Temple University Philosophy Colloquium Series presents: Dr. Surti Singh (Villanova University) 'On the Feminine Character: Adorno's Gendered Critique of Capitalism. 

In the 1930s, Adorno formulated his view of the bourgeois ‘feminine character’ as a patriarchal and capitalist formation, one that exerted the ideological function of preserving the status quo. In opposition to the prevalent tendency to view women as closer to nature and therefore less subject to the logic of capital, Adorno advanced the converse view: the ‘feminine character’ exemplified women’s thoroughly commoditized character, one that was colonized by the logic of capital to a greater extent than that of men. Rather than acting as symbols of freedom, Adorno argued that bourgeois women functioned as the agency of the commodity. In this paper, I revisit Adorno’s view of the ‘feminine character,’ which is both maligned by critics for stereotypically reducing women to irrational and infantile consumers, and celebrated for disclosing a certain naturalization of femininity that reflects concerns about gender avant la lettre. As an intervention into these debates, this paper situates Adorno’s view of the ‘feminine character’ within his broader methodological concern about the commodity-form. It examines Adorno’s assertion that the commodity-form shapes the unconscious and conscious dispositions of the ‘feminine character’ under capitalism and focuses on his deployment of classical Freudian theory to articulate the psychic dimension of economic categories. In doing so, this paper argues that Adorno’s view of the 'feminine character' offers a gendered critique of capitalism.