Ann Ferguson, a socialist-feminist philosopher (PhD, Brown University, 1965; BA, Swarthmore College, 1959) teaches philosophy and women's studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Her political support for a democratic socialism grew out of sustained involvement with the civil-rights movement, the anti–Vietnam War movement, the new left, and the women's liberation movement in the United States.

Ferguson is best known for her critique of male dominance and her formulation of the concept of sex/affective production (1989). She contends that Marxist accounts of class oppression and radical feminist accounts of heterosexist exploitation do not properly account for (a) the social energies involved in parenting, sexuality, and affective bonding and (b) the unequal, exploitative production and exchange of services between men and women in a patriarchal society (1991). Critiquing Sigmund Freud, Ferguson claims that affective bonding and sexual desires aim primarily not at biological reproduction but rather...