1060 Joan w. Scott for a materialist explanation that excludes natural physical differences. 17An important attempt to break out of this circle of problems came from Joan Kelly in her essay, The Doubled Vision of Feminist Theory, "where she argued that economic and gender systems interacted to produce social and historical exper ences; that neither system was causal, but both"operate simultaneously to reproduce the socioeconomic and male-dominant structures of [a] particular social order. Kelly's suggestion that gender systems had an independent existence provided a crucial conceptual opening, but her commitment to remain within a Marxist framework led her to emphasize the causal role of economic factors even in the determination of the gender system: "The relation of the sexes operates in accordance with, and through, socioeconomic structures, as well as sex/gender oduced the idea of lly based social reality, but she tended to emphasize the social rather than the sexual nature of that reality, and most often, "social, "in her usage, was conceived in terms of economic relations of productio The most far-reaching exploration of sex uality by American Marxist feminists is in Powers of Desire, a volume of essays published in 1983. 9 Influenced by increasing attention to sexuality among political activists and scholars, by French philosopher Michel Foucault's insistence that sexuality is produced in historical contexts, and by the conviction that the current"sexual revolution"required serious analysis, the authors made "sexual politics"the focus of their inquiry. In so doing, they opened the question of causality and offered a variety of solutions to it: indeed, the real excitement of this volume is its lack of analytic unanimity its sense of analytic tension. If individual authors tend to stress the causality of social (by which is often meant"economic")contexts, they nonetheless include suggestions about the importance of studying"the psychic structuring of gender dentity. "If"gender ideology" is sometimes said to"reflect"economic and social structures,there is also a crucial recognition of the need to understand the complex link between society and enduring psychic structure. 20 On the one hand, the editors endorse Jessica Benjamins point that politics must include attention to"the erotic, fantastic components of human life, "but, on the other, no essays besides Benjamin's deal fully or seriously with the theoretical issues she raises.21 Instead 7 Discussions of Marxist feminism include Zillah Eisenstein, Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism(New York, 1979): A Kuhn, "Structures of Patriarchy and Capital in the F A. Kuhn and A. Wolpe, eds, Feminism and Materialism(London. 1978): Rosalind Coward, Patriarchal Precedents(London, 1988); Hilda Scott, Does Socialism Liberate Women?(Boston, 1974): Jane Humphries, Working Class Family, Women's Liberation and Class Struggle: The Case of Nineteenth-Century H:3 euew'of Radical Political Economics, 12(St 1 Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson, eds, Powers of Desire: The Politics of ork,1983) eo Ellen Ross and Rayna Rapp, "Sex and Society: A Research Note from Social History and Introduction, Powers of Desire, 12: and Jessica Benjamin, "Master and Slave: The Fantasy of Erotic Domination. Poe'ers of Desire, 297