A feminist re-reading of theories of late modernity: Beck, Giddens and the location of gender

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 labor, 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 labor, of the role of the state, and of gender as a social relation constituted through and within other social inequalities