family is a fairly recent historical phenomenon that was at its height in
the 1950s, and that the nuclear family with the strict division of labour ascribed to it by
Beck and Giddens was essentially an ideology, rather than everyday practice (Davidoff,
1999; Nicholson, 1990). Anthropological research has also shown that so-called tradi-
tional societies have complex and variable ways of organizing reproduction, reciprocity
and work, and that women are differently located in these fields (Parkin and Stone, 2004).
In other words, the family, in any ontological and stable sense, has never existed but
seems rather to be an origin myth in Donna Haraways sense. For us, the evolutionary in
the late-modern story has, to say the least, a bitter aftertaste, after the controversy in
498 Critical Sociology 35(4)

knowledge-power systems over how evolutionary accounts were fundamental for (social)
science and colonialism (Asad, 1973) and after the dethronement of scientific racisms
account of traditional/primitive peoples as being very distant, from another time, and
regarded as lower beings (Harding, 1993; Narayan and Harding, 2000).
Thus, in the narrative of waves of modernization the family is naturalized, securing gen-
der in the form of men and women as part of the human landscape and linking (natural)
women to the fate of reproduction. Further, the narrative reinscribes a colonial imaginary.
Without accounts about other people situated in another time and in distant places, these
theories are impossible to understand. The construction involves a link between woman,
nature and savage, whose counterpart is then precisely the Western white male, the same
individual that is the basis for Giddens and Becks theorizing on individualization.
Our greatest concern is thus that Beck and Giddens do not use family as an analyti-
cal concept.6 We mean that the authors in their portrayal of the nuclear family in moder-
nity rely upon some kind of recognition, that we agree that it was so without it being
proven, or that the family is investigated or problematized. It is an appeal to a certain
type of historical experience, or perhaps even more to a longing for something that we
think has been lost. The feminist notion of bracketing the family instead shows that fam-
ily is a highly contested concept (DeVault, 1991).

Understanding the Place of Gendered Labour

In this section we pose the question of the location of working women. In Becks and
Giddens texts forceful assumptions are made about womens (reproductive) work in late
modernity, where the precondition for their arguments are that, in the modern, women
and men had different but equal roles womens were still in the traditional, that is to
say in the nuclear family doing the reproductive work. The making of these assumptions,
fundamental to the authors argument about radical change, is based, we will argue, upon
the marked absence of an understanding of the sexual division of labour at the centre of
the organization of labour in capitalist societies.

Changes in Reproductive Regimes

Reproductive work in late modernity is conspicuously absent in Becks and Giddens
texts. In Giddens argument, reproduction holds a remarkable position. On the one
hand, people are expected to find an ontological security through the trust that is built
up between an infant and its caretakers (1991: 3); on the other hand, children are not
in adults (private) lives: the pure relationship is a relationship without children. This is
a construct in which the security that parents/guardians give is a precondition for the self
to be established; at the same time there is no discussion about where these relations are
lived. The abstraction and dissociation from any kind of everyday life is striking, and it
seems that no one has to do any of the tasks that are a part of reproductive work.
 Mulinari and Sandell: A Feminist Re-reading of Theories of Late Modernity 499

In Becks writing reproductive work is present, but the question about who is going to do
it if women are individualized is never resolved. He seems to mean that since reproduction
is no longer decided by fate, those women who have children take on this work of their own
volition, and have only themselves to blame for the loss of autonomy that caring for children
brings (1992 [1986]: 111). The idea that men should take part in this work is unthinkable.
Freeing women from housework requires, according to Beck:

the regression of men into this modern feudal existence which is exactly what women
reject for themselves. Historically, that is like an attempt to make the nobility the serf of
the peasants. But men are no more willing than women to follow the call back to the
kitchen! (women ought to know that better than anyone else!). (Beck, 1992 [1986]: 109)

There is thus a complete absence of any discussion about which groups (of women) do
the reproductive work and under what circumstances in late modernity. The concept of
reproductive labour is central to an analysis of gender inequality, including understanding
the devaluation of cleaning, cooking, childcare and other womens work, also in the paid
labour force. As reproductive work still is being done, feminists have shown that within
the boundaries of the heterosexual nuclear family (original or step) women currently do
most of this work, and there is very little to indicate that shifts have occurred within
households division of labour. The structural absence of change in womens historical
responsibility for reproductive work is especially interesting in the Nordic countries often
defined as women friendly (Statistiska Centralbyrn, 2003), where as a solution to this
imbalance part-time work is still much more common for women than men.
Another important absence from the authors understanding of societal changes in late
modernity is the consequences of the restructuring of European welfare states for caring.
The removal or privatization of welfare functions means that the responsibility for child-
care and care of the elderly and sick shifts from the state towards the family (and ultimately
to women), but not uniformly. McDowell (1991) suggests that the privatization of wel-
fare means that some women are being forced out of paid employment and back into the
home, while others are faced with the double burden of going out to work and taking
responsibility for dependants. These processes have had serious impact on the lives of
women and children and brought new forms of (permanent) exclusions (Borchorst and
Siim, 2002; Schierup et al., 2006).
Further, Beck and Giddens do not take into account the emergence of a global econ-
omy of caring, one of the most relevant aspects of the transformations taking place within
global capitalism. Today more than 120 million people live in a country other than the
one in which they were born, and women are moving across state borders responding to
the demand for low-paid domestic work in Europe. The movement of peoples across
national borders is not a new phenomenon, but increasingly strict immigration laws and
efforts to enforce borders within a new global economy of caring work (Anderson, 2000)
is a phenomenon that needs to be addressed.
An analysis of the relations between men and women (and between different groups of
men and of women), taking the new global division of reproductive work as a critical point
500 Critical Sociology 35(4)

of departure, provides a more critical reading of even progressive changes in gender relations
(and of the locations of these relations within the social) than the ones evolving from
Giddens and Beck. Feminists have shown that changes both in the global labour regime and
in welfare state provisions can be double edged. Mary Romero writes that Social economic
and political progress made under certain feminist political and economic regimes is struc-
turally linked to the exploitation, regression, and devolution of other women (Romero,
2000: 1016). Thus decreasing inequalities between women and men, for some groups of
women, are the very same changes central to increasing inequalities between women and
men and between women and women for other groups of women (Acker, 2006).

Productive Work
Effects of the gendered division of labour are also markedly absent in Becks and Giddens
reasoning about womens conditions in the labour market. In late modernity, the central
argument is that women work and that women and men stand on an equal footing in
the labour market. Marriage stands on a shaky foundation because men and women are
becoming equals in the professional field in terms of income and status, so that economic
restraints are reduced or even vanish, making love the main bond between the partners
(Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1995: 195).
In Becks and Giddens argument, work, equality and a good income are necessary pre-
conditions for the external conditions to lack significance. The inequality in the labour
market that they sometimes admit exists is regarded as a feudal remnant that will fade
away. Feminist theory on the other hand has committed great effort to understand the
gendered segmentation of the labour market. Women have established themselves in a
number of different fields in the public arena. But at the same time, the presence of
women has not involved any significant changes in the hierarchical connection between
gender and status in organizations, not even in the strata that Beck and Giddens seem to
discuss, the professional and managerial.

Women tend to move into those areas of professional and managerial employment where
they may be able to exercise high levels of skills and expertise but have little effective
organizational discretion. Whilst women are increasingly gaining entry to jobs demanding
high levels of expertise, they are only rarely translating these into jobs with high levels of
authority and organizational power. (Savage, 1992: 146)

The authors narrow definition of the concept of gender (as a fixed relation between two
categories of people, women and men, within the private) also obscures the interactions
between labour regimes and the production of specific (racialized) femininities. Taking as
a point of departure the experience of migration and racism in Britain, sociologist Avtar
Brah argues that Asian womens position in the labour market is affected both by gender
and by their position as black workers. Not only do Asian men earn less than white men,
which is forcing Asian women to work full time to a higher degree than white women, but
Asian womens position in the labour market is also different from white womens.
 Mulinari and Sandell: A Feminist Re-reading of Theories of Late Modernity 501

In contrast to the overall pattern of womens concentration in the service industries,

Asian women are commonly found in low-paid, semi-skilled and unskilled work in the
manufacturing sector, particularly in the clothing and textile industries which have
recently been in decline. (Brah, 1996: 71).

In contrast to postcolonial feminists argument that migrant womens working condi-

tions within European welfare states tend to reinforce race and gender inequalities in a
way that expand their vulnerability, Giddens and Becks conceptualization of the rela-
tionship between women and paid work in late modernity takes for granted the progres-
sive role paid work has for womens autonomy and well being, the very same assumption
that is at the core of the European welfare states regulation of its citizens.

The Issue of Change

Going back to the issue of change, we want to point out also the problems in Becks and
Giddens understanding of womens work in the modern. This is because todays late-mod-
ern situation is sharply contrasted with that of the earlier modern period to enhance the
impression of dramatic change. In the modern period, the writers assume that women were
at home looking after their children and men. The absence of an intersectional perspec-
tive conceptualizing the doing of gender in interaction with other social relations makes
invisible the fact that the male bread winner model worked best for those privileged by class
and ethnicity, privileges that most women did not have (Smart, 1984). In other words,
many groups of women were gainfully employed in the modern period, not only as it is
commonly assumed a small minority of unmarried women. Furthermore, the assumption
that women were women as a product of their place in the family obscures the struggle for
recognition as women, and not cheap labour, that women from underprivileged groups
have fought and made a central theme in several social movements (see Sojourner Truths
speech on womens rights, Aint I a Woman: www.sojournertruth.org/Library/Speeches).
In conclusion, we want to highlight that it is through a combination of partial, prob-
lematic and unsubstantiated statements that women in modernity were not gainfully
employed (they were housewives and carried out the reproductive work for their chil-
dren and men), and that women in late modernity are gainfully employed and on an
equal footing with men in the labour market (and do not perform any reproductive
work) that the authors create the basis for their view on changes in gender relations.

The Reinvention of Heterosexuality

Despite the dramatic changes in intimate relations that Beck and Giddens focus on
and want to explain, in their theorizing surprisingly enough one thing is remark-
ably stable: heterosexual relations remain the most significant and important relations
for adults. When we read Beck and Giddens with Judith Butler (1999 [1990]), an
almost textbook example of the heterosexual matrix emerges. Sex, gender and desire
502 Critical Sociology 35(4)

are linked in a way that recreates two pre-discursively existing sexes that desire each
other through a naturalized heterosexuality.
Through Butler, we have learnt that the heterosexual matrix is produced in theories in
the most fundamental and taken-for-granted assumptions about how the subject is con-
stituted. This also applies to Giddens and Beck, but is more pronounced in Giddens
through his use of psychoanalysis. The monogamous (hetero)sexual relationship is
through Giddens interpretation of psychoanalysis established as the place where central
aspects such as intimacy, respect, sexuality and authenticity are acquired. It is, in short,
through the heterosexual love relationship that one becomes a subject, which is the same
as becoming a man or a woman. Giddens defines sexuality as an instinct that in itself does
not need to be problematized or examined. Heterosexuality is preserved as the primary by
Giddens conceptualizing sexual identity as pre-existing orientations (Giddens, 1992: 78),
and through the gendered ways in which the potential of homosexual relationships are
understood. Homosexuals are placed outside the traditional structures/families (which
sounds better than being discriminated against and unjustly treated), which means that
they can be precursors for the new things happening. But, homosexual men are only able
to be forerunners for plastic (promiscuous) sexuality, while lesbian women, according to
Giddens, are pioneers for confluent love. However, homosexuals can never be the norm
or predominant since that role is already obviously taken by heterosexuality, the only place
where confluent love can be realized.
Beck and Beck-Gernsheim can be read with the same analytical focus, even though they
are not as explicit. For Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, the need for intimacy is the central hub
around which the heterosexual matrix revolves love is exclusively in the first person sin-
gular, and so are truth, morality, salvation, transcendence and authenticity (Beck and
Beck-Gernsheim, 1995: 171).
Both Butler and Foucault have shown that discourses are (re)created by classifications
of the normal and the pathological, making some subject positions more valid than oth-
ers. A scrutiny of Becks and Giddens understandings of gender and family as a power-
knowledge discourse reveals that they produce normality, in the form of the pure
relationship with plastic sexuality and confluent love (Giddens) and the biological nuclear
family (again) (Beck). The pathologies are at least as present as the normality. In Giddens
texts, the pathologies are present in all the situations where the pure relationship is not
realized. It is above all the men who are unable to live these new relationships. In (tradi-
tional) nuclear families women manage the emotional and men the public aspects. When
women discover that they are individuals/demand to be individuals, a painless and eman-
cipatory movement, men are left without ability to develop in a parallel way the required
emotional competence. They remain/become emotional cripples. Without (traditional)
women they experience feelings of inadequacy, insecurity and uncertainty resulting in a
desperate resort to violence and compulsive seduction (Giddens 1992: chapter 7). These
pathologies can be treated through self-help psychology, by the man reflecting over him-
self and opening himself to the other person.7
It is specifically the dissolving of the boundaries that worries Beck. It is when, through
divorces that are a result of labour market pressure, the boundary of the family can no
 Mulinari and Sandell: A Feminist Re-reading of Theories of Late Modernity 503

longer be clearly discerned that things get risky. Families with stepchildren are problematic
parents get divorced from each other, but not from their children. The children pay the
price, they live simultaneously in two families, which Beck believes leads to almost insolu-
ble tangles (1995: 149). This disintegration is a threat perhaps above all to masculinity. If
the heterosexual relationship is not saved, it results in the creation of a number of not really
real men. These men, who break away from traditional masculinity, are long-haired men,
sensitive men, groups of single fathers, and gays in clubs. Becks fear is that these new men
will simply be compulsively masculine or unsuccessful versions of a misunderstood female
wish (1995: 151).
Thus, what feminists nowadays conceptualize as the structural exercising of gendered
power tends to be interpreted by Giddens as a development resulting from men being
victims, and by Beck as effects of the vulnerability and dissolution of the family. And
contrary to what Butler at least implicitly theorizes, that the heterosexual matrix exists
everywhere, in late modernity it seems located only in the private. Adding to this con-
fluent love in the private is even supposedly what is to save the world it is through
exporting this new form of democratic relationship into the public that new positive late-
modern forms of living will be realized.
We found it difficult to understand at first how equality could come into the late-mod-
ern hetero-relationship so naturally and as a matter of course, but finally we interpreted it
as a new reproduction of the equality that functionalists claimed always has been in the
family, something that feminists have criticized strongly (Thorne, 1982). Patriarchal rela-
tions are unmade and superseded by constructing these new (?) heterosexual relations as
dramatically changing and as becoming democratic/equal. It could be argued that what
Giddens and Beck are doing here is recreating womens and mens relations to each other
within the framework of a new kind of patriarchy that is based on the actors active denial
of its existence (Jnasdttir, 1994).
We do not understand why Beck and Giddens assume that democratization involves
prioritizing intimate heterosexual relationships and an under-prioritizing of other social
relationships (between siblings, between mother and daughter, between neighbours,
friends etc.). The thought that the heterosexual pair-relationship might disappear or no
longer be the most important relationship simply does not occur to the authors. Instead,
they re-produce the hetero-relationship, not only as the fundament of society, but also as
what will save the world.

Producing Stories about the World

In the very same moment when feminist theorizing is grappling with how to theoretically and
analytically incorporate the insights that both social change and stability are deeply, but vary-
ingly, gendered, racialized and formed by class and sexuality, Beck and Giddens argue that
divisions of gender and class are crumbling, becoming erased and obsolete in the process of
individualization. When postcolonial theories such as Spivaks ask if the subaltern can speak,
Beck and Giddens reuse deeply colonial imaginaries in their understanding of how society
504 Critical Sociology 35(4)

develops through the reflexive individual, again inherently coded to be white, Western, male,
heterosexual (even though some of us others are partly and conditionally invited).
We would like to inscribe our engagement in the works of Giddens and Beck within
a feminist tradition of re-reading the social, specially those interventions that (from a
feminist perspective) are faulty and problematic but still influential. Writings of Beck and
Giddens are worthy of such a re-reading, not the least since those theories are detheo-
rized through becoming common sense. Chantal Mouffe argues along this line in her
book On the Political.

The post-political perspective that this book intends to challenge finds its sociological
bearings in a picture of the world first elaborated by a variety of theorists who in the early
1960s announced the coming of a post-industrial society and celebrated the end of
ideology. This tendency went later out of fashion but it has been revived in a new guise
by sociologists such as Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens who argue that the model of
politics structured around collective identities has become hopelessly outdated, owning
to the growth of individualism, and that it needs to be relinquished Widely diffused
in the media, those ideas are fast becoming the common sense which informs the
mainstream perception of our social reality. (Mouffe, 2005: 35)

There is something fundamentally wrong and disturbing with the late-modern story, in
its coherence, in its ability to talk in the same breath about grand societal changes, changes
in the family, gender relations and intimate relations. Our conclusion is that it is only
made coherent through violently created presences and absences in their discussions about
gender relations in late modernity. There is a marked presence of the following central dis-
courses: the heterosexual matrix, the private sphere, reproduction coupled to biology, and
gender as an intimate relation between women and men. There is an equally marked
absence of analysis of both reproductive and productive labour, of the role of the state in
creating boundaries between the private and the public, regulating national boundaries,
and of gender as a social relation constituted through and within other social inequalities.
We mean that the combination of marked presences and absences produces a specific pic-
ture of the family and gender relations in late modernity, where ideological conceptions of
the good life are presented with very little and erratic anchorage in womens everyday con-
ditions. Finally, we would argue that both Giddens and Beck in a broader sense are pre-
occupied with actively writing away patriarchy though reinscribing a specific (idealized)
form of heterosexual relationship as the model for democracy and equality.
After having read and critically discussed Becks and Giddens thinking regarding gen-
der relations and family, we began to wonder why they have had such an impact. Why
have these particular accounts, lacking in empirical foundation and theoretical strin-
gency, and not others, been consumed in academia? Beverley Skeggs maintains, and we
are inclined to agree, that the success of late-modern theorists needs to be interpreted in
the light of their role as amplifiers of the discourses of power.8

These new speculations of Urry, Beck and Giddens, therefore, should be seen for what
they are: that is, projects for intellectual grandizement (Bauman, 1998). Class is displaced
 Mulinari and Sandell: A Feminist Re-reading of Theories of Late Modernity 505

and effaced in these new modes of mobility and individualization, by the very people
whose ideas are institutionalized and help reproduce class inequality more intensely
especially in Giddens case as a friend of Clinton and Blair. This enables a particular
middle-class habitus to be institutionalized in government policy, evidenced in the New
Labour agenda on social exclusion as a way of speaking class, knowing, naming and
positioning others. This also enables the abdication from acknowledging class relations,
from occupying and recognizing the positions of power and privilege they inhabit and
the resources they can access. (Skeggs, 2004: 54)

We argue that it is characteristic of late modernity, as an account of the world, that it

actively writes away the fact that patriarchal, colonial and capitalist relations mark the world,
and how people live and experience these, at the same time that experiences of privileged
groups are spoken as universal. When late-modern theorists construct an account about time
and place through universalizing a specific historical experience this is done through the con-
tinued presence of the Other, both through referring to history and to anthropology. Thus
the Other is still fundamental for the (late-)modern subject (Pred, 2000). It is without doubt
the case that Giddens offers one category of people (heterosexually identified white men
from the middle class), a group that has been called into question and de-centred, opportu-
nity to (yet again) regain control by them embodying a central (Western) characteristic:
reflexivity. The vulnerability that the authors maintain late-modern individuals (and the late-
modern family) experience thus stands in stark contrast to the continued arrogance that priv-
ileged groups display all over the world. Of the combination that in the colonial order of
things McClintock so fittingly designates a poetics of ambivalence and a politics of violence
(McClintock, 1995: 28), Beck and Giddens seem only to grasp the first part.

Notes
1 See for example Bjrnberg and Kollind (2005), Weeks et al. (2001), Silva and Smart (1999) and
Roseneil and Budgeon (2004). All these studies depart from Giddens and Beck in their understand-
ing of changes in family life.
2 We are mainly interested in Ulrich Beck as a central icon for ideas about the risk society, and thus it
is principally him we refer to. We feel that this can also be defended since, in his later texts written
in collaboration with Beck-Gernsheim, they further develop many of his arguments from Risk
Society. In their own texts, there is also an ambivalence about how their authorship should be under-
stood, since they particularly state who has written which chapters in the preface. We have consis-
tently quoted from chapters written by Beck in The Normal Chaos of Love.
3 All italics in the quotations are in the original texts.
4 In The Normal Chaos of Love, Beck supports an argument more akin to Giddens, but with a stronger
focus on love and less on sexuality (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1995: chapter 6).
5 Beck and Beck-Gernsheim are mostly concerned about the dissolving and blurring of boundaries.
Once babies can be bred in test tubes, what does motherhood mean? Who is really the father,
brother, sister, uncle of this newborn? (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1995: 159)
6 For a similar criticism of conceptions of the family, but in a different theoretical context, see Michle
Barrett and Mary McIntoshs (1982) criticism of Scott Lash.
506 Critical Sociology 35(4)

7 The subject that Giddens creates is strikingly similar to the confessing subject that Foucault has theorized
on par excellence. The entire pure relationship revolves around telling each other everything and reflect-
ing together. The difference compared with Foucault is that the confessing should primarily be within
the couple relationship, which is above all dyadic (Giddens, 1991: 97). Not even when this becomes
pathological do institutions such as psychiatry and medicine come into it. Here, the main emphasis is on
self-help therapy, some kind of self-confession.
8 See also Mouffe (2005).

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For correspondence: Diana Mulinari, Department of Gender Studies, Lund University, Box 117, S-221
00 Lund, Sweden. Email: Diana.mulinari@genus.lu.se
Kerstin Sandell, Department of Gender Studies, Lund University, Box 117, S-221 00 Lund, Sweden.
Email: Kerstin.sandell@genus.lu.se