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Scholars’ geographical locations matter for a number of reasons to do with the politics of knowledge (some of which are discussed above), and they also matter because they can shape the types of research that is possible. While in some locations (e.g. in Hungary) it may be impossible to conduct feminist research in an academic institution at all, practical issues in other locations—such as the priorities and methodological biases of funding bodies, the relative permissiveness of risk assessment regimes, and the possibility of getting research access into military institutions—all shape what types of feminist research are possible. This likely plays out in different ways across Europe, but I offer a couple of examples from the UK here because, given that most scholars are located in the UK, this likely has the most significant impact on the field as a whole. The most immediate point here is that the concentration of scholars in the UK leads to an disproportionate focus in the literature on the UK military, but there are also more subtle factors at play. Many UK institutions have cautious travel risk assessment policies that somewhat simplistically (and influenced by a colonial mindset) divide the world into ‘low risk’ and ‘high risk,’ or even ‘hostile’ locations. Anecdotally, this may result in researchers being denied permission to carry out fieldwork in certain locations in a way that would not happen, for example, in Sweden, where universities do not seem to follow restrictive travel risk assessment regimes. Similarly, the quantity of scholarship that does exist on the British military perhaps masks the often difficult processes required to gain approval to conduct research with members of the institution itself, which particularly constrain research that is interpretive, critical, and/or feminist. The power and biases of military gatekeepers in the British context have doubtless prevented and/or reshaped feminist research that would otherwise have been conducted (Basham and Catignani 2021). It is not possible, of course, to conduct a review of literature not published and research 2 DISPARITIES AND DIVERSIFICATION … 25 not carried out. However, the point I want to make here is that it is not only intellectual interest that drives how feminist scholars in Europe select the focus of their research, it is also political economic realities and the constraints of requiring various forms of institutional permission. These realities shape the body of feminist literature on war and militarism that is produced across Europe in powerful, if usually unseen, ways.

Feminist strategies that neglect or consistently deplore state action cannot accomplish what women need – because individuals need collectives such as states to solve collective action problems and to move toward more just social arrangements. Strategies that rely heavily on women’s differences from men also cannot accomplish what women need – because women are like men in many ways relevant to individual and collective action. Despite these truths, social movements also need some strategies of action that work separately from and sometimes against the state. Moreover, strategies that accentuate the differences between oppressed and oppressing bring needed energy to a movement. The best overall strategy is, therefore, to realize that both states and difference theories are dangerous weapons, and proceed with caution.¶ In this important paper, Jane Jaquette sounds the alarm. She exposes the dangers of ignoring the state and the dangers of ‘difference feminism’. She also shows how these are linked. Although I will underscore the merits of anti-state activity and difference feminism, I agree that a feminist strategy that neglected or deplored state action would be weak indeed. So would a strategy that relied on women’s differences from men.¶ First, the merits of Jaquette’s argument.¶ One strand in feminist theory and practice greatly suspects the state. This suspicion can escalate into outright rejection, with potentially grave consequences for women.¶ The philosophical case for the state is relatively simple. Collective action¶ can improve human lives. Efficient collective action requires coercion. Instru- ments of collective action involving coercion can, paradoxically, increase human freedom. We are freer to do many things if we can bind ourselves with legally enforceable contracts. Rather than enforcing these contracts privately, it is more efficient and potentially more just to give a monopoly of legitimate violence to one entity, so long as that entity can reasonably claim to be more just than the alternatives. Humans have long struggled to devise relatively legitimate forms of coercion. The history of democracy is part of that struggle, although that history has nowhere produced national-level institutions that are highly legitimate. Despite their incapacity ever to be fully legitimate, however, we still need both states and international institutions to help solve collective action problems and to give scope to the human capacity for justice.¶ Regarding women, the practical case for the state, must be grounded in contemporary realities. In some states, such as Sweden, women do better, compared to men, than in the most egalitarian of known pre-state entities, such as the Kung!. Moreover, although the dangers of state power for women are great, it is not practical to contemplate returning to pre-state entities. Human beings seem to want the goods produced by more extensive forms of cooperation, including those that require legitimate coercion. Given that states will not disappear in the near future, what stance should we take toward them? My answer is: wary usage. State power will be used against women, just as other forms of power are used against women, unless we intervene. One response is to establish barriers, such as constitutional or internationally enforceable rights, to certain kinds of invasions by state power. Another is to make states more likely to act in the interests of women.¶ In the United States both theory and institutional practice carry suspicion of the state farther than in most countries, with some malign consequences. Ours has been a ‘liberalism of fear’ more than an Enlightenment liberalism that envisions a common good. Americans are wary of state power, encouraged in that wariness by powerful capitalist interests. Jaquette rightly warns against this. State power can serve both as a brake on the negative externalities of capitalism and as a positive force for material redistribution. Particularly when patriarchal power takes violent forms in the private sphere, state power can help women struggle against that violence as well as other non-state evils.¶ The question, then, is how far to carry wariness of state power and of theories of state universalism and impartiality. I believe we must both use state power and place bounds on. Because the state as a tool is dangerous and flawed, we need to use it with caution.¶ Jaquette faults contemporary feminist anti-state theorists not for wanting to abolish the state but for spending their energies on wariness rather than on how to use it for redistribution. How important one thinks this problem is depends on how one judges the current balance within feminist theory. Many feminist theorists – e.g. Susan Okin, Nancy Fraser, Iris Young – call for redistributive reforms requiring state power. Perhaps in Latin America, from¶ 356 International Feminist Journal of Politics –––––––––––––––––––––––––––¶ Downloaded by [Harvard Library] at 12:19 04 August 2014¶ which Jaquette takes her lead, theorists of the North are represented by anti- state theory. In that case, one must ask why these are the theorists Latin American feminists choose to read. Anti-state discourse may have informed radical practice in Latin America not because anti-state theory is dominant in the North but because activists in Latin America find that anti-state discourse meets their organizing needs. Anti-state discourse may reflect the reality of individuals working on the margins of states that either are relatively corrupt or, even more obviously than most, enforce the interests of dominant classes.¶ Jaquette also rightly warns of the dangers of valorizing action in civil society to the neglect of state action. However, we need evidence that the more women participate in NGOs the less they participate in the state. Without such evidence it seems equally plausible that the more women participate in NGOs the more they will acquire the skills and contacts required for involve- ment in state politics. Some individuals also will not be able to deal with the hierarchy, coercion and male dominance embedded in all states. They will need to work in social movements. Political activism usually sustains a division of labor, with the individuals who can best deal with established institutions doing just that and those who are most repelled by those institutions charting another course. The directions they take sometimes conflict with one another.¶ Women and feminists trying to achieve places in the state, whether as femocrats or politicians, face major barriers but also major attractions. I do not know how much we should worry that they will not be attracted to these jobs because of radical anti-state discourse. In the United States this does not seem to be a huge problem. In some countries, women who could be agents of feminist change turn down jobs in the state because those jobs are boring and unsatisfying. When these women speak of their frustrations, radical anti- state discourse appears to play a small or non-existent role.¶ In short, Jaquette is right that an established anti-state discourse within radical movements makes productive interaction with states less likely, but I am not sure that such discourse is created by feminist theory.¶ Jaquette also points to distortions produced by difference feminism. It is true that any stress on women’s differences reinforces the tendency of dominant groups such as white or middle-class women to interpret ‘women’s’ experiences primarily in light of their own experiences. In recent years, women of color have produced the greatest advances in feminist theory, forcing white feminists to look more closely at their hegemonically defined concepts of commonality; this work has given all feminists the tools to understand better differences within their groups and subgroups.¶ In addition, in most areas of presumed personality difference between men and women, the differences are extremely small. The currently definitive meta-analysis of studies on Carol Gilligan’s hypothesis shows that – at least in the United States, in the highly educated populations where she argues that differences should appear – only very small differences can be found.¶ –––––––––––––––––– Jane Mansbridge/Anti-statism and difference feminism 357¶ Downloaded by [Harvard Library] at 12:19 04 August 2014¶ Most studies do not show women taking a different approach to justice or behaving more cooperatively than men. Studies designed to elicit behavioral gender differences often generate practically none.¶ In-groups, we now know, exaggerate similarities within their group and their differences from other groups. The human brain makes these predictable cognitive and emotional mistakes in in-group/out-group differentiation. Recognizing this tendency, we should constantly struggle to take into account the fact that our social and first-order cognitive estimates of such differences are usually exaggerated. In the case of gender, all societies also engage in ‘gratuitous gendering’ – giving gendered meanings to nouns and patterns of action that do not functionally require that identification. These processes increase even more our perceptions of gender difference.¶ Today we have little idea what differences might or might not emerge between men and women in a non-oppressive society. It seems mistaken, therefore, to insist on difference rather than focusing on the effects of dominance.¶ Finally, as Jaquette warns, promising different political results based on the premise that women are different from men is dangerous. We are almost certain not to deliver on that promise, at least in the short run. The backlash after the US suffrage movement was undoubtedly caused in part by disillusion at the lack of change when women won the vote.¶ And yet, small differences that do appear between men and women can take on major symbolic significance, precisely because of our human tendency to exaggerate group differences. Although using that significance is danger- ous, not only because it exaggerates reality but also because it underlines the very stereotypes that have been used to keep women in their place, the existence of danger does not mean that we should forswear this tool – any more than for swearing the tool of state action. Just remember: when using a dangerous tool, take active precautions against its potential harms.¶ Difference arguments for electing women are not just arguments from ‘utility’, as Jaquette reports Marian Sawer’s point. For example, the fact that women are perceived as more honest than men can advance an attack on corruption by associating its female leaders with honesty. Using positive stereotypes of women in this way need not be degrading. Successful uses may even result in males adopting certain features of female symbolism to signify their own adherence to better standards.¶ In another example, among professional populations in the United States, women are somewhat more likely than men to adopt participatory, egalitarian styles of leadership. The difference probably derives from women’s relative powerlessness, which teaches skills of persuasion rather than command. In the US women’s movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, women used the gender differences they perceived in listening, interpreting body language and participatory style to create significant departures from the prevailing styles of left politics in organizations dominated by men. The message, ‘We do things differently’ is exhilarating. It prompts greater effort in trying to¶ 358 International Feminist Journal of Politics –––––––––––––––––––––––––––¶ Downloaded by [Harvard Library] at 12:19 04 August 2014¶ forge a new model, because the effort is associated not only with a different culture that can replace the old one but also with a different self and associated selves.¶ Turning from practical politics to political theory, concepts are also often gender-coded. Freedom and self-interest, for example, are often coded as male, community and altruism as female. It is not surprising, then, that when feminist theorists entered the field of theory, some explicitly supported certain values previously denigrated as female. Although the arguments made for these values might not be female, their proponrnts often were. Moreover, having been raised in a subculture that had been allocated cultural respon- sibility for these values, women had often thought about them more thor- oughly than men. Women had also usually experienced the denigration of these values first-hand.¶ In short, Jaquette is right that stressing women’s differences from men is fraught with danger. But values and practices that many cultures associate with women are often good in themselves, denigrated because of their association with women. Asserting the value of these ideals and practices from a stance as women often makes emotional, cognitive and political sense.¶ Importantly, Jaquette identifies a link between anti-state discourse and difference feminism. A number of anti-state theorists who are also strongly anti-essentialist would deny this identification. But in social movements themselves, the identification makes sense. The state is male; hence difference feminists should be anti-state. The state is instrumental, self-interested and hierarchical; women are communal, nurturing and participatory. To the degree that these associations are simply accepted as unchangeable truths, they compound the most problematic anti-state mistake.¶ I agree wholeheartedly with Jaquette’s fears in seeing no visible trend toward a renewed interest in the politics of economic justice, at least in the United States. In contrast to the creativity in the struggle against globalization, there has been an absence of ‘street-level’ activism against, for example, the revolutionary shift in tax burdens in the USA. More positively, the anti- sweatshop movement has had some good effects in raising consumer con- sciousness and bringing younger activists in touch with international labor movement organizing. As for the causes of the shift away from the politics of economic justice, I agree with Jaquette that it is related to the post-Cold War era and the temporary triumph of capitalism. I am not so sure that it has much to do either with activists’ anti-state discourse or with difference feminism.¶ This commentary has concentrated on the caveats to Jaquette’s thesis. I conclude by stressing again my fundamental agreement with her argument. Feminists have a ‘stake in a capable state’. It would be catastrophic to be so carried away by the theoretical virtues of civil society or by anti-state discourse as to deaden oneself to the practical need to work with the state to improve the lives of women.¶ Because ideas have influence, it is worth stressing Jaquette’s point that¶ –––––––––––––––––– Jane Mansbridge/Anti-statism and difference feminism 359¶ Downloaded by [Harvard Library] at 12:19 04 August 2014¶ ‘norms adopted internationally depend on states to implement them’; and only states can change the rules for women and other disadvantaged groups. The welfare state is a huge improvement over the arbitrary power of men in private families. Women’s groups must therefore work closely with govern- ments or remain on the fringe. Feminists will not only have to ‘learn to live with the state’. They should learn to work with the state. For those who do not already know this, Jaquette’s article is required reading.

Campaigns against female prostitution used slavery as a rhetorical device to characterize the condition of sex workers, and sex work features prominently in contemporary campaigns against “modern slavery”. In both types of campaigning, “the slave” is worked as a symbolic device to represent the abject condition of human beings objectified, controlled by violence or its threat, and stripped of agency and choice. The assumptions and generalizations about prostitution that inform this vision have been extensively critiqued. However, less attention has been paid to the fact that the analogy also rests on a very particular reading of “the slave” and a very partial appeal to histories of Atlantic World slavery. Histories of enslaved people's resistance and flight are entirely overlooked. The latter has recently prompted interest in fugitivity and marronage as analytic concepts, albeit concepts that are defined and deployed in different ways by different scholars and activists. This review asks whether and how they might potentially have theoretical purchase with regard to the contemporary experience (both positive and negative) of sex workers.

Introduction

If you have seen the word Latinx come across your feed or heard it being used in conversation, it is not a typo and it is not a mispronunciation. Using an “x” in place of the “a” or “o” makes the word gender neutral. For those of you that are familiar with the Spanish language, whether it be a person, place, or object, we know that many words in the Spanish language have been gendered. Latina is the feminine noun and Latino is the masculine noun. Individuals have begun to challenge the word because we have folks that are part of the Latina/o community, yet prefer not to be associated with masculine or feminine nouns. Latinx is a gender neutral term that is being used as a means of being more inclusive and moving away from the gendered term. It is pronounced “Lah-teen-ex”, and allows for the Spanish language to move beyond gender binaries. As student affairs professionals, we recognize that there is a movement to move towards gender neutral pronouns as we know that language is evolving, Latinx is a term that allows for our non-binary, genderqueer, gender fluid, and trans hermanos and hermanas to feel included.

Post-queer rhizomatic politics is one that is directed outwards rather than inwards. The continuous flows of dialogical-becomings--_-the indefinite breaks and connections—are always moving forward where something new is always created out of something given. Unlike the arborescent-subject that is directed inwards, rhizomatic dialogical-becomings are always deterritorialized as they maintain an ongoing state of becoming a body without organs (BwO). The complex flows of desiring-machines described above persistently strive to become a BwO as their connections try to reach pure deterritorialization. In this section, I want to consider how the BwO is a virtual affect of dialogical-becomings. It does not encapsulate desiring-machines but is an additional (anti-)production together with desiring-machines. The BwO is a fundamental aspect of post- queer politics because it speaks to the production of intensities that emerge when the flows of desiring-machines stop. Deterritorializations are not finalized states or binary oppositions. They offer an important strategy for contemporary politics because they do not directly oppose a structure (such as the queer/ heteronormative dyad) but instead remap a system through creative lines of flight (the plateauing of queer and post-queer). We can think of the BwO as a limit that continuously seeks to deterritorialize without ever reterritorializing (even though, as you will see belo reterritorializations are often coupled with deterritorializations). As Brian Massumi writes: Think of the body without organs as the body outside any determinate state, poised for any action in its repertory; this is the body from the point of view of its potential, or virtuality. Now freeze it as it passes through a threshold state on the way from one determinate state to another. This is a degree of intensity of the body without organs. It is still the body as virmality but a lower level of virtuality, because only the potential states involved in the bifurification from the preceding state to the next are effectively superposed in the threshold state. (1992, 70) The BwO is therefore not opposed to desiring-machines but is instead in a constant tension with them. The term itself—Body without Organs—is not in opposition to the organism. It is against what the organism stands for: organization. We can think of the subject as such an organization where all meaning refers back to a central core and all movement corresponds with a central tendency. The BwO not only challenges the arboreal structures of life but also works within a different realm as that of the rhizome where it does not break flows (rhizomatic breaks and connections) but desires continuous flows. Unlike the subject that requires external agencies for meaning such as language structures or discursive realms, the BwO is pure intensity: The body without organs is nonproductive; nonetheless it is produced, at a certain place and a certain time in the connective synthesis, as the identity of producing and the product: the schizophrenic table is a body without organs. The body without organs is not the proof of an original nothingness, nor is it what remains of a lost totality. Above all, it is not a projection; it has nothing whatsoever to do with the body itself, or with an image of the body. It is the body without an image. This imageless, organless body, the nonproductive, exists right there where it is produced, in the third stage of the binary-linear series. It is perpetually reinserted into the process of production. (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 8) We can think of the BwO as a plane of immanence rather than stratification.’3 It may seem as if desiring-machines and BwO are a part of two different systems. They are in fact two forms of the same principle: desiring-machines and BwO are both a part of the productions of productions of life. It is through the tension that they share that every production becomes an anti-production because dialogical-becomings, for instance, can not maintain a multiplicity of desiring-machines and are unable to fully become a BwO. Dialogical-becomings are schizo. Capital is perhaps the most widely referenced example of a BwO. It is the becoming-BwO of capitalism that creates the illusion that everything is produced through it. Although capital can be transformed into something concrete (i.e., money can purchase goods) it can not do anything on its own. Capital is a miraculating machine that creates the desire for a BwO to overcome the flows of desiring-machines: the BwO deterritorializes the organization of capitalism by opting for flows and smooth spaces. The capitalist machine transforms desiring- machines into BwO by creating the ultimate schizophrenic that “plunges further and further into the realm of deterritorialization, reaching the furthest limits of the decomposition of the socius on the surface of his own body without organs” (35). The capitalist-schizo becomes the surplus product of capitalism as it seeks the limits of capitalism itself. Although the BwO is unachievable, it becomes a seemingly preferred state: “You never reach the Body without Organs, you can’t reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 150). It is not a heightened awareness of the self, nor is it a fully embodied self. Unlike in significations, representations, and identifications, the BwO is no self at all. In fact, the BwO is prior to such a subjective capacity The tension between desiring-machines (reterritorializations) and BwO (deterritorializations) works within a different realm than, say, the subjective limits of identities categories where subjects become intelligible through their associations with identity norms. Everything for desiring-machines and BwO is pure difference. The intensities involved in such a relationship are before the coding structures of subjectivity that stratify subjects. It is the abovementioned intensities that make post-queer politics so creative because they challenge the structured organization of organs and biologically defined bodies. Desiring-machines and BwO offer a new language for thinking about life itself without reducing the experiences of such relationships to the stratification of language. The creativity of post-queer dialogical-becomings rests in the potential to deterritorialize stratified structures that limit life to predetermined organizations. Despite the BwO existing prior to the subjective capacities of, say, psychoanalysis and discursive norms, this certainly does not imply that deterritorializations can not offer strategies for rethinking life as it is accounted for through representations, significations, and identifications. We can, for example, think of the various codings of subjectivity that have permeated identity politics and subsequently the queer/heteronormative dyad as territorialized stratifications that are in concert with BwO. Stratifications, or strata, take hold of intensities by territorializing them. For instance, they appropriate the BwO’s flows of pure difference by organizing dialogical-becomings as subjects of reiterative norms. The strata codes and territorializes such becomings but the BwO constantly attempts to deterritorialize these territorializations. Despite queer’s interest in a politics of identity that seeks to consider bodies as mobile and fluid, these movements can never escape the territorializations of identity norms because they are always in relation to heteronormative coding and the overall arboreal organization of bodies that are directed inwards. Deleuze and Guattari describe three types of strata that help to think through the territorializations of the queer/heteronormative dyad: the organism, signifiance, and sub jectification. The surface of the organism, the angle of signiflance and interpretation, and the point of subjectification or subjection. You will be organized, you will be an organism, you will articulate your body—otherwise you’re just depraved. You will be signifier and signified, interpreter and interpreted—otherwise you’re just a deviant. You will be a subject, nailed down as one, a subject of the enunciation recoiled into a subject of the statement—otherwise you’re just a tramp. To the strata as a whole, the BwO opposes disarticulation (or n articulation) as the property of the plane of consistency, experimentation as the operation on that plane (no signifier, never interpret!), and nomadism as the movement (keep moving, even in place, never stop moving, motionless voyage, desubjectification). (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 159) This call to dismantle the organism does not imply that we just get rid of the subject or cut the body from stratification. We recall from above that the BwO and all its intensities comes before the subject and the organization of the body as an organism and so a politics of becoming calls for a return to these productive flows of desire: “opening the body to connections that presuppose an entire assemblage, circuits, conjunctions, levels and thresholds, passages and distributions of intensity, and territories and deterritorializations measured with the craft of a surveyor” (160). Post-queer dialogical-becomings seek to deterritorialize the three great strata that territorialize life through significations, representations, and identifications. This project is but one line of flight that can plateau subjugated sub jectivities. Its intent is to map various intensities so as to smooth these assemblages by moving towards a plane of immanence. The first step is to identify the strata involved and then consider the assemblages that constitute such strata. For example, the organism codes an aboreal life by creating various assemblages that define what it means to be “human”; sigmflance codes meaning through discourse where language has become the primary means for thinking about experience; and subjectification creates subjects by coding them through social norms. The purpose of this is to locate flows of intensities—not by discovering a BwO but by creating one in the process of deterritorializing the strata. The queer/heteronormativity dyad has resulted in an arboreal dyad. The extensions of an arboreal tree go through its central root that supports the whole tree. The queer/heteronorrnative dyad is such a root where all politics emerge from it. Post-queer rhizomatic politics, in contrast, do not strictly move or extend from a main root such as the queer/heteronormative dyad. With that said, dialogical-becomings can engage this binary by plateauing it through its rhizomatic connections that can spout from any point. The arboreal organization of queer/heteronormativity prohibits a politics of becoming because movement stops when there is a need to refer back to this dyad. In other words, the queer/heteronormative dyad halts queer politics when the politics of queer is predominantly concerned with disrupting heteronormative structures. Post-queer rhizomatic politics is about deterritorializing politics itself rather than opposing an a priori structure. This project is one line of flight amongst many that can remap contemporary politics as we know it today. Despite queer’s keen investment in a conceptualization of identity through mobilities and fluidities, its politics can only go so far because of its arboreal references to heteronormativity. Let me be clear that I am not demanding an outright rejection of the queer/heteronormative strata for, as we recall from above, this can result in further territorializations. I am also not suggesting an absolute denunciation of this relationship nor am I disputing the important developments that queer politics have made. I am instead calling for the production of different lines of flight and new assemblages that can smoothen the strata so as to not be limited by structural organizations.

Queer has reached a political peak. Its theoretical movements have become limited by its incessant investment in identity politics and its political outlook has in many ways attained dormant status due to its narrowed interest in heteronormativite. This is, of course, not to suggest the end of queer but instead a potential deterritorialization of queer as we know it today. Over the past two decades, a significant body of work has contributed to what is referred to as queer studies. Queer theorizations are at the heart of this anti-canonical genre where the intersection of bodies, identities, and cultures continue to be a central focus.1 Although queer theory informs much of this work vis-à-vis the queering of theory and the theories of queer, important feminist, postcolonial, and ability theorizations have more recently informed the body of queer studies. So while I consider queer studies and theories to be interconnected (and at times interchangeable), the theoretical and philosophical movements of queer studies are certainly not restricted to or by queer theories. What remains consistent amongst these various theorizations, however, is a shared politics embedded in significations, representations, and identifications where language has become somewhat of a unified trajectory for thinking through experience. These important works without question continue to offer many insightful ways to account for the intersection of bodies, institutions, cultural practices, social traditions, political movements, and economic initiatives. Michael Warner’s introduction of heteronormativiy in the early 1990s monumentally framed the ways in which we think about how subjects are subjected to the normative discourses of heterosexuality and in doing so created the important spaces to challenge and reimagine these productivities.2 As a result of this and many other significant contributions, queer theory has become almost exclusively interested in challenging heteronormative ideologies by examining and exposing how subjects come into being through discursive interactions. It offers a critical politics for thinking about how subjects are constituted through heteronormative discourses. Most notable, perhaps, is bringing to light how subjects become intelligible through binary identity categories such as male/ female, masculine/feminine, and straight/gay.3 It queers—disturbs, disrupts, and centers—what is considered “normal” in order to explore possibilities outside of patriarchal, hierarchical, and heteronormative discursive practices. We see this, for instance, in the works of Butler (1990), Fuss (1995), and Mufloz (1999) as they explore a shift from identities to (dis)identifications. I outline elsewhere (Ruffolo 2006a) how such readings confront binary identities so as to appreciate third spaces: fixed and stable identities are reconfigured as mobile and fluid identifications, where the “I” is no longer determined by the Other but is discursively negotiated through others. Queer theory critically redefines the relationships amongst bodies, identities, and culture through a particular commitment to subjectivity as seen through significations, representations, and identifications. The vigor of queer is its commitment to disrupt ideologies, practices, concepts, values, and assumptions that are essentially normal in order to expose what is normatively essentialized. Having said this, what, you might ask, are my post-queer intentions? In the Fall-Winter 2005 issue of Social Text, David Eng, Judith Halberstam, and José Esteban Munoz ask a necessary question of queer studies today: “What’s queer about queer studies now?”4 In the introduction, Eng, Halberstam, and Munoz provide an overview of queer that sets a foundation for my critique of queer: Around 1990 queer emerged into public consciousness. It was a term that challenged the normalizing mechanisms of state power to name its sexual subjects: male or female, married or single, heterosexual or homosexual, natural or perverse. Given its commitment to interrogating the social processes that not only produced and recognized but also normalized and sustained identity, the political promise of the term resided specifically in its broad critique of multiple social antagonisms, including race, gender, class, nationality, and religion, in addition to sexuality. (1) By asking the question “what’s queer about queer studies no” this edition explores the purpose and value of queer in a time of global economics marked by a post-9/ 11 politics embedded in war and terror. It offers a critical comparison between the “broad social concerns” of queer studies in the past with the more intensely interconnected focus of queer studies in the present—work interested in “theories of race, on problems of transnationalism, on conflicts between global capital and labor, on issues of diaspora and immigration, and on questions of citizenship, national belonging, and necropolitics” (2). Post- Queer Politics engages Eng, Halberstam, and Munoz’s call for a “renewed queer studies” by taking into consideration the various interconnections amongst the wide range of contributors of this edition. It is well known that queer theory is interested in challenging binaries through an interrogation of heteronormative practices using queer as a verb (a radical process of disruption) rather than a noun (an umbrella term encompassing multiple identities). My introductory comments on the peaking of queer are situated in this relationship between queer and heteronormativity. I make the argument here and throughout this book that the queer/heteronormativity dualism is unproductive considering the contemporary complexities of neoliberal capitalism and globalization. PostQueer Politics is primarily interested in challenging the queer/heteronormative dyad that has informed much of the theorizations of queer and the queering of theories over the past few decades. I consider the “peaking” of queer as a plateau that negotiates contemporary queer theories and post-queer theorizations. Post-Queer Politics is interested in examining the current politics of queer and the queering of politics through a renewed sense of queer that is differentiated from queer’s current implications in subjecdvity Its vision is twofold: to consider what something post might do for queer and what queer might do for something post. I am interested in the doings of post-queer rather than the beings of it so as to avoid unnecessary binaries that have resulted in the current desire for something post. This project is about the politics around “post-” and “queer” rather than a post-identitarian landscape that would situate “post-” and “queer” as binaries. Despite my explicit intention to avoid a reading of “post-” as a definitive time and space that come after something, I must draw a somewhat stark delineation here: the “post-” of post-queer is in many respects post-subjectivity. I say this not because queer is subjectivity and post-queer is not. This, of course, would produce an unnecessary binary. Rather, as I will argue in the plateaus that follow, notions of becoming (Deleuze and Guattari) and dialogism (Bakhtin) can speak to the creativities and potentialities of contemporary politics that can not be accounted for in the representations, significations, and identifications inherent to subjectivity. I am therefore not suggesting that post-queer comes after subjectivity but that it functions within a creative terrain of potentialities that functions quite differently from subjectivity of which the queer/ heteronormative dyad is a part of. In other words, the current politics of queer, as seen through its relations to subjectivity, are limiting for the future of queer studies because of its unequivocal commitment to the queer/heteronormative binary where the politics of such discourses are restricted by the endless cycle of significations that reposition subjects on fixed planes—bodies that are either resituated in predetermined significations (moving from one identity category/ norm to another) or are represented through differentiated significations (new representations that differ from already emerged significations). My use of bodies extends beyond the ways in which queer theories think about “the body,” embodiment, corporeality, and flesh in terms of subjectivity where, for instance, movement is often accounted for through resignifications. These readings more often than not limit bodies to physical or abstract binary representations. Consequently, my use of “bodies” reaches the virtualities of politics through a consideration of bodies of theoretical work, bodies of knowledge, institutional bodies, bodies of thought, systemic bodies, and cultural bodies. I am not so much arguing for the desire to maintain or favor the terms “body” and “bodies,” but instead to challenge how these terms are read through significations, representations, and identifications and therefore the overall privileging of subjectivity.

Introduction ‘LGBT-friendly organizations’ are understood as ‘work settings [that] do not simply tolerate. . . but accept and welcome’ (Williams, Giuffre, & Dellinger, 2009, p. 29) LGBT people: places in which LGBT employees can be ‘authentically themselves’. These have emerged as part of the contemporary re- or dis-organization of capitalism and work towards greater flexibility and inclusiveness, whereby gender and sexuality ‘no longer correspond so easily to organizational hierarchies’ (Hearn, 2014, p. 407). While some celebrate their emergence as a progressive step away from historical realities of ‘the closet’ and homophobia, others question the financial motivations driving inclusion and the promise of liberation which accompanies it (e.g. Rumens, 2018), arguing that the discourse of LGBT-friendliness is little more than a capitalist ruse designed to make us ‘feel good’ (Fleming, 2007; Fleming & Sturdy, 2009, 2011; Irving, 2008). From this perspective inclusion is the latest permutation of organizational control: a managerial mechanism designed to buttress the semblance of ‘freedom’ while maintaining the ‘fungibility of labour’ (Hearn, 2014) and keeping employees ‘happy’ and (self-)managed for the sake of organizational productivity. But between celebrating and denouncing inclusion, much goes unexamined. As a critical scholar motivated by matters of social justice, I share the political impetus driving the latter perspective which problematizes the increasingly central role played by the ‘[t]emples of global capitalism’ (Rao, 2015, p. 38) in the creation of supposedly more ‘inclusive’, ‘welcoming’ and ‘friendlier’ gender/sexual ‘scenarios’ (Hearn, 2014). At the same time, as a lesbian and thus an imagined target of LGBT-friendly promises of inclusion, I am deeply troubled by the ease with which this critique privileges matters of economic redistribution over questions of cultural recognition (Butler, 1997). While it may certainly be true that capitalist organizations are exploiting our need for recognition to further entrench labour and global inequalities, conceiving questions of gender/sexuality1 as ‘merely cultural’ (Butler, 1997) matters risks diminishing the lived experiences of gender/sexuality and missing the complex ways by which these are controlled, managed and regulated in contemporary ‘inclusive’ organizational formations.

Temples of global capitalism have become increasingly vociferous of late in their opposition to homophobia. In February 2014, shortly after Uganda’s President Museveni gave his assent to a draconian Anti Homosexuality Act, the World Bank announced that it was delaying a US$90 million loan to Uganda on the grounds that the law would adversely affect health programmes that the loan was intended to support.1 Bank president Jim Kim justified the decision with the argument that ‘when societies enact laws that prevent productive people from fully participating in the workforce, economies suffer.’2 In the same month, the Bank published a study estimating that homophobia and the exclusion of LGBT people cost the Indian economy between 0.1 per cent and 1.7 per cent of its GDP in 2012.3 Both the Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have contributed to the It Gets Better viral video campaign, launched to dissuade queer young people from committing suicide, with short films featuring LGBT staff speaking about growing up queer and being out in their personal and professional lives.4 In August 2015 The Economist magazine launched ‘Pride and Prejudice’, which it describes as ‘a comprehensive global initiative tackling the business and economic case for LGBT diversity and inclusion’. Culminating in a public event to be held in London in March 2016, the initiative aims to bring together over 200 leaders from the worlds of business, politics and society to catalyse debate on the ‘economic and human costs of discrimination against the LGBT community’.5 In this article I ask why leading institutions of global capitalism have begun to take activist stances against homophobia, and why they have done so now. I want to understand the terms on which the figure of the queer has come to be adopted as an object of concern for the development industry. Rather than pretending to offer a ‘balanced’ assessment of what is being called the ‘business case’ for LGBT rights, I am interested in thinking through how a radical queer anti-capitalist politics might relate to this emerging discourse. Central to the initiatives mentioned above is a common-sense understanding of homophobia as a cultural disposition that might be disincentivized through the deployment of economic carrots (the promise of growth) and sticks (the withdrawal of capital). Revisiting debates over recognition and redistribution politics, I argue that viewing homophobia as ‘merely cultural’ enables international financial institutions (IFIs) to obscure the material conditions that incubate homophobic moral panics, and their own culpability in co-producing those conditions. Positioning themselves as external to the problem they seek to alleviate, IFIs are able to cast themselves as progressive forces in a greater moral struggle at precisely the historical moment in which austerity and capitalist crisis threaten to bring them into evergreater disrepute. In sum, through a critical survey of recent IFI initiatives on homophobia, I attempt to delineate the emerging contours of what I call ‘global homocapitalism’. Queering IFIs Sexuality has long been central to the development agenda, but it has tended to be implicit and framed as the driver of a host of problems, including ‘overpopulation’, reproductive health, sexual violence and disease. Focused on regulation and risk management, the development industry has tended to ignore the more positive and affirmative dimensions of sexuality. And it has, until recently, been deeply heteronormative in its understanding of desire.6 As Gilles Kleitz puts it, ‘The poor simply can’t be queer, because sexual identities are seen as a rather unfortunate result of western development and are linked to being rich and privileged. The poor just reproduce.’7 Nonetheless, the statements and initiatives cited at the start of this article suggest that something is beginning to change. HIV/AIDS has been pivotal in forcing an acknowledgement of the diversity of sexualities and prompting interventions targeted at communities deemed to be especially at risk. Sexual rights victories on issues such as decriminalization of same-sex conduct, recognition of same-sex marriage and adoption rights, and access to gender transition in countries across Europe and the Americas have 39 in turn led international development bureaucracies based in these countries to fund projects dealing with sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) elsewhere. The growing prominence of SOGI issues as a development concern is also linked to the increasing propensity of development workers themselves to identify as LGBT in their professional lives. Andil Gosine has traced how the founding in 1993 of GLOBE (the World Bank’s LGBT staff association) was instrumental in getting staff to come out at work and to lobby the Bank for better benefits, but also, eventually, in prompting the Bank to exercise political leadership on HIV/AIDS and to support LGBT advocacy in the global South.8 Understanding the terms on which new issues are incorporated into the agenda of the Bank can tell us quite a lot about the motivations underpinning such moves. In this regard, I suggest that we have much to learn from the Bank’s longer history of engagement with (cisgendered heterosexual) women as a development constituency. In a study of this engagement, Kate Bedford argues that gender work became central to the Bank’s fashioning of a post-Washington Consensus. Stung by criticism of its ill-fated structural adjustment programmes in the 1980s, which typically demanded liberalization, deregulation and a downsizing of the state in exchange for Bank assistance, the post-Washington Consensus purported to recognize the importance of the state. It abandoned conditionality for a commitment to borrowing-country ‘ownership’ of policymaking and partnership with civil society, and it identified good governance, social safety nets and targeted poverty reduction as key priorities. The family, and especially poor women, became crucial sites for the Bank in demonstrating its commitment to a kinder, more inclusive and humane approach to economic growth.9 In this, we might see the Bank as exemplifying the long-standing tendency of imperial governmentality to legitimate its will to power in humanitarian justification – what postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak has pithily described as ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’.10 More specifically, guardians of capitalism have always sought to anchor capitalist social relations in extra-market moral justifications, ranging from the libertarian virtues of meritocracy and individual self-worth in neoconservative defences of capitalism to more welfarist concerns such as gender empowerment in neoliberal variants thereof.11 As Bedford argues, previous Bank gender policy had been criticized for overlooking the double burden placed on women when they entered formal employment, and for ignoring men altogether. Nonetheless the conviction that women were empowered by formal employment remained central to Bank lending. Simultaneously, Bank research on poor men was beginning to suggest that economic hardship engendered a crisis in masculinity when men could no longer play the role of breadwinners. Bedford demonstrates how these critiques and insights produced a new model of intimate attachment that became central to post-Washington Consensus projects, wherein the Bank moved from a breadwinnerhousewife model of domesticity to a two-partner sharing model of love and labour in which women were encouraged to work more outside the home while men were urged to take on greater domestic caring responsibilities.12 Crucially, Bedford underscores that the new gender regime effectively (re-) privatized responsibility for social reproduction, consistently privileging fatherhood promotion over state provision of childcare in a number of projects. Nonetheless it appealed to a range of different constituencies because its benefits appeared unqualifiedly desirable: greater sharing of the domestic labour of social reproduction was, after all, an unimpeachably feminist goal. Ultimately, the success of the Bank’s new gender regime rested on its ability to link the dual imperatives of efficiency and empowerment: greater female employment in the market promised to liberate traditional gender relations, and better gender relations promised a more efficient allocation of labour resources.13 Thus, gender relations were reimagined in ways that purported to serve neoliberal and feminist goals. Although Bedford’s study suggests that the Bank was wedded to a heteronormative model of domestic intimacy, there are striking continuities between its reformulation of ideal heterosexual relations and its more recent interest in queer subjects. Describing the post-Washington Consensus interest in poor men, Bedford notes a tendency to think of poverty as engendering a humiliated masculinity, which manifests itself in irresponsible behaviour such as alcoholism, drug abuse, sexual violence and child neglect. These beliefs generate an insistence in Bank policy that ‘poor countries are more sexist than rich ones, and that markets transform gender relations in unequivocally more efficient and empowering directions’.14 We can see in some of the Bank’s LGBT initiatives the analogous premiss that poor countries are more homophobic than rich ones. While lacking the status of an official policy pronouncement, the Bank’s It 40 Gets Better video (2011) is revealing of the pervasiveness of this assumption. It features an employee reflecting that ‘some [of his colleagues] had it easy coming out. But some others had it difficult. Specially those from developing countries.’15 Explaining why it might be difficult for IMF staff to come out at work, one speaker on the Fund’s It Gets Better video (2013) notes that ‘a lot of people at the Fund come from societies that are much less welcoming of gay people and that is a baggage that you don’t leave at the door when you come to the IMF. It’s very hard to overcome that, I think, for people who come from those societies.’16 Yet another speaker in the IMF clip elaborates helpfully: ‘We have so many people from all over the world working here, and their ideas of sexuality, of orientation, of how things are supposed to be … it’s all very different. You have anything from progressive Western countries to traditional Eastern countries or African nations or Latin America. And everybody has a different perspective.’17 The pervasiveness of these attitudes among Bank staff is borne out by Gosine’s ethnographic work on GLOBE. Asking why gay white men seemed to be overrepresented in its membership relative to the gender and geographical balance in the overall makeup of the Bank’s staff, Gosine teases out two barely disguised assumptions that recurred in his interviews: first, that heterosexual people who were non-white or not from Western countries were more likely to be homophobic; second, that women and non-white men who were not heterosexual hesitated to come out and to join GLOBE because they faced overwhelming ‘cultural’ pressures to remain closeted.18 Eliding ‘culture’ and levels of ‘development’, these discourses participate in what Jasbir Puar has influentially described as ‘homonationalism’, whereby LGBT rights have become a new marker for old binaries (civilized/savage, developed/less developed).19 But they do considerably more. In their subversive reworking of the IMF It Gets Better video, the Greek conceptual audiotextual performance duo FYTA suggests that the video is also an artefact of ‘pinkwashing’ in its implicit yoking of its neoliberal economic mission with a ‘civilizing’ anti-homophobic project.20 Overlaying the IMF video with subtitled commentary, FYTA punctures the monotonously familiar coming-out narratives of well-groomed, largely white, male, upper-middle-class professionals uttered against an aural backdrop of anodyne elevator music, with viciously snarky political and psychoanalytic critique. The most productively jarring moments in the performance come when we are reminded of the dissonance between the values that the individuals featured on the video seek to reclaim from their personal struggles, and those that they promote through their work. 41 When a lesbian Haitian staffer bemoans her upbringing in a Haiti where ‘you don’t hear people talking about gays and lesbians in a very positive way’, FYTA reminds us that Haiti’s contemporary political predicaments can, in quite significant measure, be traced back to the devastation of its agricultural sector by IMF policies foisted on the country in 1986 in return for desperately needed financial assistance. When IMF managing director Christine Lagarde appears on the video to affirm that she wants to head an organization where ‘everybody has to be able to be who they are, and they have to be comfortable, respected, proud of their difference’, FYTA reminds us of Fund policies imposing ‘user fees’ that made education and health care inaccessible to the poorest in many borrowing countries. Beyond the specific instances of hypocrisy that FYTA draws our attention to, there is something apposite about this critique being offered by queer Greek voices in the current conjuncture. Although FYTA is deeply invested in deconstructing Greek nationalism, committing itself in its self-description to ‘wiping out notions of Greek tradition and Greekness’, it is not incidental that its critique should have emerged from Greece. Indeed it does not take much to imagine how self-evidently absurd it must appear to queer Greeks to hear the IMF promise that ‘It Gets Better’, even as it participates in imposing draconian austerity measures on their country. If the It Gets Better videos can be dismissed as amateur efforts that are unrepresentative of IFI policy, this certainly cannot be said about the Bank’s more recent attempts to build an economic case against homophobia. Its 2014 report estimating the cost of homophobia to the Indian economy, authored by economist Lee Badgett, is revealing of the Bank’s emerging interest in queer sexuality. The basic argument is simple enough. Homophobia imposes avoidable costs on economies by lowering productivity and output as a result of employment discrimination, reducing investment in human capital as a result of discrimination in education, and widening health disparities between heterosexual and queer people thanks to the disproportionate risk of HIV/AIDS, violence, depression and suicide borne by the latter. Offering a conservative estimate of these costs as amounting to 0.1–1.7 per cent of 2012 GDP in its chosen case study India, the Bank seeks to incentivize governments to end homophobia by quantifying the economic growth that they would enjoy as a consequence of doing so.21 Once again, the Bank advances an efficiency rationale for gender empowerment, which appears incontrovertibly good because ending homophobia is desirable for its own sake. Yet in unpacking what is at stake here we must ask not only what the Bank is doing for queers but also what queers are doing for the Bank. As FYTA’s pinkwashing critique of the IMF suggests, a radical agenda is effectively conscripted in the service of the capitalist imperative of expanding output, productivity and markets. Queer visions of the good life become mortgaged to limitless growth, which is itself further insulated from environmental, equity, and other critiques. Beholden to capitalism, the prospects for a queer Green or a queer indigenous politics become increasingly remote. In the political context of the Bank’s work in India, the Bank’s overtures to queers should invite us to interrogate the queer movement’s relations with other social movements – those of farmers, fishworkers and adivasis (forest dwellers) to name only a few – that have struggled against the effects of Bank-led policies for decades. As with queer Greeks and the IMF, it is sobering to imagine what queer adivasis might make of a Bank project that hailed their participation (as queers) in the very processes that are destroying their lifeworlds (as queer adivasis). That the intersectionality of queer and adivasi is virtually unthinkable in the imaginary of the Bank and possibly the mainstream of the queer movement in India begs important questions that I cannot do justice to here. A second problem concerns the deeply reductive account of freedom as participation in the market which appears to animate this project. There is something profoundly troubling about a strategy that makes respect for personhood contingent on the promise of that person’s productivity were their personhood to be fully recognized. To do so is of course not to treat persons as ends in themselves. But it should also prompt us to wonder about the implications of strategies that premiss full citizenship on productivity for those who find themselves unable or unwilling to be ‘productive’ within the terms of the market – the disabled, the unemployed, the elderly, the ‘development’-induced displaced. One consequence of the increasingly tight link between personhood and productivity is that public support for welfare for the ‘unproductive’ becomes increasingly difficult to sustain, especially in a climate of austerity. A third worry about the Bank’s homophobia costing exercise arises out of the images of love and labour that suffuse the report’s key claims. To its credit, the Badgett report is candid about the lack of data on LGBT working conditions in India. To fill in 42 the gaps, it makes the questionable move of extrapolating from studies of analogous questions in the USA and Western Europe. Thus, finding that gay and bisexual men tend to earn 11 per cent less than their heterosexual counterparts and that lesbians enjoy a wage premium of 9 per cent in the West, the report averages out these numbers to suggest that ending LGBT employment discrimination would increase labour market productivity by 10 per cent.22 The report justifies these transnational extrapolations by stressing that this is likely to be a conservative estimate in the Indian context, given that the figures are taken from countries that have extensive legal protections for LGBT workers, and given also that employment discrimination against transgendered workers is likely to be more severe. It is curious that in measuring the gap between the status quo and a hypothetical non-discriminatory scenario, the report posits that gay and bisexual men’s wages would attain parity with those of heterosexual men, but that lesbians would continue to enjoy a wage premium. Indeed the section on lesbians is illustrative of my critique. Noting that the pressures of compulsory heterosexuality tend to force Indian lesbians into straight marriage and childbearing, the report speculates that were they to be freed from these pressures, Indian lesbians might also benefit from the wage premium enjoyed by their counterparts in the West.23 Although the reasons for the lesbian wage premium in the West are not discussed in the report, the ‘dual income, no kids’ phenomenon is a spectral presence in this part of the discussion. The report seems to assume that ending discrimination in India would have effects on family formation and household decision-making that produce something resembling queer lives in the Western contexts from which the quantitative data is drawn in the first place. In doing so, it seems incognizant of the radically diverse social structures within which actually existing gender non-conforming lives in India are embedded.24 Leaving aside the matter of children, there is no recognition, for example, that the lesbian wage premium – were it to be enjoyed in a non-discriminatory India – might well be offset by the claims of ageing parents, dependent siblings, and the array of other relationships that constitute the web of obligations within which even professional middle-class nucleated family lives are lived. If Bedford’s work on the gendering of the post-Washington Consensus Bank revealed a heteronormative twopartner sharing model of working woman and caring man, the Bank’s latest regendering has produced its homonormative counterpart in the image of happily partnered (or single) and highly productive LGBT workers choosing to pursue the good life in radically autonomous and unencumbered style.25 In contrast to critics such as Joseph Massad, I do not wish to suggest that Western homonormativity is forced on countries like India by a ‘Gay International’, whether that ‘international’ is understood as Western human rights organizations, states or – as is my focus in this article – IFIs.26 Rather, homonormativity is enthusiastically embraced by significant internal constituencies. Nor can these constituencies be reduced, in the narrow terms offered by Massad, to a class of ‘native informants’ (elite local LGBT activists) who stand to gain personally from state recognition of (their) particular performances of queer life. This account may be true enough but it is trivial, for homonormativity derives its power not simply from the material wherewithal of its proponents, but from its ability to shape desire by making itself synonymous with modernity, giving it mass appeal or, in a word, hegemony. Attending to the politics of two recent representations of queer life in India would make this point clearer. In July 2013 the United Nations Human Rights Office launched a year-long global public education campaign for LGBT equality called ‘Free & Equal’.27 As part of the campaign it released a Bollywoodstyle music video in April 2014 featuring Indian actor Celina Jaitly, which went on to become one of the UN’s most watched videos.28 Titled The Welcome, the video depicts a young man bringing his boyfriend home to meet his family for the first time. The family are not expecting a ‘special friend’ of the same sex and are initially frozen in disbelief. But thanks to a deft and tactful musical intervention from Jaitly referencing the changing times, the mood shifts decisively and they all live happily ever after. Queer critics of the video fastened immediately on the stratospherically elite milieu in which it was set – the pretext for the gay couple’s homecoming is their attendance at a lavish wedding at which even the family dog is wearing a silk coat – as evidence of the detachment of mainstream gay activism from the lives of the overwhelming majority of queer subjects in India.29 Indeed the choice of setting could, at one level, be seen as rather puzzling, given that homophobic voices in India already discredit LGBT rights as an elite issue. Nonetheless, the campaign’s decision to embed its pedagogical mission in the deeply familiar idiom of the ‘big wedding’ – whose recent cinematic genealogy might be traced back through films such as Monsoon 43 Wedding (2001), Hum Aapke Hain Koun (Who Am I To You?) (1994), and beyond30 – was a clear play for hegemony, co-produced with Indian artists in the full understanding that such texts depicting the lives of the super elite are avidly consumed by Indian cinemagoers of all classes in a range of affective modes including identification, aspiration and escapism. In this sense, what the queer critics were calling ‘homonormativity’ was also deeply ‘authentic’, conforming as it did to the canons of mainstream Bollywood cinema. The second representation, described on social media as India’s first lesbian advertisement, was produced for Anouk – a line in contemporary Indian ‘ethnic’ apparel. Titled The Visit and released in June 2015, the video quickly went viral, notching up 3 million views in ten days.31 This video portrays a cohabiting lesbian couple also preparing for a first encounter with the parents of one of the women. In its aesthetic, this clip is quieter and more quotidian than the previous one. And it is transgressive in more than one sense as it becomes evident that, in addition to both being of the same sex, the women are from different ethno-linguistic communities – a difference that could arouse anxiety in the kinds of parents who might prefer to arrange the marriages of their children. The couple converse intimately but casually about what to wear and what to serve the parents, but there is an undertone of trepidation about whether the visit will go well. For all its understatement, this narrative is also set in a comfortably upper-middle-class milieu. The women are surrounded by their possessions – books, makeup, antique furniture – many of which signify their cosmopolitan tastes (‘tribal’ art, a framed poster of A Clockwork Orange). And, of course, filling every frame subtly but unmistakeably are tasteful fabrics – clothes, cushion covers, rugs, curtains – that are presumably the products that Anouk seeks to market. Produced in and for a country in which homosexuality remains illegal, thanks to a retrograde 2013 Supreme Court decision,32 the advertisement offers a seductive reminder of the still extant possibilities for queer self-expression through consumption in the market. We are invited to engage in what Puar calls ‘homonational spending’, in which the market proffers placebo rights to (some) queers who are hailed by capitalism but not by judges or state legislators.33 In its depiction of this comfortably self-determining existence, this advertisement produced by and for an Indian company, provides almost the perfect visual representation of the lesbian futures that the Badgett report anticipates. In discussing these widely consumed contemporary representations of queer Indian life, I want to suggest that – in India at least – far from imposing norms on an unwilling recipient, international institutions are pushing against something of an open door, collaborating with local actors in co-producing activist narratives and interpellating subjectivities that already enjoy considerable social even if not state recognition. The new homonormativities congealing within such contexts are not simple transplants of Western homonormativity but are culturally legitimated in locally recognizable idioms: indeed this is what makes them normative in their respective locales. Nonetheless, the cultural diversity of queer life fostered by international governmentality should not blind [distract] us to one of its underlying and unifying imperatives, namely that of folding queers into capitalism. Moral panic, material precarity Given the centrality of the notion of ‘homophobia’ to recent IFI forays into struggles for sexual and gender justice, it is worth unpacking how they understand this term. Focusing on the Bank, in this section I will suggest that ‘homophobia’ is conceptualized in an impoverished manner that allows the Bank to present itself as external to the problem and therefore as a potential force for good, rather than one that is implicated in its production. To illustrate this, I attempt to think through the conditions that have incubated a virulent public discourse around homosexuality in Uganda in recent years, while paying attention to the Bank’s interventions in, and influence over, the country. The Badgett report defines homophobia as ‘negative responses to and prejudice against LGBT people, as well as structural manifestations of that prejudice in institutional settings such as workplace and the law’.34 Indeed it notes that the otherwise heterogeneous category ‘LGBT’ derives its conceptual coherence from the experience of ‘stigma and prejudice’ experienced by people who are read into this category because of their attraction to people of the same sex and/or their gender non-conformity. ‘Stigma’ in turn is defined, citing psychologist Gregory M. Herek, as ‘the negative regard and inferior status that society collectively accords to people who possess a particular characteristic or belong to a particular group or category’.35 While Herek expresses reservations about the term ‘homophobia’ on account of its tendency to individualize and pathologize the affect it seeks to describe, the report decides to run with the term 44 anyway on account of its widespread usage. I want to take issue not so much with the choice of term as with its understanding as status differentiation. Nancy Fraser has advocated a ‘bifocal’ conception of gender as both a class-like differentiation, rooted in the economic structure of society, and a status differentiation that privileges masculinity over femininity, rooted in the status order of society.36 These dimensions, she insists, are analytically distinct and irreducible to one another, even if they may interact with each other. Gender justice, in Fraser’s view, requires both an objective redistribution of material resources to ensure that all participants in society can exercise voice, and an intersubjective cultural recognition of equal standing vis-à-vis fellow participants. Although Fraser notes that virtually all injustices perpetrate both maldistribution and misrecognition, she leaves open the question of whether the two dimensions are of equal weight. Indeed she constructs a spectrum of possible proportions in which the two dimensions might be combined, with injustices tilting more heavily in the direction of maldistribution at one end and those entailing primarily misrecognition at the other. Crucially, like the Bank, Fraser understands heterosexism as a status injustice entailing largely misrecognition.37 This aspect of Fraser’s argument has provoked a sharp rebuttal from Judith Butler, who criticizes Fraser’s relegation of certain oppressions to the derivative and secondary status of the ‘merely cultural’.38 In Butler’s view, movements against heterosexism attack the normative regulation of sexuality within central institutions of the capitalist order such as the family, thereby setting themselves up as threats to that order. Indeed Butler questions the distinction between recognition and redistribution that lies at the heart of Fraser’s argument, noting that homophobic cultural norms that misrecognize queers also have maldistributive effects – by denying benefits or property to same-sex partners, for example. Fraser counters by acknowledging that while queers suffer economic harm, such harm is a maldistributive consequence of a more fundamental injustice of misrecognition. Moreover she accuses Butler of an indifference to history, arguing that the relationship between queers and capitalism cannot be asserted by definitional fiat, and observing that in late capitalist society the links between sexuality and surplus value accumulation have been weakened. The enemies of queers, she points out, are not multinational corporations seeking to extract their labour, but religious conservatives invested in denying their personhood. Capitalism, Fraser concludes, no longer needs the heteronormative family as a central stabilizing institution.39 Fraser is both right and wrong. History matters, as does geography. While anti-homophobic movements (in the USA and Western Europe, which is where the Butler–Fraser debate is implicitly situated) may indeed have attacked capitalism at a certain historical juncture, capitalism responded to that attack in ways that attenuated the force of the critique. Indeed the story of this shifting relationship is central to Lisa Duggan’s influential critique of mainstream LGBT politics in the USA in the 1990s. As Duggan explains it, neoliberals blunted the sharp edge of progressive critique by recognizing claims to equality while minimizing potential redistributive consequences: in essence, they embraced a non-redistributive identity politics. The distinction between recognition and redistribution, far from marking a real separation between different kinds of injustices as suggested by Fraser, is essentially the ruse through which neoliberal capitalism pretends to become more inclusive.40 In its conceptualization of homophobia as a status differentiation, distinct from injustices of maldistribution (which find no mention in any of the IFI initiatives on homophobia to date), the Bank reproduces this ruse. But it also does something more that cannot be grasped through the narrow terms of the Butler– Fraser debate. One of the striking things about this debate and the numerous subsequent treatments of it is the highly agent-centred view that the arguments on both sides take. Focusing on queers or the putative enemies of queers (neoliberals, religious conservatives), the argument proceeds as if things might have turned out differently if only these agents had thought or acted in ways other than those in which they actually did. Thus, following Butler and Duggan, we are tempted to fantasize that if LGBT movements had refused the recognition/redistribution distinction, they might not have succumbed to homonormativity in the way that they did. I am sceptical of the high degree of voluntarism implicit in this argument. Accordingly, I want to think about the wider structural conditions within which narratives about sexuality produced by particular agents acquire salience. It is in thinking about these structural conditions that the implication of the Bank in the production of homophobia becomes more visible. I shift the geographical terrain of discussion to Uganda here for two reasons: first, because Uganda has become the site of multiple contending discourses about sexuality 45 thanks to its passage of the Anti Homosexuality Act, 2014; and second, because the Bank’s suspension of its US$90 million loan to Uganda in response to the passage of this legislation constitutes perhaps the single most coercive response by an IFI to a memberstate action perceived to be homophobic. Introduced in the Ugandan parliament in 2009, the Anti Homosexuality Act was given presidential approval in February 2014.41 The text of the bill that was first circulated earned notoriety for its proposed introduction of the death penalty for a select category of offences.42 The version of the bill that was eventually passed amended the death sentence to life imprisonment, while enhancing existing punishments for same-sex conduct and criminalizing advocacy in support of LGBT rights. Following a concerted domestic and international campaign, the Act was struck down by the Ugandan Constitutional Court on 1 August 2014, on the procedural ground that it had been passed without the requisite parliamentary quorum.43 Activists fear that supporters of the legislation will attempt to have it passed again. Scholarly analysis of these developments has tended to focus on a set of elite relationships involving Ugandan politicians and clergy and mainly USbased Christian evangelical activists. The drafting of the original Anti Homosexuality Bill is believed to have been inspired by a ‘Seminar on Exposing the Homosexual Agenda’ held in Kampala in March 2009 by a group of US anti-gay evangelical activists, of whom Scott Lively is perhaps the most well known.44 For conservative Western evangelicals, Africa provides new terrain on which to fight the ‘culture wars’ – in which LGBT rights remain a crucial wedge issue – that they find themselves losing in the USA and Western Europe.45 Political alliances with African clergy enable Western Christian conservatives to block progressive moves towards embracing, say, the ordination of women as bishops or same-sex marriage, in global Christian norm-setting forums such as the Anglican Communion’s Lambeth Conference. Paying attention to the evolution of these relationships also explains why an issue that had hitherto had no salience in Ugandan public culture became controversial at the same time as it threatened to split the worldwide Communion.46 Useful as these accounts are, they have been incomplete in several respects. As I have argued at length elsewhere, the emphasis on US evangelical proselytization has tended to evacuate such accounts of African agency.47 African elites bear significant responsibility for the virulently homophobic public discourse that circulates in many parts of the continent. To cite an example from just one – albeit the politically most influential – Christian denomination in Uganda, namely the Anglican Church, Ugandan clergy were receptive to the overtures of US conservative evangelicals within the Communion because this was perhaps the first moment in the history of this imperial holdover, in which African voices (and votes) were being courted as significant in shaping the future trajectory of Christian doctrine.48 Spearheading the opposition to greater tolerance of homosexuality at the 1998 Lambeth Conference offered African clergy a way to symbolize the inexorable reality that power was shifting within the Communion towards the more populous African constituencies.49 For their part, Ugandan politicians in the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) have stoked and benefited from the furore over homosexuality, which has conveniently distracted domestic and international publics alike from other vexing issues such as political repression, corruption and bad governance.50 Yet even accounts that weigh African agency more heavily have been relatively silent on two counts. First, neoliberalism is never part of this story, missing the very profound effects that it has had both on the institutional landscape in Uganda as well as on everyday attitudes. Second, in focusing disproportionately on the collaborative US–African elite production of homophobic discourse, such accounts have neglected to explain subaltern receptiveness to these discourses. Scholars of religion and sexuality in Uganda have noted the central role that Pentecostal-charismatic churches are playing in the production of homophobic discourse.51 Now believed to command the allegiance of up to a third of the country’s population, the spread of Pentecostal Christianity from the late 1980s onwards was enabled by two factors: war and neoliberalism. In the aftermath of the devastation wrought by the brutal reign of Idi Amin and the ‘bush war’ against the government of Milton Obote, Pentecostalism’s promise of temporal rupture and renewal through ‘born again’ Christianity provided the perfect spiritual complement to the victorious NRM’s mission of reconstruction from 1986 onwards. In contrast to the mainline Anglican and Catholic churches, the new Pentecostal churches were also less tainted by association with the previous dispensation.52 Taking over the reins of power in a highly indebted country, the NRM eagerly implemented the neoliberal prescriptions of the Bank and Fund, imposed as part of the structural adjustment 46 programme that Uganda underwent in the 1980s and 1990s: indeed, Uganda is widely regarded as the African country in which the neoliberal project was most enthusiastically embraced.53 As structural adjustment gathered pace, the new Pentecostal churches moved into the space vacated by the shrinking state, becoming major providers of social services such as education and health.54 By the early 2000s, the burgeoning HIV/AIDS epidemic offered the perfect pretext for their interventions in the public sphere with a conservative, moralizing and virulently homophobic discourse. Their efforts were given a shot in the arm by equally conservative donor initiatives such as the US Bush administration’s President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). Informed by theological prohibitions on extramarital, commercial and non-heterosexual sex, PEPFAR diverted funding from progressive public health organizations to faith-based organizations among which US evangelical and African Pentecostal-charismatic churches were prominent. As Melinda Cooper argues, PEPFAR ‘served to institutionalize the presence of Pentecostal-charismatic churches in the very social infrastructure of sub-Saharan Africa, turning them into indispensable conduits to healthcare in the now largely privatized welfare sector’.55 Accounting for 94 per cent of Uganda’s total HIV/AIDS budget at one time, PEPFAR funding had pernicious effects on the country’s HIV prevention efforts, transforming a programme that had emphasized condom use to one that promoted faith-based messages of abstinence.56 At the same time, the World Bank was itself promoting the involvement of faith-based organizations in development and humanitarianism. In 1998, then Bank president James Wolfensohn and Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey convened a World Faiths and Development Meeting, which produced an advocacy group called the World Faiths and Development Dialogue, devoted to promoting collaboration between international development agencies and faith-based organizations.57 Virtually ratifying the effects of neoliberalism, the Bank noted that since faith-based organizations provided up to 50 per cent of social services in places like sub-Saharan Africa, they should be recognized as key partners in development work.58 Bank policy therefore opened up space for, and legitimated the work of, the very actors who are leading purveyors of homophobic discourse in Uganda today. I want to turn from the production of homophobic discourse, on which the literature has been almost exclusively focused, to what we might think of as the ‘consumption’ side of this problem. Here, too, the changes wrought by neoliberalism are relevant. Analysts have recently begun to draw on the notion of ‘moral panics’ to theorize homophobia.59 Stanley Cohen famously defined moral panics as widespread and volatile concern about the potential or imagined threat posed by a set of actors (folk devils) out of all proportion to any objective harm that they may be likely to cause, which fuels reactions of moral outrage and hostility against those actors.60 The concept seems especially appropriate to homophobic discourses in Uganda, given the way they construct queers as paedophiles, ‘recruiters’ of children into homosexuality, and threats to social morality.61 In their work on moral panics around ‘mugging’ in inner-city Britain, Stuart Hall and his colleagues reframe their inquiry in the following way. ‘The question’, they insist, ‘is not why or how unscrupulous men work … but why audiences respond.’62 Asking why elite discourse on homophobia has popular purchase in Uganda, Joanna Sadgrove and a team of collaborators have argued that rather than echoing popular concerns, elite state and evangelical positions map onto and manipulate other widely felt anxieties, ‘many of which relate directly or indirectly to the profound economic insecurity and fears for the future (especially in the context of the HIV crisis) experienced by ordinary Ugandans’.63 Sadgrove et al. identify a deep imbrication of discourses about morality and money in media and popular discourses about homosexuality. They find widespread concern that moral values are under threat from a pervasive preoccupation with material gain. This is borne out by the work of Jörg Wiegratz, who has argued that neoliberalism in Uganda has, in restructuring the state and economy, also entailed a project of moral restructuring, inculcating a utilitarian, egoistic, market rationality in everyday life that has sought to displace ‘traditional’ values and cooperative practices. While Wiegratz is concerned mostly directly with explaining a spurt in malpractice in the rural agricultural economy, he detects a more pervasive worry among ordinary Ugandans that the privations of life under neoliberalism have made it increasingly necessary for them to prioritize money-making over morality in the interests of survival, making it increasingly difficult – in their self-perception – to live up to their own moral standards, and feeding panics about moral degeneration and decay.64 As Sadgrove et al. report, the link between money and morality manifests itself more specifically in 47 relation to homosexuality in a common understanding of same-sex loving Ugandans as having being lured into such relationships by wealthy Western tourists, or into proselytizing on behalf of same-sex love by funding from Western donors and human rights organizations. Such narratives conflating love and money carry considerable credibility in a society where family is understood as much in economic as in affective terms. Thus, marriage is not simply a romantic contract, but also an economic transaction involving the exchange of wealth and establishing material relationships between kin groups. The production of children secures inheritance and the transfer of property within kin groups, while also ensuring the survival of the family as an economic entity by providing labour (especially in rural areas) and security for parents in their old age. Newly emerging individualized sexual identities, such as LGBT, are difficult to make sense of against the backdrop of these understandings because they exist outside formalized networks of exchange and indeed threaten to redirect resources to new networks. In this regard, homophobic discourses that portray queers as succumbing to the lure of filthy lucre provide culturally legible explanations for these new identities. The key point that frames this account of everyday homophobia in Uganda is the reminder that the profound economic and existential insecurities that ordinary Ugandans face reinforce the tendency to view social and kinship relations in inextricably moral and material terms. Perhaps in circumstances of less profound insecurity, investment in marriage and procreation as indispensable welfare and social security mechanisms would decline, weakening the force of compulsory heterosexuality. The Bank’s decision to suspend its $90 million loan to Uganda in retaliation for the passage of the Anti Homosexuality Act was not universally welcomed, even by friends of LGBT rights. The Economist published a scathing editorial arguing that while the decision was well intentioned, it undermined the Bank’s authority as a technocratic institution by embroiling it in political controversy, while also being capricious in singling out Uganda and gay rights for attention.65 LGBT activists countered with the claim that ending SOGI discrimination was vital to ending poverty and therefore integral to the Bank’s core mission.66 Missing in this curious debate about whether the Bank should concern itself with LGBT rights was a recognition of the degree to which it was already implicated in their disavowal. As I have argued, neoliberal policies urged on the Ugandan state by IFIs and powerful donors such as the USA have had profound consequences that are directly relevant to explaining contemporary homophobia in Uganda, opening up space for and empowering the very actors that are at the forefront of the production of homophobia, and generating anxieties that nourish the moral panics in which queers (but also sex workers, ‘witches’ and others) have provided easy scapegoats. For reasons that are too obvious to belabour, the links between neoliberalism and homophobia in Uganda have never been acknowledged in IFI and donor pronouncements on the subject, or in their efforts to pressure the Ugandan government into moderating its stance on homosexuality. Welcome as these efforts have been from the perspective of local LGBT activists desperate for international support to offset their precarious domestic position,67 there is something deeply disingenuous about donors moralizing on the subject of homophobia while failing to recognize their partial culpability in its production and consumption. At best, we might ascribe this to a cognitive failure to appreciate their implication in complex chains of cause and effect. At worst, we might read this as an ideological effort to position themselves as external to the problems they claim to want to alleviate, allowing them to masquerade as agents of benevolence and to shore up the hegemony of ‘development’ and neoliberal capitalism as civilizing influences. Capitalizing QUEER The term ‘homocapitalism’ has been in circulation for some time, largely on social media, and largely as a critique of gay assimilationist politics in the USA and Western Europe.68 In its everyday usage, it builds on concepts like homonormativity and homonationalism to signify the selective incorporation of some race-, class- and gender-sanitized queers into capitalism and the disavowal of others through a liberal politics of recognition that obviates the need for redistribution. In this article, taking as my archive a set of early efforts by IFIs to lend their institutional authority to struggles against homophobia, I have attempted to describe the contours of an emerging global homocapitalism. As with its domestic counterparts, global homocapitalism seeks to reconcile the twin imperatives of efficiency and empowerment, making capitalism friendly to queers but also rendering queers safe for capitalism. Such discursive moves threaten to split queers off from anti-capitalist movements, while also splitting queers themselves into those deemed ‘productive’ and worthy of celebration and others cast out as ‘unproductive’. But we also need to take the globality of this homocapitalism seriously. No doubt propelled by the collaborative efforts of a transnational capitalist class, global homocapitalism acquires hegemony by repackaging queer normativity in recognizably local idioms with which those outside this class can identify or aspire to inhabit. In its bewildering cultural diversity, homocapitalism perpetuates neoliberal illusions of autonomy and choice. I have also argued that homocapitalism relies on a view of homophobia as ‘merely cultural’, allowing it to celebrate a liberal politics of recognition while ignoring or marginalizing redistributive concerns. Taking prior debates about recognition and redistribution as a point of departure, I have suggested that these debates focus too narrowly on what agents want or say they want, neglecting the wider structural conditions within which they acquire power and saliency. As long as IFIs fail to recognize their partial culpability for the very injustice that they claim to oppose, their efforts to inveigh against homophobia will only ever come across as disingenuous and ideological exercises in pinkwashing. Where will resistance to global homocapitalism come from? Early utopian Western queer Marxist texts tended to see queers as both creatures of, and potential antagonists to, capitalism, in much the same way that Marx considered the proletariat to exemplify the internal contradictions of capital. Freed up to express sexual and gender non-normativity by capitalism’s disruption of traditional family and kinship arrangements, queers were nonetheless cast out by capitalism’s reliance on heteronormativity to produce the next generation of workers, making it imperative for them to be part of anti-capitalist movements.69 That this was not, in fact, imperative became clear as Western LGBT movements entered into a rapprochement with capitalism in a politics of homonormativity. More recently formed LGBT movements in the global South are in many respects more beholden to capitalism because the vectors of their foundational Euro-American originated identities (‘LGBT’) – HIV/AIDS funding, human rights discourses, global media, elite diasporic travellers – are borne along by the circuits of global capital. Although these identities take their place within complex gender landscapes populated by older indigenous queer lifeworlds, the disproportionate power and leadership wielded by LGBT constituencies within those landscapes might render them less antithetical, as a whole, to the interests of capitalism than queer Marxists had once hoped. While a full consideration of this question is beyond the scope of this article, it seems reasonable to suppose that the most determined resistance to global homocapitalism will not come from the LGBT movements with which the IFIs seek alliance, given their reliance on the flows and infrastructures of neoliberal globalization. Nor is it likely to come from movements that have long struggled against the IFIs but within a largely heteronormative framework. If the critique offered by this article has a constituency, it probably lies in the very figurations of unproductive, ‘anti-development’ queerness that haunt the imaginaries of homocapitalist discourse.

Today, I am writing a follow up from my last post about embracing failure, which is a concept that I use out of Jack Halberstam’s work “The Queer Art of Failure.” Failure, often times is seen as negative and as problematic. People associate failure with the inability to achieve a particular goal. However, failure can be seen in a more positive light as a method for political resistance. Failure becomes a way to disassociate ourselves with problematic hegemonic institutions and practices.

One of the major problems with the current fight for “queer rights” today, is that we have, or others have spoken on our behalf to fight for our inclusion into structures that have failed us. Marriage has become the perfect example of this. Marriage is the place where heteronormativity has been celebrated in addition to being a major sites for queer exclusion. It is the place in which the ideal nuclear family has been celebrated. Queer people that choose not to or refuse to conform to particular family structures are marked as deviant and for violence. Additionally, marriage is a failed institution. Divorce rates are high. It has turned into an economic incentive versus affective bonds between people. The list goes on.

State lawmakers have proposed a record 238 bills that would limit the rights of LGBTQ Americans this year — or more than three per day — with about half of them targeting transgender people specifically. 

Nearly 670 anti-LGBTQ bills have been filed since 2018, according to an NBC News analysis of data from the American Civil Liberties Union and LGBTQ advocacy group Freedom for All Americans, with nearly all of the country’s 50 state legislatures all having weighed at least one bill. 

We have seen already that scarcely anybody imagines that there are no intelligible patterns in history at all. It is rare to find someone who sees history as simply one shambolic heap of chaos, chance, accident and contingency, though Friedrich Nietzsche and his disciple Michel Foucault sail close to this view at times. Most people accept that there are chains of cause and effect in history, however complex or hard to fathom, and that this lends it some rough kind of pattern. It is hard to believe, for example, that various nations began to collect colonies at a certain historical point for reasons that had nothing whatsoever in common. African slaves were not transported to America for no reason at all. That fascism emerged at more or less the same time in various twentiethcentury nations was not just a copycat affair. People do not suddenly hurl themselves on open fires just for the hell of it. There is a remarkably uniform pattern across the globe of people pointedly not doing so. The question, surely, is not whether there are patterns in history, but whether there is one predominant pattern. You can believe the former without crediting the latter. Why not just a set of overlapping designs that never merge into a whole? How on earth could something as diverse as human history form a unified story? To contend that material interests have been the prime mover all the way from the cave dwellers to capitalism is a lot more plausible than believing that diet, altruism, Great Men, pole-vaulting or the conjunction of the planets has been. But it still seems too singular an answer to be satisfying. If it is satisfying to Marx, it is because he considers that history has been by no means as varied and colourful as it may appear. It has been a much more monotonous story than meets the eye. There is indeed a kind of unity to it; but it is not one that should yield us any pleasure, as the unity of Bleak House or High Noon might. For the most part, the threads that leash it together have been scarcity, hard labour, violence and exploitation. And though these things have taken very different forms, they have so far laid the foundation of every civilisation on record. It is this dull, mind-numbing recurrence that has lent human history a good deal more consistency than we might desire. There is indeed a grand narrative here, and more’s the pity. As Theodor Adorno observes, ‘‘The One and All that keeps rolling on to this day—with occasional breathing spells—would teleologically be the absolute of suffering.’’ The grand narrative of history is not one of Progress, Reason or Enlightenment. It is a melancholic tale which leads in Adorno’s words ‘‘from the slingshot to the atomic bomb.’’≥ It is possible to agree that violence, hard labour and exploitation bulk large in human history without accepting that they are the foundation of it. For Marxists, one reason why they are so fundamental is that they are bound up with our physical survival. They have been abiding features of the way we maintain our material existence. They are not just random events. We are not speaking of scattered acts of savagery or aggression. If there has been a certain necessity to these things, it is because they are built into the structures by which we produce and reproduce our material life. Even so, no Marxist imagines that these forces shape absolutely everything. If they did, then typhoid, ponytails, convulsive laughter, Sufism, the Saint Matthew Passion and painting your toenails an exotic purple would all be the reflex of economy forces. Any battle not fought for directly economic motives, or any work of art which is silent on the class struggle, would be inconceivable. Marx himself occasionally writes as though the political is simply the reflex of the economic. Yet he also often investigates the social, political or military motives behind historical events, without the faintest suggestion that these motives are just the surface manifestations of deeper economic ones. Material forces do sometimes leave their mark quite directly on politics, art and social life. But their influence is generally more long-term and subterranean than this. There are times when this influence is only very partial, and other times when it scarcely makes sense to speak in these terms at all. How is the capitalist mode of production the cause of my taste in neckties? In what sense does it determine hang-gliding or the twelve-bar blues? So there is no reductionism at work here. Politics, culture, science, ideas and social existence are not just economics in disguise, as some neuroscientists hold that the mind is just the brain in disguise. They have their own reality, evolve their own histories and operate by their own inner logic. They are not just the pale reflection of something else. They also powerfully shape the mode of production itself. The traffic between economic ‘‘base’’ and social ‘‘superstructure,’’ as we shall see later, is not just one way. So if we are not speaking here of some mechanistic determinism, what kind of claim is being made? Is it one so fuzzy and generalized as to be politically toothless? The claim is in the first place a negative one. It is that the way men and women people produce their material life sets limits to the kind of cultural, legal, political and social institutions they construct. The word ‘‘determine’’ literally means ‘‘to set limits to.’’ Modes of production do not dictate a specific kind of politics, culture or set of ideas. Capitalism was not the cause of John Locke’s philosophy or Jane Austen’s fiction. It is rather a context in which both can be illuminated. Nor do modes of production throw up only those ideas or institutions which serve their purposes. If this were true, then Marxism itself would be impossible. It would be a mystery where anarchist street theatre comes from, or how Tom Paine came to write one of the best-selling books of all time—the revolutionary Rights of Man—at the heart of the repressive police state that was the England of his day. Even so, we would be astonished to discover that English culture contained nothing but Tom Paines and anarchist theatre groups. Most novelists, scholars, advertisers, newspapers, teachers and television stations do not produce work that is dramatically subversive of the status quo. This is so glaringly obvious that it generally fails to strike us as significant. Marx’s point is simply that it is not an accident. And it is here that we can formulate the more positive aspect of his claim. Broadly speaking, the culture, law and politics of class-society are bound up with the interests of the dominant social classes. As Marx himself puts it in The German Ideology, ‘‘The class that is the ruling material force of society is at the same time the ruling intellectual force.’’ Most people, if they pause to think about it, would probably accept that the business of material production has loomed so large in human history, absorbed such boundless resources of time and energy, provoked such internecine conflicts, engrossed so many human beings from cradle to grave and confronted so many of them as a matter of life or death, that it would be amazing if it were not to leave its mark on a good many other aspects of our existence. Other social institutions find themselves inexorably dragged into its orbit. It bends politics, law, culture and ideas out of true by demanding that rather than just flourish as themselves, they spend much of their time legitimating the prevailing social order. Think of contemporary capitalism, in which the commodity form has left its grubby thumbprints on everything from sport to sexuality, from how best to swing oneself a front-row seat in heaven to the ear-shattering tones in which U.S. television reporters hope to seize the viewer’s attention for the sake of the advertisers. The most compelling confirmation of Marx’s theory of history is late capitalist society. There is a sense in which his case is becoming truer as time passes. It is capitalism, not Marxism, which is economically reductionist.

Scholars in the fields of critical ethnic, Black, and Native studies who welcome the charge of decolonization and abolition in the corporate university often labor to push back against and expose the limitations of the “epistemic turns” or “epistemic revolutions of Europe” that Sylvia Wynter so deftly tracks in her voluminous body of work. Scholars committed to the politics of Black abolitionist work and Native decolonization must often assume postures of suspicion—“misanthropy”—and sometimes must outright refuse Western thought’s arrogant universalist assumptions, commonsense tautologies, and professed reforms to the category of the human; due to these ways, they often experience a great deal of hostility and violence. When decolonial and Black abolitionist thought has to contend with Western or European continental theory, specifically its critical theories of progressive (liberal) social change, one often encounters an epistemic crisis or what scholar Frank Wilderson refers to as an antagonism. Forced to wrestle with antagonisms that often require Native/Indigenous and Black death, the scholar committed to decolonization and abolition in the university seminar space often has to refuse necropolitical epistemological systems, which structure white liberal humanist ways of thinking and imagining the world. This kind of labor and violent confrontation in the classroom on a repeated basis can transform one’s educational and professional experience into one rife with stress, anxiety, and unease. More specifically, I have watched graduate students of color experience this kind of stress, anxiety, and unease as they confront the pressure to “take up” more contemporary impulses within Western “critical theory” to move “beyond the human” or toward the posthuman. One task of this article is to attend to the ways that Black and Indigenous academics, as well as Black and Native studies scholars, are expected to perform a commitment to a Deleuzian brand of posthumanist and nonrepresentational theory as proof that they are critical and postmodern scholars and disciplinary formations. Lately, I have heard questions posed to Black and Native scholars and activists who theorize the work of movements like Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, and other work addressing Black and Indigenous death to explain what relationship this (survival- based) work has to “identity,” “the subject,” or “the human.” More specifically, the questions are posed as ones that assume that these movements reify one or all of the above categories. Additionally, the inquiries are accompanied by an expectation that the person(s) and the movements will disavow all claims to identity, subjecthood, and the desire for humanity. What kinds of hostilities, assumptions, and misrecognitions lurk in inquiries such as the following: “Is Black Lives Matter a humanist movement?”2 “Does BLM reify the notion and idea of the human?” “When will Native studies transcend or get beyond the subject or the human?”3 Because emerging scholars in the academy often contend with these hostile inquires in the seminar space, while teaching, at conferences and in other spaces of academe, a change in comportment, tone, affect, and ways of being in the academy also needs to accompany the modes of conceptual and theoretical resistance within Black and Native studies. This article is as interested in the postures, affective states (skepticism), and stubborn practices of insubordination such as refusal that frustrate forward movement and business-as-usual in the academy. Specifically, this article tracks how Native feminist refusal and Black feminist suspicion respond to Deleuzian theory. Native feminist politics of decolonial refusal and Black feminist abolitionist politics of skepticism informed by a misandry and misanthropic distrust of and animus toward the (over)representation of man/men as the human diverge from the polite, communicative acts of the public sphere, much like the politics of the “feminist killjoy.”4 Throughout this article, I deploy the term “feminist” both ambivalently and strategically to mark and distinguish the scholarly tradition created by Black and Native women, queer, trans, and other people marginalized within these respective communities and their anticolonial and abolitionist movements.5 Until a more useful and legible term emerges, I will use “feminist” to mark the practices of refusal and skepticism (misandry/misanthropy) as ones that largely exist outside more masculinist traditions within Indigenous/Native studies and Black studies. “Decolonial refusal” and “abolitionist skepticism” depart from the kinds of masculinist anticolonial traditions that attempt to reason Native/ Black man to White Man within humanist logic in at least two significant ways. First, neither participate in the communicative acts of the humanist public sphere from within the terms of the debate. Further, they do not play by the rules.6 Specifically, the Native and Black “feminist” politics discussed throughout launch a critique of both the logic of the discussion about the human and identity as well as the mode of communication. In fact, practices of refusal and skepticism interrupt and flout codes of civil and collegial discursive protocol to focus on and illumine the violence that structures the posthumanist discourse. Attending to the comportment, tone, and intensity of an engagement is just as important as focusing on its content. The particular manner in which Black and Native feminists push back against violence is important. The force, break with decorum, and style in which Black and Native feminists confront discursive violence can change the nature of future encounters. Given that Black women who confront the logics of “nonrepresentational theory” are really confronting genocide and the white, whimsical disavowal of Black and Native negation on the way to subjectlessness, it is understandable that there is an equally discordant response. Refusal and skepticism are modes of engagement that are uncooperative and force an impasse in a discursive exchange. This article tracks how traditions of “decolonial refusal” and “abolitionist skepticism” that emerge from Native/Indigenous and Black studies expose the limits and violence of contemporary nonidentitarian and nonrepresentational impulses within white “critical” theory. Further, this article asks whether Western forms of nonrepresentational (subjectless and nonidentitarian) theory can truly transcend the human through self-critique, self-abnegation, and masochism alone. External pressure, specifically the kind of pressure that “decolonial refusal” and “abolitionist skepticism” as forms of resistance that enact outright rejection of or view “posthumanist” attempts with a “hermeneutics of suspicion,”7 is needed in order to truly address the recurrent problem of the violence of the human in continental theory. While this article does not directly stake a claim in embracing or rejecting identity per se, it does take up the category of the human. Because the category of the human is modified by identity in ways that position certain people (white, male, able- bodied) within greater or lesser proximity to humanness, identity is already taken up in this discussion. Conversations about the human are very much tethered to conversations about identity. In the final section, the article will explore how Black and Native/Indigenous absorption into the category of the human would disfigure the category of the human beyond recognition. Further, I discuss “decolonial refusal” in relation to how Black scholars like Sylvia Wynter, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, and Amber Jamilla Musser work within a Black feminist tradition animated by a kind of skepticism or suspicion capable of ferreting out the trace of the white liberal human within (self-) professed subjectless, futureless, and nonrepresentational white theoretical traditions. In other words, in the work of Sylvia Wynter, one senses a general suspicion and deep distrust of the ability of Western theory— specifically its attempt at self-critique and self-correction in the name of justice for humanity— to revise its cognitive orders to work itself out of its current “closed system,” which reproduces exclusion and structural oppositions based on the negation of the other.9 Wynter’s study of decolonial theory and its elaboration of autopoiesis informs her understanding of how the human and its overrepresentation as man emerges. Recognizing that humans (of various genres) write themselves through a “self-perpetuating and self-referencing closed belief system” that often prevents them from seeing or noticing “the process of recursion,” Wynter works to expose these blind spots [shortcomings].10 Wynter understands that one of the limitations of Western liberal thought is that it cannot see itself in the process of writing itself. I observe a similar kind of cynicism about the way the academic left invokes “post humanism” in the work of Jackson and Musser. Musser in particular questions the capacity of queer theories to turn to sensations like masochism within the field of affect studies to overcome the subject. Further, Jackson’s and Musser’s work is skeptical that white transcendence can happen on its own terms or rely solely on its own processes of self-critique and self-correction. I read Jackson’s and Musser’s work as distrustful of the ability for “posthumanism” to be accountable to Black and Indigenous peoples or for affect theory on its own to not replicate and reinforce the subjugation of the other as it moves toward self-annihilation. Both the human and the post human are causes for suspicion within Black studies.

McLaren: Mitja, I like the way that you framed that question. The obviousness of conservative culture is precisely why it is so hidden from view. Much like those who controlled the paradis articificels of everyday life in the film, The Truman Show. I am struck each day by the manner in which predatory capitalism anticipates forgetfulness, nourishes social amnesia, smoothes the pillows of finality, and paves the world with a sense of inevitability and sameness. I am depressingly impressed by what a formidable opponent it has proven to be, how it fatally denies the full development of our human capacities, and inures us to the immutability of social life. In other words, it naturalizes us to the idea that capital is the best of all possible worlds, that it may not be perfect, but it certainly is preferable to socialism and communism. Many leftists have unwittingly become apologists for capitalist relations of domination because they are overburdened by the seeming inability of North Americans to imagine a world in which capital did not reign supreme. To address this situation, I have turned to critical pedagogy

Mitja: You are very much identified with the field of critical pedagogy. How would you define critical pedagogy? What is your position within this field today?

It can be argued that horizontalism is, in many ways, a product of the growing disaggregation and individuation of Western society; that it is a kind of free-market leftism: a politics jury-rigged out of the very culture it hopes to resist. For not only does it emphasize the agency of the individual, but it draws one of its central inspirations from a neoclassical image: that of the self-managing society—the polity that functions best when the state is absent from everyday decisions.

But one can also find in its anti-institutionalism an attempt to speak in today’s language for yesterday’s goals. If we must live in a society that neither trusts nor feels compelled by collectivist visions, then horizontalism offers us a leftism that attempts to be, at once, both individualist and egalitarian, anti-institutional and democratic, open to the possibilities of self-management and yet also concerned with the casualties born out of an age that has let capital manage itself for far too long. Horizontalism has absorbed the crisis of knowledge—what we often call “postmodernism”—and the crisis of collectivism—what we often call “neoliberalism.” But instead of seeking to return to some golden age before our current moment of fracture, it seeks—for better and worse—to find a way to make leftist politics conform to our current age of anti-foundationalism and institutionalism. As Graeber argued in the prescriptive last pages of his anthropological epic, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, “Capitalism has transformed the world in many ways that are clearly irreversible” and we therefore need to give up “the false choice between state and market that [has] so monopolized political ideology for the last centuries that it made it difficult to argue about anything else.” We need, in other words, to stop thinking like leftists.

“Anti-politics” is not a negative, but it is an ambiguous phenomenon. The rebellion against the political elites can find a variety of expressions, progressive and reactionary. If in the current conjuncture in Europe the radical right has benefited more than the radical left, this is a consequence of the factors mentioned above—the relatively low level of struggle and the subjective weaknesses of the radical and revolutionary left. What this has meant is that the response of the dominant European capitalisms to the crisis—recharged neoliberalism in the shape of austerity—has increased popular alienation with the political system and that this opening has been seized largely by populist racist parties that are trying to remake this system on their terms. This is very clearly the project being pursued by Marine Le Pen and Nigel Farage. Maybe we should set aside our point-scoring and reflect a moment about that: in two key European countries the radical right believe they are in a position to make hegemonic interventions. This is a situation that demands, not despair, but sober thinking and targeted action. But things don’t have to take this form. In Greece the long-term level of social struggles and the inherited strength of the radical left, and in the Spanish state the sustained scale of the mass movements since the early 2000s have realised other possibilities. Southern Ireland hasn’t seen anything so spectacular, but a recent history of powerful local campaigns around social issues (now metamorphosing into the national movement against water charges) has allowed the radical left to build up significant electoral bases. Even more striking is the Scottish case. The pain of austerity and the hatred of politicians are the same both sides of the border. But south of the Tweed the beneficiaries have been the little England bigots of UKIP. The Scottish referendum campaign, however, was dominated by the progressive case for independence. And this wasn’t just a matter of Alex Salmond of the Scottish National Party’s skilful appropriation of the mantle of social democracy from Labour. As Keir McKechnie showed in our last issue, the running in the Yes campaign was made by forces on the left putting an anti-neoliberal and anti-imperialist case for independence. The Union came closest to disaster when Salmond dropped his efforts to stress the continuities between a present and a future Scotland and reframed independence as the way to save the welfare state. Though a ruling class on panic stations managed to scare enough voters into the No camp to defeat independence, Scotland continues to vibrate politically to the rhythms of the Yes campaign. One form this takes, fascinatingly and bucking the “anti-politics” trend, is a huge influx of new members into the pro-independence parties. The Scottish referendum is particularly interesting because the level of class struggle is, if anything, lower north of the border than it is in England. It was the particular configuration of the political field—not just the SNP’s rebranding as a social-democratic party but also the ability of forces further to the left to influence mainstream debate—that made the difference. The sentiments elsewhere associated with “anti-politics” found expression within the political system. There is nothing more part of bourgeois constitutional politics than a referendum about whether an existing capitalist state should split into two separate ones. Yet what could have been an empty ritual (think of the 1979 devolution referendum whose result was nullified because of the low level of participation) became a lightning conductor of much larger social tensions that could lead to the renewal of the radical left in Scotland. This example suggests that the opposition Tad and Elizabeth establish between “struggles where ordinary people take action to change society in their own interests—including in relation to the state” (= social and therefore good) and “political activities that merely seek a change in the policies, personnel or form of the state” (= political and therefore bad) is false. The Scottish referendum was about a mere “change in the…form of the state” and therefore on the wrong side of this line. But what does this mean? That the revolutionary left should have abstained from it? Tad and Elizabeth are too dedicated followers of fashion on the radical left (witness their shy-making invocation of Bob Dylan to expose me as insufficiently down with the kids) to propose anything so unpopular. But if they accept some version of the analysis of the referendum campaign offered above then their counterposition of the social and the political collapses. This brings me to Tad’s and Elizabeth’s theoretical argument: “Under capitalism all politics is necessarily ‘capitalist politics’ precisely because ‘the political’ only exists as a separate—and alienated—sphere in modern, bourgeois society”.7 They claim authority for this from the writings of the young Marx in 1843 and 1844 where he criticises the state not as the resolution of the antagonisms of civil society (as Hegel believed), but as a specific form of the alienation of civil society. The significance of these texts—for example, the “Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State” and “On the Jewish Question”—have been widely appreciated by Marxists, starting with Galvano Della Volpe and his pupil Lucio Colletti. They represent a very important step in Marx’s development towards communism in which he comes to realise that the kind of democratic transformation he wants to see in Germany requires more than a new edition of the French Revolution: the roots of alienation lie, not in religion (as the Young Hegelians thought) or even in political absolutism, but in civil society, and overcoming its antagonisms requires transcending the distinction between civil society and the state, which represents a merely imaginary resolution of these antagonisms.8 So it is already in the mid-1840s that Marx sets as his objective the abolition of the state. But he does so prior to his first formulations of historical materialism and of his critique of political economy and to his identification of the proletariat as the agent of what at this stage he calls “human” (as opposed to merely “political”) emancipation. It is a symptom of the limitations of Marx’s analysis in the “Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State” that he seems to identify the dissolution of both civil society and the state with the introduction of universal male suffrage. This does not mean that in his “mature” writings Marx simply abandons his critique of the state as a form of alienation. Tad and Elizabeth partially quote his description of the Paris Commune of 1871 as “a Revolution against the State itself, this supernaturalist abortion of society, a resumption by the people for the people, of its own social life”.9 This critique of the state can be integrated into his theory of fetishism in Capital. In other words, the apparent autonomy of the state in capitalist society can be seen as one specific form of the fragmentation of social relations that results from the dominance of commodity exchange. There is no contradiction between subsuming the state under fetishism and understanding it as a form of class domination since the latter perspective is needed in order to identify the mechanisms that ensure that the state operates in the interests of capital.10 In any case, Marx’s critique of the state does not license the kind of counterposition of the political and the social advocated by Tad and Elizabeth. While reaffirming his critique of the state in the wake of the Paris Commune he was engaged in a bitter factional struggle with Mikhail Bakunin and his followers in the First International. At stake here was whether the workers’ movement should undertake political action. Marx and Engels, even though, like Bakunin, they sought the abolition of the state, thought that it should, while Bakunin opposed it. It was in the course of this struggle that Marx explained to Friedrich Bolte that: every movement in which the working class comes out as a class against the ruling classes and attempts to coerce them by pressure from without is a political movement. For instance, the attempt in a particular factory or even a particular trade, to force a shorter working day out of the individual capitalists by strikes, etc, is a purely economic movement. The movement to force through an eight-hour law, etc, however, is a political movement. And in this way, out of the separate economic movements of the workers there grows up everywhere a political movement, that is to say a movement of the class, with the object of achieving its interests in a general form, in a form possessing general, socially binding force… Where the working class is not yet far enough advanced in its organisation to undertake a decisive campaign against the collective power, ie, the political power of the ruling classes, it must at any rate be trained for this by continual agitation against, and a hostile attitude towards the policies of the ruling classes. Otherwise it will remain a plaything in their hands.11 So Marx believes that, short of the conquest of political power, workers can strengthen their organisations and increase their self-consciousness by putting demands on the state, “this supernaturalist abortion of society”. Was he confused? I don’t think so. The state as a specific fetishised form of capitalist social relations creates a certain field of struggle (the political) in which different classes seek to secure for themselves measures that possess “general, socially binding force”. This is part of what Marx is getting at when he calls the state the concentration of the antagonisms of capitalist society. It is inevitable that working class movements will engage in political struggles and this can serve to strengthen and develop them, though Marx stresses that there are dangers involved. The example that Tad and Elizabeth give of Podemos illustrates the point. They rightly (though quite uncontroversially) stress the significance of the 15 May movement and of Podemos as its political expression. But they go on to accuse a Podemos leader, Íñigo Errejón, of “subordinating social interests to the primacy of politics”.12 But it is very welcome for a mass movement such as 15-M to invade and seek to reshape the political field. This is an advance compared to the previously predominant position of rejecting any form of representative politics. Potentially the rebels of 15 May are starting to grapple with how to reshape society, which requires addressing the question of political power. The problem lies with the specific political project of the leadership of Podemos, a combination of radical reformist economic policies with forms of decision-making (eg online voting) that are apparently ultra-democratic but in fact vest the power of initiative in the hands of a narrow group in Madrid. But counterposing the social and political in the way Tad and Elizabeth do is of little use in contesting this project. The problem is not that politics is sullying the purity of the social movement—politics is always implicit in social struggles—but what kind of politics comes to predominate. In some ways Tad’s and Elizabeth’s position is a flashback to the early phases of anti-capitalist radicalisation—a fetishism of the social implied by what Daniel Bensaïd rather nicely called “a ‘social illusion’, by analogy with the ‘political illusion’ of those criticised by the young Marx for thinking ‘political’ emancipation through the achievement of civil rights was the last word in ‘human emancipation’”.13 The rational kernel in their argument is that many translations from the social to the political do founder in some version of reformism. But, as the Scottish case illustrates, the solution lies, not in abstention from the political, but in developing forms of political intervention that, as Marx suggests, undermine the hegemony of the ruling class and increase the self-consciousness and self-organisation of the exploited and oppressed. Tad and Elizabeth insist that they renounce neither intervention nor strategy, but their argument is conducted at so high a level of generality as to be of little use. This is a pity because the revolutionary left has to think and work hard to influence what are very powerful developments in the political field, and we can do with all the help we can get.

But Goldwater failed to realize that governmental indifference can harden hearts, and government action can create conditions that soften them. People's attitudes aren't static or untouchable. They are molded by the quality of interactions with others, and one of the great powers of government involves shaping those interactions-not determining them in any concrete sense, but defining the parameters within which people come to know each other and live together. Today, for example, most Americans don't believe women should be confined to the home raising children, or subjected to crude advances and sexist remarks by men. The women's-rights movement put pressure on the government, which in turn passed laws that helped change some of our beliefs about women. Similarly, the relative progress of the 1960s did not happen merely by using the blunt instruments of the law. Change emerged from the ways those laws, with grassroots pressure, created new patterns of interactions, and ultimately new habits. Neither Obama's election to the presidency nor my appointment as a Princeton professor would have happened were it not for these new patterns and habits.

None of this happens overnight. It takes time and increasing vigilance to protect and secure change. I was talking with a dose friend and he mentioned a basic fact: that we were only fifteen years removed from the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 when Ronald Reagan was elected president and Republicans began to dismantle the gains of the black freedom struggle. Civil rights legislation and the policies of the Great Society had just started to reshape our interactions when they started to be rolled back. We barely had a chance to imagine America anew-to pursue what full employment might look like, to let the abolition of the death penalty settle in, to question seriously the morality of putting people in prison cells, and to enact policies that would undo what the 1968 Kerner Commission described as "two Americas" before the attack on "big government" or, more precisely, the attack on racial equality was launched. The objective was to shrink the size of government ("to starve the beast") and to limit its domestic responsibilities to ensuring economic efficiency and national defense. Democrats eventually buckled, and this is the view of government, no matter who is in office, that we have today. It has become a kind of touchstone of faith among most Americans that government is wasteful and should be limited in its role-that it shouldn't intrude on our lives. Politicians aren't the only ones who hold this view. Many Americans do, too. Now we can't even imagine serious talk of things like full employment or the abolition of prisons.

So, looking at examples from southern Europe—solidarity networks in Greece, self-organization in Spain or Turkey—these seem to be very crucial for building social movements around everyday life and basic needs these days. Do you see this as a promising approach?

I think it is very promising, but there is a clear self-limitation in it, which is a problem for me. The self-limitation is the reluctance to take power at some point. Bookchin, in his last book, says that the problem with the anarchists is their denial of the significance of power and their inability to take it. Bookchin doesn’t go this far, but I think it is the refusal to see the state as a possible partner to radical transformation.

Unlike these rewritings, which reaffirm in a somewhat new language the system of wage labor with only minor internal reforms, materialist critique aims at ending class rule. It goes beyond description and explains the working of wage labor and the abstract structures that cannot be experienced directly but underwrite it. Materialist critiques unpacks the philosophical and theoretical arguments that provide concepts for legitimizing wage labor and marks the textual representations that make it seem a normal part of life. In short, instead of focusing on micropractices (prison, gender, education, war, literature, and so on) in local and regional terms, materialist critique relates these practices to the macrostructures of capitalism and provides the knowledges necessary to put an end to exploitation. At the center of these knowledges is class critique. Pedagogy of critique is a class critique of social relations and the knowledges they produce . Its subject is wage labor, not the body without organs . An exemplary lesson in pedagogy of critique is provided by Marx, who concludes chapter 6 of Capital, " The Buying and Selling of Labour-Power, " by addressing the sphere within which wages are exchanged for labor power and the way this exchange is represented in the legal, philosophical, and representational apparatuses of capitalism as equal . He provides knowledge of the structures of wage labor and the theoretical discourses that sustain it. I have quoted this passage before and will refer to it again and again. Here is the full version: We now know how the value paid by the purchaser to the possessor of this peculiar commodity, labour-power, is determined. The use-value which the former gets in exchange, manifests itself only in the actual usufruct, in the consumption of the labour-power. The money-owner buys everything necessary for this purpose, such as raw material, in the market, and pays for it at its full value . The consumption of labourpower is at one and the same time the production of commodities and of surplus-value. The consumption of labour-power is completed, as is the case of every other commodity, outside the limits of the market or the sphere of circulation. Accompanied by Mr. Moneybags and by the possessor of labour-power, we therefore take leave for a time of this noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in view of all men, and follow them both into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there stares us in the face "No admittance except on business . " Here we shall see, not only how capital produces, but how capital is produced. We shall at last force the secret of profit making. This sphere that we are deserting, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of labour-power, are constrained only by their own free will. They contract as free agents, and the agreement they come to, is but the form in which they give legal expression to their common will. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to himself. The only force that brings them together and puts them in relation with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interests of each. Each looks to himself only, and no one troubles himself about the rest, and just because they do so, do they all, in accordance with the pre-established harmony of things, or under the auspices of an all-shrewd providence, work together to their mutual advantage, for the common weal and in the interest of all. On leaving this sphere of simple circulation or of exchange of commodities, which furnishes the "Free-trader vulgaris" with his views and ideas, and with the standard by which he judges a society based on capital and wages, we think we can perceive a change in the physiognomy of our dramatis personae. He, who before was the money-owner, now strides in front as capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his labourer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other, timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but-a hiding. Materialist critique is fundamental to a transformative feminist politics. Through critique the subject develops historical knowledges of the social totality: she acquires, in other words, an understanding of how the existing social institutions (motherhood, child care, love, paternity, taxation, family, . . . and so on ) are part of the social relations of production, how they are located in exploitative relations of difference, and how they can be changed. Materialist critique, in other words, is that knowledge practice that historically situates the conditions of possibility of what empirically exists under capitalist relations of class difference-particularly the division of labor-and, more important, points to what is suppressed by the empirically existing: what could be, instead of what actually is. Critique indicates, in other words, that what exists is not necessarily real or true but only the actuality under wage labor. The role of critique in pedagogy is exactly this: the production of historical know ledges and class consciousness of the social relations, knowledges that mark the transformability of existing social arrangements and the possibility of a different social organization--one that is free from necessity. Quite simply then, the pedagogy of critique is a mode of social knowing that inquires into what is not said, into the silences and the suppressed or the missing, in order to unconceal operations of economic and political power underlying the myriad concrete details and seemingly disparate events and representations of our lives . It shows how apparently disconnected zones of culture are in fact linked by the highly differentiated and dispersed operation of the systematic, abstract logic of the exploitation of the division of labor that informs all the practices of culture and society. It reveals how seemingly unique concrete experiences are in fact the common effect of social relations of production in wage labor capitalism. In sum, materialist critique both disrupts that which represents itself as natural and thus as inevitable and explains how it is materially produced. Critique, in other words, enables us to explain how social differences, specifically gender, race, sexuality, and class, have been systematically produced and continue to operate within regimes of exploitation-namely, the international division of labor in global capitalism-so we can change them. It is the means for producing politically effective and transformative knowledges . The claim of affective pedagogy is that it sets the subject free by making available to her or him the unruly force of pleasure and the unrestrained flows of desire, thereby turning her or him into an oppositional subject who cuts through established representations and codings to find access to a deterritorialized subjectivity. But the radicality of this self, at its most volatile moment, is the radicality of the class politics of the ruling class, a class for whom the question of poverty no longer exists. The only question left for it, as I have already indicated, is the question of liberty as the freedom of desire. Yet this is a liberty acquired at the expense of the poverty of others. The pedagogy of critique engages these issues by situating itself not in the space of the self, not in the space of desire, not in the space of liberation, but in the revolutionary site of collectivity, need, and emancipation. The core of the pedagogy of critique is that education is not simply for enlightening the individual to see through the arbitrariness of signification and the violence of established representations . It recognizes that it is a historical practice and, as such, it is always part of the larger forces of production and relations of production. It understands that all pedagogies are, in one way or the other, aimed at producing an efficient labor force. Unlike the pedagogy of desire, the pedagogy of critique does not simply teach that knowledge is another name for power, nor does it marginalize knowledge as a detour of desire. It acknowledges the fissures in social practices-including its own-but it demonstrates that they are historical and not textual or epistemological. It, therefore, does not retreat into mysticism by declaring the task of teaching to be the teaching of the impossible and, in doing so, legitimate the way things are. Instead, the pedagogy of critique is a worldly teaching of the worldly.

The concept of social reproduction has been at the centre of materialist feminist debates and has helped to uncover the invisibilised tasks needed to maintain life, both daily and across generations, which are mostly performed by women and racial minorities (Federici 2020; Mitchell, Marston and Katz 2004). Social reproduction scholarship has complemented Marxist theory by highlighting the crucial role of reproductive work in producing the most fundamental element in capitalist production, labour power, and disentangling the gendered division of labour (Dalla Costa and James 1975). The relation between capital and social reproduction, though, is far from being linear. Whereas the process of capital accumulation is sustained by the appropriation of reproductive work, capitalism also erodes the conditions of social reproduction, incurring in a contradiction that is at the root of periodical crises of care (Fraser 2017). Federici (2020) has framed this contradiction as a ‘double character’ of reproductive work, which in capitalism, simultaneously reproduces life and labour power. This reformulation has an important political connotation, since placed in a different context, social reproduction could potentially contribute to “reconstruct the world as a space of nurturing, creativity, and care” (Federici 2020: xvii). Therefore, the struggle over reproductive work is crucial in creating the conditions for emancipatory forms of social organisation and advancing a post-capitalist transition. In this context, several authors have recently started speaking of reproductive (or reproduction) commons, which refer to the collectivisation of social reproduction, taking it away from the market and/or private spaces (Federici 2018). In the current situation, reproductive commons are easily co opted by capital and the state. Since the retreat of the welfare state in Western countries that brought about the neoliberal era (a process that has intensified after every economic crisis) many of the reproductive functions that the state covered have been transferred S. Ruiz Cayuela and M. García-Lamarca Geoforum 144 (2023) 103807 3 back to the private sphere, in what Ezquerra has characterised as a new enclosure of reproductive commons (2015). This housewifization process, as Mies (2014) has called it, is not the only possible outcome though. Occasionally, communities have come together and have been able to share the load of these reproductive tasks, reclaiming their own reproduction as a commons. In this way, reproductive commons have been able to undo three of the main impacts of enclosure: “the loss of community bonds, the separation of production and reproduction, and the invisibilisation … of reproductive work” (di Masso Tarditti et al. 2022: 12, own translation). However, reproductive commons do not aim to revert enclosure in order to recover a romanticised pre-capitalist past. As De Angelis (2017) has demonstrated, reproductive commons form the material basis that can make commoning a viable alternative to the market and the state. Therefore, reproductive commons play a key role in building commons autonomy and are central in igniting and sustaining a social revolution towards emancipatory post-capitalist futures. Whereas there is a growing interest in reproductive commons, the existing literature addresses them mostly from an abstract conceptual perspective. Among the scarce empirically based publications that we have been able to find, the topics of care work and food prevail (see for example the collection edited by Ezquerra et al. 2022). While these are certainly important, we situate our intervention as one connecting scholarship on social reproduction and housing commons to deepen understandings of reproductive commons. The role housing plays as a critical dimension of social reproduction has been explored from feminist perspectives underlining how mortgage debt under neoliberalism (re)privatises relations of social reproduction (Roberts 2013), or how debt more broadly intertwines the very infrastructure for life, labour, care and housing (Cavallero and Gago 2021). Marxist approaches emphasise tensions between housing as accumulation and housing as a form of social reproduction (Byrne 2020; Madden and Marcuse 2016). The role of social reproduction in housing struggles has more recently taken front and centre stage through analyses of rent strikes (Hughes and Wright 2018; Gonzalez-Guzm ´ an ´ and Ill-Raga 2023). Considering how housing arrangements affect our common senses and subjectivities, as evidenced by the close connection between the private household model and the hegemony of the nuclear family (Aramburu 2015; Lewis 2022), a growing literature on housing commons has generated very insightful debates. These include the role that squatting has played as a way to (re) appropriate urban space for decommodified social relations rather than speculation, a process embedded in practices of commoning (Di Feliciantonio 2017; García-Lamarca, 2015), and the contestation of migration governance and border policies (Montagna & Grazioli 2019). A range of publications have considered the production, management, financial and political mechanisms to remove and maintain housing outside market dynamics, as well as the challenges these noncommodified housing processes face (Huron 2015, 2018; Joubert and Hodkinson 2018; Larsen and Lund Hansen 2015; Miralles Buil 2020). Housing commons owned and operated by non-profit, independent housing associations in Denmark, for example, endure due to their engagement with, against and beyond the state (Vidal 2019). Ferreri and Vidal (2021) detail how public-cooperative policy mechanisms for housing commons have unfolded through collaboration and conflict and continuous political and social struggles. What role do critical approaches to reproduction play here? In the next section we turn our attention to the particularities that reproductive commons located in urban environments are facing.

Ramsey: It’s difficult to miss the Lacanian influence here. I’ve seen some within self-identified socialist or communist circles writing about your book in somewhat dismissive ways, focusing on the ‘Lacanese’ you employ as if it is does more to obfuscate than to illuminate. What do you see as the value of Lacan here for radical theory and for the communist movement in particular? Dean: The unconscious matters—we’ve been talking about desire and drive, both unconscious processes. Language matters. Understanding the subject matters. Psychoanalysis offers a theoretical apparatus that helps us think about these components of our thought and experience. It provides us with ways of addressing our attachments to dysfunction and self-hate, to perceived needs for guarantees and certainty, as well as to our ambivalence toward masters. But, to use an odd cliché I may have never used before, ‘the proof of the pudding is in the eating.’ If people don’t find Lacan/lacanese illuminating, it will be obfuscating. It’s that way with any specialized discourse or vocabulary. Maybe an example will help. In The Communist Horizon I use Lacan to suggest an idea of the party as situated at the overlap of two lacks, such as the people’s lack of knowledge of what they desire as well as the party’s own lack of knowledge, the fact that it can’t guarantee a particular future. Given these lacks, the role of the party is to keep the site at which they overlap open as the gap necessary for the collective desire for collectivity. The question is then whether this formulation helps us think of new or better ways to organize. Ramsey: Would it be fair to say then, building upon these “two lacks,” that the party you envision must be one that is able both to learn and to teach, and moreover to incite and sustain the collective desire to both learn and teach? Dean: Yes, particularly the latter insofar as sustaining desire requires cultivating a kind of relation or orientation to what is lacking. I sometimes wonder whether prior visions or versions of the communist party have overplayed its teaching role and then in a backlash against this overplaying ended up fetishizing some kind of authentic workers’ or people’s knowledge that the party has to learn. What if instead we recognize that the party is a collective and that collectives bring together people with different skills, experience, and knowledge? A communist party orients its collective toward the truth of communism. The primary task of the party is the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and establishment of communism. This is more than a pedagogy, to say the least. Ramsey: In the book you cite Marx’s famous communist motto (a phrase that precedes Marx as well) “from each according to ability, to each according to need,” writing that “this principle contains the urgency of the struggle for its own realization” (15). I often speak of the communist kernel of hope as inherent in the fact that among the needs of human beings is the need to satisfy others’ needs (and perhaps to be or to feel needed by those others as well). How does your reframing of communism from the standpoint of desire relate to the (more traditional?) framing of communism as oriented towards the satisfaction of need, and the development of human abilities? How do need and desire relate within your thinking here? Dean: Here’s the rub: we all know that people have needs. Even the worst capitalists know this. The political question concerns our relation to these needs. This is a matter of desire and will. Are needs to be addressed singularly or collectively? Desire, then, involves the politicization of needs. Ramsey: Often it seems to me that communists put forth our goals as a matter of what we will eliminate or abolish (“the 4 Alls” etc. “the gaps” or divisions that are inherent in class society, etc). Not so much in terms of what we want to cultivate or unleash. Often when we speak of what we strive to unleash or cultivate (“global human flourishing” etc.) it is depicted as something that will come after the elimination or overturning of various oppressive institutions, ideologies, state structures, class relations, etc. I’m not suggesting that it is wrong to say we want to eliminate A, B, and C, or that we want to abolish or overthrow X, Y, and Z. But it sometimes seems to me as if desire and the pursuit of what we “really want” is positioned somehow “on the other side” of this abolishing, overturning, eliminating, etc. – now being the time for “self-sacrificing struggle” and the repression of desire for the sake of the greater good, of the collectivity, of the revolution down the road. Desire here may become something we’ll only get back to on the “other side” of some kind of revolutionary break. Nothing against revolutionary breaks, and the openings they provide, of course. But your focus on communism as a matter of desire–”the collective desire for collective desiring”–seems to me notable and refreshing as a way to bring that future flourishing we communists often imagine into the present, but in a way that still propels us forward towards cultivating human liberation. It gives a positive lean to communist subjectivity, even if that subjectivity continues to be defined (as desire) by lack. Dean: I love the way you are putting this and will now have to use this! It’s nicely succinct and clear. Ramsey: It seems to me that often on the radical left, we speak of pursuing the “satisfaction of human needs.” Everyone getting enough food to eat, clean, water, shelter, etc. All crucial stuff, obviously. But this emphasis on the emancipated society as a state of satiety and “satisfaction” may give short shrift to the way that – on another level– communism and liberation is not only, or even primarily, about satisfying people’s immediate material needs (though this too), so much as it is about cultivating a hunger, or, as you would put it, a desire. A political desire. Dean: Sorry to keep interrupting but I like your expression ‘state of satiety and satisfaction’ and your evocation of a hunger — it reminds me of Benjamin’s critique of left melancholic hacks preoccupied with their digestion. Ramsey: Something I’m just starting to think about is what the difference is between conceiving of communist politics as a matter of satisfying human needs – and cultivating new needs – vs. a matter of desire. What do you see as the stakes of foregrounding communism as a matter of desire? Dean: The opening up of a gap so as to free us to envision new possibilities. You know how people tend to criticize the left for not having a vision, not having a goal, not having ideas? Well, this only makes sense for a left that has abandoned communism. Once we claim communism, then we insert ourselves into a logic of desire such that we have to think strategically as well as tactically, we have to start thinking in terms of what communism for us will look like and how we can get there.