Wai Chee Dimock. "Class, Gender, and a History of Metonymy." Rethinking Class: Literary Studies and Social Formations. Ed. Wai Chee Dimock and Michael T. Gilmore. New York: Columbia UP: 1994.

Dimock begins by historicizing Marx's "epistemology": deeming it tinged by an Enlightenment faith in metonymy, in the belief that if we can know a part, we can generalize to the whole. Thus, Marx's materialism draws on that posited by Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke, meaning it enjoys "epistemological certitude" because the material is perceptibly verifiable. What Marx really had was "corporealism," which explains why society or community was for him like a body whose members were like parts serving a specified purpose for the whole.

I hesitate at this point because it isn't clear to me that by calling the community a "body," Marx is being metonymical rather than metaphorical. Nor is it clear to me that my distinction matters, except that generalizability is not at issue in metaphor as Dimock demonstrates it to be in metonymy.

In any case, if the social is a generalized extrapolation from what could be known about the individual body (and if Dimock's right, she catches Marx(ism)'s flip side of liberal individualism's coin) and, thus, the social is a body with corresponding parts, classes are essentially identities because they are merely names for characteristics "in" the bodies of their members. Dimock sees, in this preposition, traces of metonymical thinking, and thus the historical contingency of Marx's theorization of classes.

But if one problem is that Marx's theorization is historically contingent, another is that, empirically, there are exceptions to monolithic models of the working class. Specifically, women in mid-Nineteenth Century America worked in factories with conditions far different from those Marx takes to be standard for the proletariat. While this doesn't strike me as damning to a Marxist notion of class (Dimock herself observes that these women who were happy at being liberated from the domestic front were also often daughters of property-owning fathers--i.e., they aren't working for non-disposable income; they aren't really the working poor), her strong claim is that class-analysis too often assumes gender doesn't serve a differentiating function.