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The Sexual Division of Labor, Sexuality, and Lesbian/Gay Liberation: Toward a Marxist-Feminist Analysis of Sexuality in U.S. Capitalism
Abstract
This paper explores the ways in which economic forces have contributed to the social construction of sexuality in the 19th-20th-century United States. It centers on the institution of the sexual division of labor, which is shown to construct both heterosexual marriage, as well as homosexual relations of differing types. The breakdown of the sexual division of labor in the 20th-century is shown to be related to the rise of the lesbian/gay liberation and feminist movements.
... Critical scientists, in particular Marxist-feminist economists, are oriented to history, societal institutions and power structures. Economic dissenters typically apply the social constructionist approach and contend that heterosexuality is the key to patriarchy which in turn determines the division of labor (Matthaei 1995). From such a viewpoint, adopted for instance by Rhonda Gottlieb (1984), women in a straight relationship are put at a twofold disadvantage: First, the conventional heterosexual intercourse has turned out to result in an extremely uneven distribution of sexual pleasure derived from it. ...
... After all, the sexual division of labor is predicted to decline, as women's labor market participation increases and undermines patriarchy (Matthaei 1995). This sort of undermining is what makes queer liberation and feminist emancipation (both of them are comparatively well aware of the disadvantages of conventional roles) go hand in hand, fostering one another. ...
... As homosexuals, who are as successful in leading long-term relationships as heterosexuals do, and who are unlikely to reveal differences regarding trust, commitment and love, there is no rationale for the reluctance to recognise their bonds. The society is 124 See Matthaei, J. (1997), p. 140-141, Bartel, R. (2000a), p. 84-87. 125 See Eskridge, W. (1996), p. 118. ...
... SeeBartel, R. (2000a), p. 64. 191 SeeMatthaei, J. (1997), p. 156. also moral and religious values. ...
This article applies the neoclassical microeconomic analysis of marriage as developed by Nobel laureate economist Gary Becker to same-sex marriage. The objective is to demonstrate that the economic analysis of marriage supports allowing same-sex marriage, and that same-sex marriages would strengthen the incentive to marry, increase the efficiency of marriage markets, provide for more children to be raised in two-parent optimum environments, and benefit states economically overall. The article concludes with an overview of the economic impact of same-sex marriages on states based on the analysis, data and fiscal information currently available from researchers and economists in the field.
... Displays of sex and sexuality therefore had to be excluded from the rational and dispassionate public realm, becoming a nocturnal activity; sexuality only became acceptable on the basis of its exchange value (Lefebvre, 1991). Those who engaged in non-reproductive sex (sodomy) were made to feel spiritually damned, socially corrupt, anti-social and selfish given that they were not 'contributing' to the welfare of the state (Weeks, 1977;Matthaei, 1997). ...
p>This thesis examines the relationships between sexuality, communality and space through the exploration of changing senses of community experienced by gay men in Brighton. A review of changing conceptualisations of sexuality reveals that the formation of sexual identities, communities and urban spaces cannot be reduced to a single historical narrative but are influenced by numerous contextual factors. In response, the thesis develops what is termed a 'negotiative framework' in which the tensions and contradictions associated with these differences can be reconciled with the need for strategic senses of resistance and solidarity. It is argued that Barthes' writings on doxa (systems of repression and control), paradoxa (forces of transgression) and atopia (processes occurring between and beyond these forces) provide such a negotiative framework.
Drawing upon evidence from in-depth, qualitative semi-structured interviews with gay men in Brighton, supplemented by group interviews and the analysis of secondary sources of historical documentation, five paths of transgression are observed: the establishment of the early underground scene; the gay political organisations formed in the wake of threats to civil liberties; the responses to HIV and AIDS; the responses to police harassment; and finally the development of the gay commercial scene. The study reveals how sites of both doxa and paradoxa are diverse and spatially and temporally contextual. Exploring changing conceptualisations of community amongst gay men in Brighton illustrated how concepts of atopia can reconcile bounded and boundless conceptions of space.
The Barthes-inspired approach of this thesis contributes to post-structuralist and queer theories by relating issues of negotiativity and process in a non-binaristic way to the functioning of systems of restraint and resistance in the context of gay spaces.
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... For example, employment benefits, tax benefits, disclosure, and wage effects of sexual orientation could then be modeled into the econometrics, rather than being added as an external dummy variable to the existing model (Badgett, 2008). Similarly, the impact of sexual division of labor, demand for children, and investment in individual members of the family on the sexual orientation and the gender identity of heads of household could be examined (Matthaei, 2008). Queer economics has also shown that patterns of gentrification and housing access, as well as the manner in which urban spaces were claimed by communities, have a specific impact on ...
The question of LGBT rights was first examined as part of gender and sexuality studies in the 1980s, predominantly in the United States. This was a result of the LGBT movement that had articulated the demand for equal rights and freedom of sexual and gender minorities a decade before. Since then, the examination of LGBT rights has traversed multiple theoretical and methodological approaches and breached many disciplinary frontiers. Initially, gay and lesbian studies (GLS) emerged as an approach to understand the notion of LGBT identity using historical evidence. GLS emphasized the objectives of the LGBT movement in articulating its identity as an issue of minority rights within the ambit of litigation and case law. However, the definition of LGBT identity as a homogeneous and fixed category, and the conceptualization of equality rights as the ultimate project of emancipation, was critiqued on grounds of its normative and assimilationist tendencies. Queer theory emerged in the 1990s as a counter-discourse to GLS, using the individual-centric postmodern technique of deconstruction as the method of analysis. This approach opened up scope for multiple identities within the LGBT community to articulate their positionality, and reclaim the possibilities of sexual liberation that GLS had previously obscured. Subsequent scholarship has critiqued GLS and queer theory for incomplete theorization and inadequate representation, based on four types of counter-argument. The first argument is that queer theory, with its emphasis on self as an alternative for wider social interaction, concealed constitutive macrostructures such as neoliberal capitalism, as well as the social basis of identity and power relations. The second argument highlights the incomplete theorization of bisexual and transgender identities within the LGBT community. For example, understanding bisexuality involves questioning the universalism of monosexuality and postmodern notions of linear sexuality, and acknowledging the possibility of an integrated axis of gender and sexuality. Theorization of transgender and transsexual rights requires a grounded approach incorporating new variables such as work and violence in the historiography of transgender life. The third critique comes from decolonial scholarship that argues that intersectionality of race, gender, class, caste, and nationality brings out multiple concerns of social justice that have been rendered invisible by existing theory. The fourth critique emerged from family studies and clinical psychology, that used queer theory to ask questions about definitions of all family structures outside the couple norm, including non-reproductive heterosexuality, polyamorous relationships, and non-marital sexual unions. These critiques have allowed new questions to emerge as part of LGBT rights within the existing traditions, and enabled the question of LGBT rights to be considered across new disciplinary fronts. For example, the incorporation of the “queer” variable in hitherto technical disciplines such as economics, finance, and management is a development of the early-21st-century scholarship. In particular, the introduction of LGBT rights in economics to expand human capabilities has policy implications as it widens and mainstreams access of opportunities for LGBT communities through consumption, trade, education, employment, and social benefits, thereby expanding the actualization of LGBT rights.
... Several social constructionist histories (most of which were published in the late 1970s and 1980s) which analyse the genesis of non-heterosexual subcultures in the 19 th and 20 th centuries (among others) from the point of changes in the productive/ reproductive nexus, are an exception (e.g. Adam 1998;Weeks 1990;D'Emilio 1983;Matthaei 2008). More recently, a small number of scholars working in critical sexuality studies have emphasised the need to foreground class and political economy (e.g. ...
Decades of neoliberal governance and the current economic crisis have resulted in growing socioeconomic inequalities, increases in poverty, escalating prices for basic consumer items (including food), an infringement of labour rights, deterioration of working conditions, land grabs, mass unemployment, and a reduction of welfare provisions in many nation states. These developments impact on economies across the globe to differing degrees. They have led to political unrest and resistance in many parts of the world, including some of the economically worse off (and most regulated) societies within the European Union. The current situation also presents a challenge for social and political theory and particularly for the "cultural turn" which has often celebrated "choice" within consumerist society and has thereby implicitly or explicitly supported market oriented perspectives. Our view is that critical work is needed attempting to link gender and sexuality perspectives within contexts of socioeconomic crisis, growing class divisions, and rapid social change. We consider gender and sexuality to be distinct yet closely connected categories. Beasley (2005) for instance, writes of the 'gender sexuality field', which is comprised of several subfields, including feminist studies, masculinity studies, and, as we would add, transgender studies. Yet in many approaches the concepts appear as separate, with attempts to explain gender inequalities often having nothing much to say about sexual forms of power and work on sexualities having little to say about subordination of women, hierarchies among men, and marginalisation of transgender people.
... Badgett and Folbre (2003) discuss the potential penalty that one may face in the marriage market for being in a gender-non-conforming occupation. Changes in social norms regarding the social construction of sexuality may have had some effect in reducing these losses (Matthaei, 1995). Deviation tends to appear only within a dualist system; indeed, the prominence of gender duality in most, but not all, cultures is notable. ...
All human societies exhibit some degree of division of labour by gender. These divisions continue to exist as participation in paid work has increased over time. Gender divisions occur between household tasks, between unpaid and paid work, and within paid work. Economists have explained these divisions through reliance on essentialist arguments and/or the fundamental economic concepts of efficiency of specialization and division of labour, and investment in human capital. However, gender discrimination can also cause division of labour, and the feedback effects of such discrimination make it difficult to untangle the causes of the gender division of labour.
... The crux of what Taylor asserted suggested that homosexuality was nurtured through attribution by external sources (such as media, see Vandenbosch & Eggermont, 2014) and not sourced from a natural predisposition within homosexuals. Matthei (1995) argued that sexual identity was formed via engagement in gendered professions, asserting that environment engendered homosexuality. For Wilkerson, Ross and Brooks (2009), heteronormativity (the acceptance that heterosexuality, heterosexual norms and heterosexual values were superior to homosexuality, homosexual norms and homosexual values) constructed homosexuality as inferior and therefore, homosexuality was adopted and nurtured in those who did not meet the superior standards of a society. ...
Scholars have debated, asserted and posited that the source of homosexuality in both gay men and lesbian women is found either in nature or nurture. Of specific interest to this research was the self-identified source of homosexuality in gay men through their lived experience. A Malaysian-based context was taken due to the growing interest, both politically and socially, of the social phenomenon of homosexuality in Malaysia. As personal experience was the data source selected for this research and social construction of identity was the perspective taken, phenomenology acted as the theoretical underpinning through which the shared experience of the respondents was analysed. The geographic setting of the research was Penang, Malaysia as it was an urban area that had been identified as having a population of self-identified gay men. A qualitative perspective was taken due to the sensitive nature of the research. The sample population was gathered via purposive sampling and the snowball technique and a total of 33 respondents were recruited. All respondents were interviewed in-depth where a semi-structured interview questionnaire was utilised. All data were transcribed and analysed via a content analysis matrix. The findings suggest that the source of homosexuality for the respondents was nature and not nurture. Respondents attribute their homosexuality to genetics, inborn hormonal influence and biology. However, the findings do point out that nurture has a part to play in the development of self-identified gay men as individuals. Nurturing via friendships, role-modelling and environments that are affirming and positive portrayals of homosexuality in the media allow the respondents to internalise positive attitudes towards their homosexuality. Research into the source of homosexuality from the viewpoint of complementarity as opposed to opposition is a direction that would benefit studies of homosexuality. Longitudinal research would deepen understanding of the source of homosexuality.
... Several social constructionist histories (most of which were published in the late 1970s and 1980s) which analyse the genesis of nonheterosexual subcultures in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (among others) from the point of changes in the productive/reproductive nexus, are an exception (e.g. Adam 1998;Weeks 1990;D'Emilio 1983;Matthaei 2008). More recently, a small number of scholars working in critical sexuality studies have emphasised the need to foreground class and political economy (e.g. ...
IntroductionDecades of neoliberal governance and the current economic crisis have resulted in growing socioeconomic inequalities, increases in poverty, escalating prices for basic consumer items (including food), an infringement of labour rights, deterioration of working conditions, land grabs, mass unemployment, and a reduction of welfare provisions in many nation states. These developments impact on economies across the globe to differing degrees. They have led to political unrest and resistance in many parts of the world, including some of the economically worst off societies within the European Union.The current situation also presents a challenge for social and political theory and particularly for the “cultural turn” which has often celebrated “choice” within consumerist society and has thereby implicitly or explicitly supported market oriented perspectives. Our view is that critical work is needed attempting to link gender and sexuality perspectives within contexts of socioecono ...
... Marxist-feminists have also made important contributions in analyzing prostitution in the United States and abroad. Matthaei (1995) analyzes prostitution through the concept of the sexual division of labor. Women often worked as prostitutes when other lucrative employment alternatives were unavailable to them, given the gender discrimination and occupational segregation that funneled women into particular occupations. ...
... In a cross-country study, Nilu¨fer Ç agatay and Sule Ö zler (1995) also find that women's share of the labor force exhibits a U-shaped pattern over the course of development. Finally, assumptions of heterosexuality are also embedded in many feminist treatments of the household (Badgett and Williams 1992;Badgett 1995a;Matthaei 1995). M.V. Lee Badgett points out that lesbian and gay families face different social norms and institutions which may influence the household division of labor. ...
To avow that gender is more than an independent--or dummy--variable is to posit the centrality of gender (as well as race and class) in economic analysis. Conventional economic methods tend to neglect the process by which gender interacts with and shapes other social forces and institutions. The basis for a feminist alternative is the assertion that the social construction of gender permeates men's and women's labor market experiences. A feminist definition of discrimination is proposed which emphasizes process as well as outcomes; measurable as well as unquantifiable repercussions. Labor market discrimmation is a multidimensional interaction of economic, social, political, and cultural forces in both the workplace and the family, resulting in differential outcomes involving pay, employment, and status. Several propositions toward developing feminist approaches to labor market discrimination are illustrated with examples of feminist research. These propositions delineate feminist work on: the importance of praxis-based research; the necessity for methodological pluralism; the role of power in wage-setting within the firm; the impact of macro-social institutions; and the intersections of gender, race, class, and other social forces.
This essay provides a brief informal reflection on radicalism from the perspective of intersectional political economy.
JEL Classification: A113, B51, B54
An Amazonian Goddess who was raised a warrior set in World War I, screams the impact of Marxism. Wonder Women (2017), produced by DC, has a nominal heroine who seems like an icon of Feminism but is instead the opposite in close observation. Though the character seems vigorously empowered, she is reduced to a commodity in the clutches of capitalism. Wonder Woman’s labour was tried to fit into the domestic sphere. This paper would explore the film from the focal lenses of Marxist Feminism. The investigative questions revolve around ‘cheap labour,’ ‘reserve labour,’ and ‘reproduction.’ Also, the marginalized status of other proletariats is examined. How the character becomes a target of capitalism by pushing her into the domestic sphere and objectification is the paper’s primary concern. The paper would use a qualitative approach to achieve the desired result. The analysis will be a subjective judgment based on the film text. The characters’ cognitive behavior and the surrounding are a central element that will be explored through the narrative analysis. The research methodology will employ conceptualization and qualitative design and methodology.
This paper investigates the relationship between heteronormativity, queerness, and neoliberal capitalism. By reinterpreting the 1997 Recognition–Redistribution debate between Nancy Fraser and Judith Butler through a social reproduction lens, I show that Butler’s position is broadly consistent with a social reproduction analysis of heteronormativity. Through stabilizing the gender division of labor, promoting the normative heterosexual family, and contributing to the internal stratification within the working class, heteronormativity fulfills critical social-reproductive roles. Queer emancipation, therefore, cannot be realized without an overhaul of the political economic structure. As relations of reproduction change under neoliberal capitalism, what is constituted as queer is also altered in ways that incorporate queerness into capitalist value production. Mainstream narratives of LGBT progress obscure the emerging division between queers with capital and queers without, a division undergirded by familiar contradictions of racialized, heteronormative, reproductive capitalism.
JEL Classification: B51, B54, P16
This article examines the subject and visual representation of the gay fantasy figure, with specific reference to the male sexual outlaw character and its embodiment in the archetypes of the sailor and male hustler, and their fantasmatic performance in fashion editorials and advertising campaigns. It will focus on themes of homoeroticism, narratives of sexual danger, duality and adornment (with specific reference to tattooed bodies), and will provide an overview of the fascination with the rough trade type that gay artists and audiences share, and the dichotomy of ‘good and evil’ and ‘tragic and comic’ in these artists’ subversive rendition of homo-hetero desire. The starting points for this article are two seminal works on the Male Sexual Outlaw as a central focal point for their audiences’ desire: Jean Genet’s novel Querelle de Brest (1947, illustrated by Jean Cocteau) and Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s series of photographs titled Hustlers (1990–1992). By focusing on the figures of the professional mariner and the male prostitute, and incorporating underlying references to the male-dominated shady underworlds they supposedly inhabit and a life lived on the margins of society, the work investigates the representation and desire for a sexually dominant man from within the canon of western white gay male art.
Interest in economics is at an all-time high. Among the challenges facing the nation is an economy with rapidly rising unemployment, failures of major businesses and industries, and continued dependence on oil with its wildly fluctuating price. Economists have dealt with such questions for generations, but they have taken on new meaning and significance.Tackling these questions and encompassing analysis of traditional economic theory and topics as well as those that economists have only more recently addressed, 21st Century Economics: A Reference Handbook is a must-have reference resource.Key FeaturesProvides highly readable summaries of theory and models in key areas of micro and macroeconomics, helpful for students trying to get a "big picture" sense of the fieldIncludes introductions to relevant theory as well as empirical evidence, useful for readers interested in learning about economic analysis of an issue as well for students embarking on research projectsFeatures chapters focused on cutting-edge topics with appeal for economists seeking to learn about extensions of analysis into new areas as well as new approaches Presents models in graphical format and summarizes empirical evidence in ways that do not require much background in statistics or econometrics, so as to maximize accessibility to students.
This article advances a Marxist approach to the contradictory relationship of minority sexuality to capitalist political economy. I use the work of Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci and critical theorist Nancy Fraser to tell a story of an extraordinary momentary opening for a distinct lesbian subculture in Shanghai. This moment was born from a Chinese reality TV show called Super Girl. A radical space for lesbian self-development is shown to have emerged through a relative uncoupling of the social relations of capitalism from political authority. This article warns against an Althusserian tendency within gay political economy and intersectionality analyses which slips into a notion of hegemonic market containment. Instead, a Marxism that is alert to subversive outlets by and for human agency is applied.
This essay pretends to analyze the topics of visibility and tolerance related to homosexuality in Luis Zapata's El vampiro de la Colonia Roma (1981), Carlos Monsiváis Apocalipstick (2009), and Ángel Lozada's No quiero quedarme sola y vacía (2006) linked to the success and failure of the neoliberal mercantilist system, the urban transformations of the neighborhoods where the stories take place (Mexico City and New York City) and the consequences carried out in the process at the end of 20th century and beginnings of 21th century.
This article explores the contributions to a history of sexuality, capitalism and revolution made when we consider the work of anarchist thinker and activist Emma Goldman (1869–1940). I suggest that Goldman's centring of sexual freedom at the heart of revolutionary vision and practice is part of a long tradition of sexual politics, one which struggles to make sense of how productive and reproductive labour come together, and to identify the difference between sexual freedom and capitalist opportunity. Goldman's concern with the significance of kinship in holding together capitalism, militarism and religion, as well as sexual feeling's capacity to disrupt those relationships, echoes across more than a century to resonate with Marxist, feminist and queer scholars' engagements with similar issues. But where contemporary scholars often tend to retain the opposition between culture and society, representation and the real, making it difficult to produce a materialist analysis of sexuality as transformative rather than always already overdetermined, Goldman's energetic insistence on sexual connectivity as freeing provides an important vantage point. Not only does Goldman consistently situate sexuality in a broad political context of the sexual division of labour, the institutions of marriage and the church, consumerism, patriotism and productive (as well as reproductive) labour, she frames sexual freedom as both the basis of new relationships between men and women, and as a model for a new political future.
Within the gay/lesbian historiography, there has been a long-running debate over the relative roles played by capitalism and urban culture in the historical formation of gay and lesbian identities and communities. The author argues that in recent years historians have come to favor the urban, both as a framework for inquiry and as an explanatory device. In view of this historiographical tilt toward the urban, the author goes on to suggest some ways to bring capitalism and the economic back into view.
Queer theory offers insights for political economy on how humans induce categories and conflate traits in ways psychologists call "illusory correlations." A Bayesian simulation is constructed of people interacting and using probits to compare their rankings of alternatives to estimate the subjective probability i.) that others have the same tastes as them, and ii.), for each alternative, that this alternative is their best choice. These simulations are found to, at least simplistically, resemble a type of illusory correlation which gained increased prominence in the United States from 1930 to 1960, and earlier in the United Kingdom when queer panics conflated "predatory" and "traitorous" with lesbian/gay. This modeling of the social articulation of preferences leads to conjectures on the role of Michel Foucault's épistémè (1972), Barbara Ponse's principle of consistency (1978), Jeffrey Escoffier's master code (1985), Sandra Bem's schema (1981), John R. Searle's Background (1990, 1992, 1995), and Judith Butler's linguistic norms (1993). Here these are called cognitive dispositions or codes, and are seen as social structures which grow as individuals try to form homopreference networks to process information in parallel, collectively. The concept of identity or ideology entrepreneurs is used to establish the importance of institutional analysis for political economy. Such an incorporation of desire on a par with logic - "rationality" - is called post/modern and is used to overcome the silence in both neoMarxian and neoclassical political economy on queer theory and queer issues. © 1997 by URPE All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10.2 (2004) 308-312
In a key moment in the "witless white males" classic Dude, Where's My Car? (2000), Jesse and Chester, having been threatened by a male-to-female transsexual and her drag-king boyfriend, chased by a troupe of large-breasted hot female aliens, and kidnapped by members of a bubble-suit-wearing religious cult, stand before a pair of space travelers and request information about the universe. "What do you want to know?" ask the space aliens, disguised as Swedish gay men. Jesse and Chester smirk and say, "Have you been to Uranus?" We have not heard such a preponderance of anus jokes since Wayne's World (or, for those who missed Wayne's World and its sequel, grade school), but in a comedy where the bumbling male buddies share many a nude moment, and even engage each other in a little open-mouth kissing, the Uranus jokes register a new casualness about the homosocial-homoerotic divide. At a time of deep and continuing crisis, when George W. Bush can rally new support with every shit-eating grin, let us take comfort where we can find it, and Dude, Where's My Car? (hereafter referred to as Dude) is as good a place as any to start.
What can a film about two idiot stoners who lose their car and then have to reconstruct the events of the previous night to find it, repay money they owe, and win back the love of the twins they are dating while saving the universe from certain destruction and in the process kicking the ass of moronic jocks, pissing off male supermodel Fabio, escaping from a fifty-foot hot space alien woman, receiving as presents from the other space aliens some necklaces that make their girlfriends develop huge hoo-hoos (to use the film's own vernacular), and receiving in return not sex but only some dumb berets with their names embroidered on them—what can such a film tell us about the relationships among sexuality, gender, nation, and race today? More precisely, is this going to be another ridiculous essay about queering a fourth-rate adolescent comedy with a few laugh lines, lots of butt jokes, a weak heterosexual resolution, and no political consciousness whatsoever? The answer to the first question will engage us for the rest of the essay. The answer to the second question is, perhaps.
Why is Dude a queer narrative, and why should we care? Before the space aliens disguised as Swedish gay men leave planet Hollywood for a quick tour around Uranus, they force Jesse and Chester to forget everything that has happened to them and leave them to return to the state of oblivion from whence they came. Jesse and Chester return home, only to awake the next morning as befuddled as they were, wondering why they remember nothing of the night before and why their fridge is packed with chocolate pudding. The exchange that began their picaresque journey across the landscape of mini malls and miniature golf courses—"Dude, where's my car?" "I don't know, dude, where's your car?" "I don't know, dude, where's my car?"—begins again, and the lessons that the pair learned the night before are lost and remain to be relearned. This Nietzschean act or nonact of forgetting on which the loopy narrative depends arrests the developmental and progress narratives of heteronormativity and strands our feckless heroes in the no man's land of lost knowledge and scatological humor. While the deliberate forgetting of the George W. Bush kind can threaten the very survival of the universe, the benign forgetting of the dude variety allows for a free space of reinvention, a new narrative of self and other, and, possibly, the chance to revisit the hot chicks from the night before as if meeting them for the very first time.
While each dude lacks self-knowledge, each finds himself reflected in and completed by the other. Jesse and Chester face threatening obstacles—castration and humiliation at the hands (and beaks) of some mean ostriches, for instance—as a team, a unit, a...
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10.2 (2004) 236-240
For the past two years I have worked with a dynamic group of interdisciplinary and transnational feminist scholars on a collaborative project whose working title is "Feminisms, Geopolitics, and Sexuality." Central to our critical and political project is the understanding that the intersectionality of gender and sexuality is not only crucial to but a function of geopolitical formations. Through this project my colleagues and I are attempting to thicken current analyses of geopolitics, variously understood through rubrics such as transnational, international, global, and diasporic, to argue for an epistemological and activist conversation that places discourses of sexuality alongside locations of social struggles and state formations. While the project was conceptualized prior to the events of September 11, 2001, its current formulations clearly reflect on and engage with feminist implications of the ongoing war against "terrorism." Our continued desire has been to foreground feminist analyses of sociohistorical, cultural, and geopolitical conditions to make visible alternative strategies of intervention derived from alternative conceptualizations of problems for which violence is now considered a necessary solution. The participants in this project come from South Asian, Pacific Rim, and Southeast Asian studies, African legal and cultural studies, and Latin American anthropology. The questions we ask include the following: What new knowledges of genders and sexualities are being forged within differing interpretive communities in our contemporary climate? What are the links between colonial models of area-studies scholarship and the new global order, including the patterns of under- and overattention that privilege Arab countries and yet ignore Africa? What epistemological concerns emerge from the production of research practices and policy agendas around the study of gender and sexuality dynamics in Central Asian contexts?
I begin with an invocation of this project because its critical energies and struggles articulate, for me, some of the key debates and lacunae in current theorizations of gender and sexuality. The aim of my brief meditation here is to propose that we vigilantly interrogate the labor of geopolitics in the study of gender and sexuality. Such an exercise will go beyond the familiar rehearsal of dilemmas around incommensurability, cross-cultural comparison, translation, and the impossibilities of understanding and will take seriously the genealogical peculiarities that the recent turn to geopolitics brings. Just as critics such as Rachel Lee and Minoo Moallem have powerfully argued that the project of "women of color" and/or race has emerged as a pedagogical and intellectual corrective to the flawed past of women's studies, I want to argue that the project of geopolitics in all its avatars has emerged to play a similarly redemptive role in the new formations of queer scholarship. My goal here is not to equate the overinvestment of women's studies in the project of women of color with queer scholarship's overinvestment in the discourse of geopolitics, but to foreground patterns of epistemological recuperation and redemption in two related sites of intellectual exploration.
More precisely, what I want to suggest is that the current representational field of geopolitics, its complications notwithstanding, functions as a vexed, theoretical antidote to earlier models of a flawed, colonial geography of perversions. Such models, largely derivative of discourses of colonial anthropology, literature, sexology, and law, have been powerfully debunked and reassessed by scholars of colonialism(s) such as Ann Stoler, Elizabeth Povinelli, and Anne McClintock. We have also seen a concurrent outpouring of rich scholarship on "queer globalization," cross-cultural ethnographies of sexual cultures in a vast range of non-U.S. sites, all of which have troubled the portability of gender and sexuality as stable analytic registers across geopolitical sites. This new scholarship certainly attempts to avoid the facile additive approach of piling differentiated sexual minorities from different regions onto its analysis as a gesture of its transnational approach. However, even as new versions of relationalities in, between, and among cultures, ethnicities, and nations emerge, we appear to reproduce methodologically what Joan Wallach Scott refers to as analytic echoes—mutable conceptual modes that are not just "distorted...
In order to successfully use gender as a structure of constraint, I posit that the concept of gender be expanded from dichotomous categories of masculine and feminine to a continuum where agents are motivated and constrained by characteristics within the two extremes. Further we must explore specific origins and attributes of gender - its relationship to sexuality, its dynamic nature and the significance of socio-historical context. Households consisting of same-sex couples provide an interesting case for examining the relationship between gender and the division of labor. Theoretical and empirical predictions claim that the lack of gender differentiation within such households results in inefficiencies, equality or gender-neutrality. In contrast, initial research on the division of labor within lesbian households indicates that lesbian couples employ a variety of different divisions of labor. One implication is that lesbian couples exhibit gendered patterns of relations. Same-sex households provide an avenue to expand our understanding of gender itself and the nature of the relationship between gender and the sexual division of labor.
This paper explores the relationship between feminism and lesbianism, arguing both that feminism has encouraged and supported lesbianism, and that the existence of lesbian feminism supports both feminist goals in general and heterosexual feminists in particular.
Queer theory studies the linguistic structures which lie behind socioeconomic inequality as well as the dependence of these structures on markets and other institutions. The methods of this theory and some of its assertions are exhibited. In particular, Foucault's conjectures about the birth of the concept of sexuality and the gender asymmetry in the historical articulation of lesbian and gay identities are described. The goal is to queer the temptation for economists to use ''identities'' uncritically.
The economics profession has only recently begun to include research on lesbians and gay men, but we argue that a lesbian economics has long existed, with documentation of anti-lesbian discrimination, discussion of its private and social costs, and practical work for change. This tradition, along with the newer traditions built upon work with gay men and bisexual people, provides a basis for feminists to expand work in economics on lesbian and gay issues. The articles in the symposium propose ideas for future research, for learning from other disciplines, and for creating a more welcoming academic climate.
The human body is said, by critics of mainstream, modern economics, to have 'disappeared' from economic theory over the past century. Like subjectivity, the body is thought to have been displaced through mathematical formalism. In this paper, we present the story of this purported disappearance, from the emergence of the 'full' desiring and labouring body in Classical economics to its supposed elimination in contemporary neoclassical theory. We also present a critique of this narrative, since the story of the body's disappearance presumes a universal 'real' body as a norm. In criticising this story for its humanism and universalism, we provide an alternative reading of contemporary neoclassical economics in which a decentred, fragmented, 'postmodern' body (rather than no body at all) can be seen to emerge. Copyright 2002, Oxford University Press.
Thanks to a Ricardian concept of the magnitude of value, the participants in the controversy on the transformation of values into prices can separate the capitalist economy into two different spheres, price and value. This is a procedure completely foreign to Marx. The main consequence of this separation is the misunderstanding of the money form of value, a problem that arises in two ways. Firstly, money is a commodity like all others and there is thus an essentially contradictory relationship between its value and its exchange value, that is between its value and the expression of this value in the use-value of another commodity. This contradiction is neglected in the controversy, and therefore money becomes a simple num�raire, exactly as in the Ricardian and Walrasian traditions. Second, two juxtaposed standards of price are allowed to co-exist -one in the sphere of values and the other in the sphere of prices- whose relationship constitutes the only external link between the two realms. The transformation of values into prices becomes an external problem of reconciling two systems of accounting.
The purpose of this article is to propose a systematic reading of the transformation procedure illustrated by Marx in the first example of Chapter 9, Capital III, with an effort to convey the non dualistic vision he has of the economy. The article shows that Marx’s texts on the transformation have a radically different meaning than that attributed to them by Bortkiewicz and other authors, and establishes the soundness of Marx’s conclusions. Moreover, the passages where Marx tests the validity of his results are carefully examinated. To do this, we follow an observation made by Marx himself which has been completely neglected in the subsequent literature.
This article describes and analyzes contemporary sexual practice and the social context in which it occurs. Heterosexual and homosexual relations are analyzed in a manner analogous to Marx's labor theory of value. It is concluded that heterosexual relations are characterized by patterns in which male gratification is promoted and achieved at the expense of female gratification. In contrast, sexual behavior among homosexuals is found to be mutually satisfying to both partners. To achieve an egalitarian sexual system heterosexual behavior patterns must be supplanted by a sexual practice in which intercourse is not defined as the central sex act.
Despite its reputation for openness to research on sexuality, anthropology as a discipline has only reluctantly supported such work. Anthropological research and theory developed slowly, sharing a stable theoretical paradigm (the cultural influence model) from the 1920s to the 1990s. Moving beyond determinist and essentialist frameworks still common in biomedicine, anthropological work nevertheless viewed important aspects of sexuality as universal and transcultural. Social construction theory has offered a challenge to traditional anthropological models and has been responsible for a recent burst of innovative work in sexuality, both in anthropology and in other disciplines, since 1975. The theoretical roots and implications of constructionist theory are explored. The intensifying competition between cultural influence and constructionist paradigms has been altered by the appearance of AIDS and the subsequent increased support for research on sexuality. On the one hand, the expansion in funding threatens to strengthen essentialist models in biomedical contexts and cultural influence models in anthropology. On the other hand, the complexities and ambiguities inherent in the sexuality under study may both reveal the strengths of constructionist approaches and spur the development of research and theory in anthropology.