This sex which Is Women on the market the standard of all value; its need for a material support hem; the constitution of women as"objects"that emblematize the relation of appropriation to and of that standard sured; its exchange relationships-always rivalrous-among the materialization of relations among men, and so on men alone, and so ot In such a social order, women thus represent a natural value and a social value. Their "development"lies in the passage Are not these modalities the ones that might define the economy of (so-called ) masculine sexUality? And is libido not another name from one to the other. But this passage never takes place for the abstraction of"energy "in a productive power? For the imply ork of nature? Another name for the desire to accumulate oods? Another name for the subordination of the specific As mother, woman remains on the side of (re)productive nature and, because of this, man can never fully transcend his relation qualities of bodies to a-neutral?power that aims above all to to the "natural. "His social existence, his economic structures transform them in order to possess them? Does pleasure, for masculine sexuality, consist in anything other than the appro. and his sexuality are always tied to the work of nature: these priation of nature, in the desire to make it(re)produce, and in structures thus always remain at the level of the earliest appro- exchanges of its/these products with other members of society? priation, that of the constitution of nature as landed property and of the earliest labor, which is agricultural. But this rela An essentially economic pleasure tionship to productive nature, an insurmountable one, has to be Thus the following question: what needs/desires of (so-called) denied so that relations among men may prevail. This means order, from its primitive form, private property, to its devel that mothers, reproductive instruments marked with the name oped form, capital? But also: to what extent are these needs/desires of the father and enclosed in his house, must be private proper- ty, excluded from exchange. The incest taboo represents this the effect of a social mechanism, in part autonomous, that produc them as such? refusal to allow productive nature to enter into exchanges among men. As both natural value and use value, mothers cannot circulate in the form of commodities without threaten- On the status of women in such a social order. ing the very existence of the social order. Mothers are essential /hat makes such an order possible, what assures its founda- to its (re)production (particularly inasmuch tion, is thus the exchange of women. The circulation of women [re]productive of children and of the labor force: through ma- among men is what establishes the operations of society, at least ternity, child-rearing, and domestic maintenance in general of pa the appropriation of nature by man; the transformation riarchal society, Whose presuppositions include the fol- Their responsibility is to maintain the social order without in- tervening so as to change it. Their products are legal tender in that order, moreover, only if they are marked with the name of of nature according to "human"criteria, defined by men alone the submission of nature to labor and technology; the reduction the father, only if they are recognized within his law: that is, of its material, corporeal, perceptible qualities to man's practical only insofar as they are appropriated by him. Society is the concrete activity; the equality of women among themselves place where man engenders himself, where man produces him- but in terms of laws of equivalence that remain external to self as man, where man is born into"human,""super-natu existence 184