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We bet notable macroeconomists, Alan Blinder and Charles Wyplosz, never heard of the ‘performativity of economics’ when they stated that ‘the main purpose of central bank talk is to help markets “think like the central bank”’ (2004, 7). It is, however, striking, that so many differ- ent aspects of what is commonly called ‘performativity’ are entangled in discussing central bank communication—a theme which is currently at the heart of macroeconomic debates. All our intuitive notions—to be explained below—are here: the context of economic governance, the inherent sociality of language, the role of explicitness, the importance of signification, and the enactment of ideas and theories. For successful performance of a central bank, successful communication is crucial. To govern, one has to use the resources of language, to create a community of those who comprehend one’s message, to make explicit one’s com- mitments, and, finally, in and through communication, to enact the very economic theory stating that central bank communication is essential for channeling economic agents’ expectations and eventually for the proper functioning of this institution. This is of course only one example of economics not merely describing or explaining, but also actively shaping the economies—this is how performa- tivity is most commonly understood. The recent emphasis on economics in the performativity debate is not surprising: many studies document how a very—perhaps, the most—influential social science participates in build- ing up social reality. The performative move thus refers to the venerable epistemological question of the relation between ‘reality’ and ‘theory,’ but goes beyond the traditional idea of economics describing more or less adequately some supposedly ‘real’ processes. This performative turn took place at the beginning of the new mil- lennium and culminated in books such as An Engine, Not a Camera (MacKenzie 2006) and Do Economists Make Markets? (MacKenzie et al. 2007). Afterwards, the performativity research proliferated. However, these new studies were not a replication of the essential work on perfor- mativity: We could clearly observe the drift toward a new understanding of the concept. In this new—‘after-the-turn’—research, the focus has been shifted from the investigation of the one-way link ‘theory→reality.’ The search for a general proof that this link exists—in more or less strong form—was recognized by many as futile. Today, the performativity con- cept moved from the theoretical debate about the link between abstract theories and economic reality toward empirical studies of how this link works in various applied fields. There was a drift toward investigations of performative practices. This shift had consequences. On the one hand, the proliferation of empirical studies diluted the term ‘performativity’ often reducing it just to a ubiquitous catch-all concept. One might deplore the limited theoretical advancement in the field. On the other hand, what we can state with certainty is that, in the last years, performativity became a part of the DNA in the social studies of economic phenomena. The performativity program delivered a framework for the discussion of what economic professionals do and, more generally, of what happens in economics. In fact, it is now well established that economic theories of various kinds define standards of rationality and categories of risk, determine the rules undergirding investment decisions, influence macroeconomic expec- tations, and formulate microeconomic incentives. The performativity per- spective also pertains to the phenomena of marketization, indoctrination, diffusion of theoretical knowledge via expertise, creation of new languages and ideologies. Economists formulate the norms for reconfiguring markets (Garcia-Parpet 2007; Holm and Nielsen 2007) and set criteria of efficiency (Breslau 2011, 2013); manage identities and produce subjectivities—be it through business education (Ghoshal and Moran 1996; Ghoshal 2005) or consumer testing (Muniesa 2014); they also specify policy agendas and generally play a crucial role in institutional design both by directly inter- vening and by providing a relevant ‘cognitive infrastructure’ (Ferraro et al. 2005; Friedman 2010; Hirschman and Popp Berman 2014). Choosing a pension plan in the US pension system with the mechanism of choice devised by experimental economists (Thaler and Sunstein 2008); taking part in the auctions following the rules formulated by the teams of game theorists and economic experimentalists (Guala 2001; Nik-Khah 2008; Boldyrev 2012, 2013); investing in index funds as embodiments of efficient market hypothesis in financial economics (MacKenzie 2006); establishing incentive systems inspired by microeconomic theory (Dix 2014; Herrmann- Pillath, this volume); confronting people with questions they never thought of before and thus constructing their preferences (Kahneman and Tversky 2000; Muniesa 2014); using a micro-credit scheme in Bangladesh or India on the terms proposed by experimental development economists (Banerjee and Duflo 2011; Favereau and Brisset 2013; Davis 2013)—all these actions suggest the ways economics helps in creating its own realities and attempts to make the agents, material infrastructures, and knowledge converge and mutually stabilize each other. Small wonder that in the postcrisis neolib- eral era, the role of economists in facilitating (or neglecting) major eco- nomic instabilities sparks controversies (Krugman 2009; Hodgson 2009; Caballero 2010; Mirowski and Nik-Khah 2013). The interest of performativity lies precisely in its radical stance: in blur- ring or at least questioning the boundaries between research and its object, in focusing on knowledge and its pragmatic realizations, we both chal- lenge traditional epistemology and address the very texture of social life. That is why clarifying the meaning of performativity eventually matters for understanding the social. The studies on various ‘performative practices’ imply that the link between ‘theories’ and ‘economic reality’ cannot be understood in terms of a mechanical, one-way influence. It could be empirically demonstrated that clear distinction of this kind is often not possible. ‘Realities,’ while being theoretically assembled, also shape theo- ries (via statistical data or observations).

This is of course only one example of economics not merely describing or explaining, but also actively shaping the economies—this is how performativity is most commonly understood. The recent emphasis on economics in the performativity debate is not surprising: many studies document how a very—perhaps, the most—inl uential social science participates in building up social reality. The performative move thus refers to the venerable epistemological question of the relation between ‘reality’ and ‘theory,’ but goes beyond the traditional idea of economics describing more or less adequately some supposedly ‘real’ processes. This performative turn took place at the beginning of the new millennium and culminated in books such as An Engine, Not a Camera (MacKenzie 2006) and Do Economists Make Markets? (MacKenzie et al. 2007). Afterwards, the performativity research proliferated. However, these new studies were not a replication of the essential work on performativity: We could clearly observe the drift toward a new understanding of the concept. In this new—‘after-the-turn’—research, the focus has been shifted from the investigation of the one-way link ‘theory → reality.’ The search for a general proof that this link exists—in more or less strong form—was recognized by many as futile. Today, the performativity concept moved from the theoretical debate about the link between abstract theories and economic reality toward empirical studies of how this link works in various applied i elds. There was a drift toward investigations of performative practices . This shift had consequences. On the one hand, the proliferation of empirical studies diluted the term ‘performativity’ often reducing it just to a ubiquitous catch-all concept. One might deplore the limited theoretical advancement in the i eld. On the other hand, what we can state with certainty is that, in the last years, performativity became a part of the DNA in the social studies of economic phenomena. The performativity program delivered a framework for the discussion of what economic professionals do and, more generally, of what happens in economics. 2 I. BOLDYREV AND E. SVETLOVA In fact, it is now well established that economic theories of various kinds dei ne standards of rationality and categories of risk, determine the rules undergirding investment decisions, inl uence macroeconomic expectations, and formulate microeconomic incentives. The performativity perspective also pertains to the phenomena of marketization, indoctrination, diffusion of theoretical knowledge via expertise, creation of new languages and ideologies. Economists formulate the norms for reconi guring markets ( Garcia-Parpet 2007; Holm and Nielsen 2007) and set criteria of efi ciency (Breslau 2011, 2013); manage identities and produce subjectivities—be it through business education (Ghoshal and Moran 1996; Ghoshal 2005 ) or consumer testing (Muniesa 2014); they also specify policy agendas and generally play a crucial role in institutional design both by directly intervening and by providing a relevant ‘cognitive infrastructure’ (Ferraro et al. 2005 ; Friedman 2010; Hirschman and Popp Berman 2014). Choosing a pension plan in the US pension system with the mechanism of choice devised by experimental economists (Thaler and Sunstein 2008); taking part in the auctions following the rules formulated by the teams of game theorists and economic experimentalists (Guala 2001; Nik-Khah 2008 ; Boldyrev 2012, 2013); investing in index funds as embodiments of efi cient market hypothesis in i nancial economics (MacKenzie 2006); establishing incentive systems inspired by microeconomic theory (Dix 2014; HerrmannPillath, this volume); confronting people with questions they never thought of before and thus constructing their preferences (Kahneman and Tversky 2000; Muniesa 2014); using a micro-credit scheme in Bangladesh or India on the terms proposed by experimental development economists (Banerjee and Dul o 2011; Favereau and Brisset 2013; Davis 2013)—all these actions suggest the ways economics helps in creating its own realities and attempts to make the agents, material infrastructures, and knowledge converge and mutually stabilize each other. Small wonder that in the postcrisis neoliberal era, the role of economists in facilitating (or neglecting) major economic instabilities sparks controversies (Krugman 2009 ; Hodgson 2009 ; Caballero 2010; Mirowski and Nik-Khah 2013). The interest of performativity lies precisely in its radical stance: in blurring or at least questioning the boundaries between research and its object, in focusing on knowledge and its pragmatic realizations, we both challenge traditional epistemology and address the very texture of social life. That is why clarifying the meaning of performativity eventually matters for AFTER THE TURN: HOW THE PERFORMATIVITY OF ECONOMICS MATTERS 3 understanding the social. The studies on various ‘performative practices’ imply that the link between ‘theories’ and ‘economic reality’ cannot be understood in terms of a mechanical, one-way inl uence. It could be empirically demonstrated that clear distinction of this kind is often not possible. ‘Realities,’ while being theoretically assembled, also shape theories (via statistical data or observations).

The intellectual history of the Frankfurt School, especially as it has been taken up by media and communication scholars, in other words, reveals not oversight but a motivated silence. It maps what Charles Mills has termed “an epistemology of ignorance” (2007, p. 16). Here we are talking precisely about ways of knowing that are premised on not knowing. We are talking about tactical silences, minimizations, and misrepresentations in textbooks, on curricula, and in how expertise is measured and valued. For Mills, these are epistemologies designed to safeguard white ignorance, protecting those who “for ‘racial’ reasons have needed not to know” (p. 35). Inscribed in the publication and citational politics of journal articles, conference programs and special issues, state-of-the-field forums and anthologies, encyclopedias, dictionaries, and keyworks collections, reproduced in syllabi, and concretized in hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions, the epistemologies of ignorance that characterize the legacies of the Frankfurt School are woven into the great debates and ferments, subsuming the claims as well as counter-claims that constitute the Communication canon. The intellectual footprints of these legacies of the Frankfurt School are tracked along two main strains, both part of the “critical” orientation in communication and media studies. The first of these, returning more fully to Marxist institutional and materialist analyses, was loosely organized under the banner of critical political economy.9 The other, riding Marxism’s wider “cultural turn,” brought communication and culture scholars together under the category of critical cultural studies, especially in the wake of the founding in 1964 of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Political economy, while positioned in sharp opposition to the U.S.-based “administrative” canon of communication studies, nevertheless took its cues from the Frankfurt School’s deliberate erasure of its formative investments in racism and racial difference. Selectively foregrounding critical theory’s investments in state and capitalist domination, scholars working on the political economy of media and communication emphasized institutional and industry analyses to highlight how mass media disenfranchised, commodified, and administered mass publics. Questions of race, if they emerged at all, took a backseat to issues of labor and class. Much of what is currently organized under the sub-field of media industries, for example, or what is now emerging as the digital media studies canon, reflects political economy’s deracialized emphasis on the economic base. Despite Cedric Robinson’s forceful claim that racialism, as a material force, permeates the social structures emergent from capitalism, and that “the development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society [have] pursued essentially racial directions” (2000, p. 2), critical political economy has yet to engage substantively with the theoretical formulations of racial capitalism and to reckon with the ways critical race approaches may enrich their insights. Critical cultural studies, for its part, took its cue from the Frankfurt School’s rejection of orthodox Marxism’s dichotomies between base and ideological superstructure, and the corresponding view that culture was merely epiphenomenal. Drawing attention to issues of cultural difference and marginality in ways that critical political economists rarely did, early works focused on white British objectifications of AfroCaribbean styles and Asian youth as victims of white skinhead aggression. Such an emphasis, as Huq explains, privileged the supposedly sub-culturally stylish and/or deviant deeds of white working-class males (2003, p. 30), and embedded familiar epistemological myopias that constrained critical cultural studies to questions of class division. Approaching the representational and cultural politics of racialized populations as distinct and particular, against which white cultural identities and experiences remained, as if by default, prototypical and generalizable, early critical cultural inquiry, in other words, had a race problem of its own. Reflecting conspicuous problems of ethnocentrism and nationalism and an essentially reactive approach to questions of ethnicity and racial identity, the emerging canon “mobilized [race and ethnicity] often by default rather than design,” inscribing the persistent and “unthinking assumption that cultures always flow into patterns congruent within the border of essentially homogeneous nation states” (Gilroy, 1993, p. 5). After Stuart Hall assumed the leadership of the Birmingham school in 1971, the culturalist shift within Marxist theory eased a wider range of projects concerned with race and post-coloniality but it took later generations of Birmingham scholars, likewise, to variously challenge the white working-class, male, and nation-bound focus of cultural studies (Clarke, 1985; Gilroy, 1993; McRobbie and Garber, 1976; McRobbie and Nava, 1984; Mercer, 1994). These efforts continue to make progress in opening out the field to the cultural practices of ethnic minorities, women, and middle-class youth, and attending to the reception practices of women of color and the performative subcultures of queer of color communities not as exotic and niche objects of study but as formative to the epistemologies and methodologies of critical cultural studies. In many ways, these contentious trajectories of the field have transformed communication and media studies. But, as we know too, our place in the canon remains uneasy. I read with dismay, for example, Toby Miller’s recent entry entitled “Cultural Studies and Communication” in the Oxford Research Encyclopedias, in which he identifies one notable “critical strand of communication studies,” namely, political economy (2018). Miller, a prominent cultural studies scholar,10 explains that while political economy “examines such social forces of domination as the state and capital,” cultural studies, in contrast, “is more akin to a tendency connected to concerns and identities on the margins of academia” (p. 1). Where political economy, seemingly in faithful service to the foundational burdens of the Frankfurt School, remains concerned with the “pessimistic” record of domination, cultural studies, in a presumably sunnier outlook, favors “a faith in the resistive qualities of the oppressed and silenced” (p. 6). Miller’s version of the cultural studies canon makes ethical claims to a commitment to social justice through historical and contemporary analyses of “slaves, crowds, pirates, bandits, minorities, audiences, fans, women, and the working class,” which, he explains, show us how “creative struggles undertaken by ordinary people (...) interpret dominant cultural forms in terms of their conditions of existence” (p. 7). Defining the oppressed and silenced wholly in terms of their alienation, powerlessness, and victimization, Miller’s account tediously retraces the blind spots of early critical cultural studies, positioning those othered by history and circumstance as outside, looking in, significant to the field as exotic objects of study. Reducing practices of “day-to-day non-compliance with authority” (p. 6) to struggles geared to “claim[ing] resources and seek[ing] inclusion” (p. 7), Miller approaches communication and media ecologies as if unmarked by institutional histories of raced and gendered difference, except when those on the outside, valiantly and creatively, peck at the margins. Espousing the “blithe universalism” that Said diagnosed in the work of the Frankfurt School, Miller, likewise, highlights how the crises of belonging and economic necessity confronting the oppressed are, no doubt, occasioned and impacted by the forces of global capitalism without much insight into how the historical expansion of capitalism has depended on the structural exploitation and subjugation of raced and gendered others. Miller’s summary is neither alone nor exceptional in the ways in locates critical race epistemologies and approaches outside the mainstay of critical cultural studies. Its logics of white ignorance shepherded by presumed experts and leaders in the field, it is, to be sure, another point of ethno-racial encounter, specifically, of raced erasure, of forgetting and not knowing. Tracking the institution that Sara Ahmed names “white men” as well as the racialized and racializing mechanisms for reproducing that institution, Miller’s essay offers us a glimpse, one among others, of how and why Communication remains so white.

These achievements may seem like genuine progress, especially through a recognition– redistribution lens. Gay and lesbian sexual specificity is being recognized, destigmatized, and normalized. Economic injustices facing gays and lesbians are being redressed. But I want to cast a more critical look at some of these victories for signs of an ongoing production of a neoliberal queer subject—a phenomenon associated with a regime of sexual regulation that some have called “homonormativity” (Duggan 2003; Drucker 2015). This neoliberal subject may embody forms of sexuality and gender that overflow heteronormativity at the margin (“homo”), yet at the core they remain “normative,” constituted as white, well-educated, middle-upper classed, predominantly cisgender-male, depoliticized, and committed to heteronorms and neoliberal capitalism. The forging of this subject helps stabilize some of the contradiction between queer sexuality and capital’s social reproductive needs. Simultaneously, it recasts the old contradiction into newer forms, into the divide between queers with capital and queers without, between normative queers and deviant queers, between queer elites and queer outlaws. In the final instance, what appears as progress is revealed to be the reproduction of the same oppressive regulation of gender and sexuality. Heteronormativity, together with settler colonialism, racism, slavery, and patriarchy forms “the historical foundation that has not been surpassed but serves instead as material conditions reproduced in new ways in the present” (Goldstein 2018: 83).15

Let us start with marriage equality, a goal often considered the Holy Grail of mainstream gay and lesbian rights movements. A wave of high-profile same-sex marriage legalizations in recent years has brought some degree of recognitive and redistributive justice to same-sex couples. But who are these couples in whose name this battle is fought? Consider the following passage from the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling

The heterosexual, masculinist way of liberation from the subjugating bond of charity is central to the idea of the freedom of labour as independence from feudal conditions of coercion. At the same time, relations of care were not considered profitable spheres, and the reproduction of the labour force had to be guaranteed through heterosexual gender relations within the family. Independence from care is the basis of the idea of a liberal, capitalist masculinity that feminizes and devalues care. In the second half of the eighteenth century, this gender construction becomes entangled with the bourgeois idea of freedom as voluntary subjugation under the now self-made laws of political democracy. This is a social contract that justifies the legal equality of white, male, propertied, free citizens via the social and political bond of fraternity, 15 a masculinist bond that intertwines social independence and juridical subjection. But in its construction of liberal masculinity, the subjectivating ambivalence between freedom and obedience, between self-determination and control, is in no way transparent or obvious; instead, it appears as a paradox – one that can only appear on the ideological stage by suppressing its gendering and the patriarchal, heteronormative dual-gender system of the sexual contract required for that gendering. It is an arrangement of freedom and subjugation that rests decisively on the patriarchal subjugation of women in the private sphere.16 In bourgeois-capitalist society, precariousness is tamed and contained in the private by means of a gender-specific division of social space. Care and reproduction are feminized, de-politicized, devalued, and structured through precarity based on gender, sexuality, and ‘race’. Governmental body relations served the production of a class-specific and heterosexual, racialized dual-gender system, which, through gender segregation, not only guaranteed the maintenance of the labour force, but at the same time ensured generativity for strengthening the nation state.17 On the basis of ideas of one’s ‘own’ body and Christian practices of confession, biologistic and naturalized constructions of the disambiguation of gender and sexuality became manifest in the nineteenth century, as did constructions of a superior ‘white race’, which could not have arisen without the doctrine of ‘possessive individualism’18 and liberal ideas of freedom, self-determination, and civilized life. The social bond of bourgeois-capitalist society and its relation to the world are structured by conditions of domination and exploitation; mutual dependency is striated through precarity, through categorizations based on class, gender, ‘race’, and citizenship. For eighteenth-and also nineteenth-century male workers, however, individualization, the devaluation of the ‘other’, and the feminization of reproduction in the private sphere were not enough to tame precariousness. Smith’s idea that the free labourer must be able to feed a family soon proved to be ‘utopian capitalism’.19 The social welfare state and the organizational structures of a (mainly masculine) workforce made it evident that individualization in liberal democracy was not possible without collective protection and insurance systems. Legal claims and solidarities led to a social compromise that provided a welfare state complement to Fordist individualization which survived intact into the 1970s.20 The idea of male freedom and independence through wage labour could thus be collectively supported and maintained, consolidating the gender-specific divisions between waged productive and unwaged reproductive labour as well as between a public and a private sphere. This welfare state bond of safeguarding was based on massive precarity in the form of structural relations of inequality in terms of origin, class, and gender. In their examination of discourse on welfare mothers in the US in the 1980s and 1990s, Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon showed why the ambivalence of bourgeois, juridical self-government between freedom and subjugation was adamantly perceived as a paradox, and thus, in its specific masculinity, could become economically exploitable. According to Fraser and Gordon, white male workers’ independence is based on their failure to perceive their own subjugation in relations of production. At the moment that white men were politically and legally equal, ‘by definition’, economic inequality among them ‘no longer generated dependency … Thus, dependency was redefined to refer exclusively to those noneconomic relations of subordination deemed suitable only for people of color and for white women.’21 This male form of independence was based on the precarity of others, who were once again differentiated in their subordinate dependency into those who seemed worthy of being protected and those who did not – a ‘ “good”, household dependency, predicated of children and wives’, on the one hand, and a ‘ “bad” (or at least dubious) charity dependency’22 on the other.

Must acknowledge the linkage between sexuality and production to challenge capitalist exploitation

Sexuality is omitted from current radical political economics

All debate is performative, and all debaters of color embody their performance

The primary reason differentiating between traditional policy debate and performance debate suggests some obscured motive is because all debate is performative (Solt 2004). That is no surprise for debaters and their coaches, nor one would imagine the casual observer. Indeed, the form/content division is poorly suited for forensics competition (Johnson 2017). Put another way, the medium is the message (McLuhan 1964). This will not seem odd to rhetoricians or others who study performance, but it bears repeating for coaches, debaters, and judges who might not actively think about the ways they represent the debate activity and the ways different practices like labeling affect performative potentials. Of course, performance is polyvocal, meaning many things to many disciplines (Cassin 2009). This article is not intended to offer a strict definition of what constitutes performance debate (Is it all plan-less debate? Must there be non-prose? Is it different speaking styles?), because that definition is not necessary to understand how the label functions with respect to race. That performance might suffer from a tremendous number of definitions or understandings does not deny its importance to understanding a broad array of forensics activities and the ways in which debate participants engage them. Furthermore, even if there is concern about performance debate and its argumentative value, one cannot deny that debate of all types remains performative (Solt 2004)

Our findings have implications for the study of ‘statements’ in their broadest sense and their performativity in the economy (Callon, 2007). This includes those that come from people’s everyday

thinking and acting in the economy (Swedberg, 2018), something the social science literature has

In this article, I offered the development of a methodological approach I term embodied queer listening. The approach was developed based on a need to capture, analyze, and write the researcher’s

embodied experience in(to) an interview-based study, recognizing it as data and establishing it as

By investigating queer relationality, this special issue advances new modes of relating, engaging, and connecting to illustrate a framework of queer possi- bilities that is diverse and not final. Indeed, we intend for this special issue to serve as a compelling foundation for queer relationalities that will inspire subsequent exploration and conversation. In this special issue, queer rela- tionality is exemplified in a myriad of ways, including discourse, contiguity, and linearity, which are foundational concepts often overlooked within communication studies and queer studies when defining relationality as inherently teleological. Often, the adverse of this notion is true, in that queerness can primarily be found within the transgressive ruptures experi- enced in daily life. In this vein, this special issue, finds queer relationality within the mundane, messy, and often unintelligible chasms of lived experi- ence—across time and space. Queer relationality offers a framework that makes room for scholars to find and read queerness across different contexts, including histories, localities, affinities, and affects. In this section, we explore the theoretical, methodological, and political implications of queer relationality. Theoretical implications Queer relationality, as demonstrated in this special issue, is theorized and conceptualized beyond a reductionist framework of social experiences. Queer relationality does not involve singular theoretical viewpoints or specific pro- positions about genders and sexualities. Rather, it offers multiple ways of recognizing and studying sociality and relationality. Queer relationality ergo has three theoretical implications that help to address the epistemic violence in Western academe holistically. First, queer relationality can theoretically push back against longstanding assumptions about queer bodies that rely mainly on Western theories, con- texts, and geographies. By employing queer relationality as a theoretical tool, scholars are better able to engage in active decolonizing through scholarship by challenging much of the hegemonic worldviews, and theories, and ways of knowing born out of Euro-American philosophy. Queer relationality, as a theoretical aperture, requires scholars to unlearn sociality, relationality, queerness, as understood solely in the West, to instead make room for new increased connections that do not fall into the limited Western definition of queerness. The second theoretical implication of queer relationality is understood through underscoring locality, subjectivity, and positionality when telling queer stories and trying to better understand queerness as an inclusive com- mitment. Third, queer relationality can theoretically allow for a revisiting of epistemological practices through intentional geopolitical and transnational lens that underscores the connectivity within, throughout, and around multi- ple geographies, genders, and sexualities. Thus, by offering inclusive and complete readings and more successful theoretical engagements, queer rela- tionality can advance the epistemological significance of queerness that exists within the margins, in turn rejecting dualism and pushing back against long- standing hierarchies of power within oppressive structures. Methodological Implications In addition to theoretical implications, this special issue approaches queer relationality as a significant advancement to critical research that centers intersectional queer subjectivities. Queer relationality offers three methodolo- gical implications that bridge emerging and esteemed research and researchers in academe invested in finding innovative new ways for doing methods. First, queer relationality methodologically centers the chaotic, unintelligi- ble, ordinary sociality in conversation within a multiplicity of cultural con- texts, geographies, memories, sensations, and affective investments. Second, queer relationality demands an operational rigor, meticulousness, and critical direction. As a method, queer relationality necessitates close consideration of the social context of the research/researcher as well as the political motivations and positionality of the scholars doing the work. Third, queer relationality makes space for inclusive knowledge production that can supports theoretical, empirical, and ethical rigor by relying on reflexivity in practice. Queer rela- tionality offers many opportunities for further critical interventions that value accessibility, ethical and political projects, and most importantly, self- reflexivity about who they are and their investment in this work. Political implications Finally, queer relationality offers three clear political implications for critical researchers pursuing this line of inquiry. First, it is through queer relationality that researchers can resist longstanding institutional injustices that has insofar served to safeguard hegemonic Western ways of knowing, sensing, experien- cing, embodying, and doing queerness. Queer relationality as a political ethic emphasizes intentional undoing and unlearning. Second, queer relationality as a political orientation supports the advancing of the narratives of minoritarian subjects to create and build alternative spaces, networks, and ways of knowing that transcend the heteropatriarchal and colonial barricade within research. By employing queer relationality as a political framework, scholars can be more actively engaged in the process of (re)shaping a more just social and political order in academe and beyond. Third, queer relationality’s major political implication is its purposeful push back against longstanding structures and frameworks that make particular forms of knowledge of special value. In other words, queer relationality aims to critically dismantle the hierarchies, boundaries, and borders that impede, impact, and influence the ability to highlight diverse ways of knowing the world. Queer relationality moves us toward the pursuit of inclusive knowledge production by amplifying those that resist colonial and imperialist frameworks that have insofar been understood as canonical, or what Edward Said defines as, political knowledge. Political knowledge is the hierarchical and colonial mechanism of power used to dominate subordinate groups—a form of power that establishes a system of “truth” that nurtures hierarchies and injustices (Foucault, 1990). Accordingly, the resilience and durability of oppressive structures within Western academe is explicated by the power of cultural hegemony in sustaining what is considered higher knowledge (Said, 1979. In all, the essays in this special issue offer myriad ways to understand and utilize queer relationality as a theoretical, methodological, and political lens for the study of queerness all together. Queer relationality reflects long-standing contestations over power, agency, and influence in the study of minoritarian issues, politics, and people, which lays the groundwork for a lifetime of future research that pushes back against the enduring stronghold of the ivory tower.

This flesh is not just mine, or yours; it’s ours, we share this flesh and we share in flesh. Coalition happens when we don’t presume that we already know each other. Plagued by myths and exclusions, bodies mired in the hubris of cohesion and normalcy can’t give us what we need. We need something else, which is why we welcome the flesh in all its coalescing unfastening, its fugitive agency and force of assault on those nets of regulation. Feel the flesh, hear the flesh, Ralph Ellison’s lower frequencies when they vibrate beneath lowness.

Putting the flesh to werq, claiming an enthusiasm in the expansive capacity of fleshiness to, as they say, make it happen—where “it” is the illegible edge of liberation’s horizon—is a potent refusal. Werqing, or alternatively werking, comes from Black and queer underground socialities, in the hollowed-out buildings, the midnight subway cars, the clandestine balls. It is an affirmative expressive activity used when a way of living “exceed[s] the commonsense of normative categories of social being,” when we bring it but bring it new and different.2 Werqing, because of its love affair with the expressive, the performative, and the affective, is not about that life—or more accurately, that death—of the biological, the documentational, the checked box; werq always happens in the flesh, a different labor in surplus and potential, of repurposing and reworking. Werq is sutured to flesh like a fresh fade on brushed heads, claiming not the rigidity of the body but this ante-body of flesh that we might call that which refuses the body. It takes us through the bowels of “underworlds and undercommons” where things ain’t like they used to be. Werqing in the flesh gives us over, because we choose to give ourselves and be given, to “the parasubjective and para-identitarian movement of the labor of werqing it.” It’s an ecstatic next-to kind of subjectivity, a to-the- side- with-ourbacks- turned- to kind of identity. We love it here in this flesh, werqing it, getting werqed by it, giving it werq to do.

This concern for heteronormativity and the state is informed by the ‘state-centric’ approach to queer sexuality and capitalism (Bergeron and Puri 2012, Lind 2012, Peterson 2017, 2020). In this vein, Suzanne Bergeron and Jyoti Puri (2012) call for scholars to theorise sexuality and (Marxist) political economy beyond reproductive and sexual labour (within the family) and in relation to the institutional, legal, and structural mechanisms through which hegemonic configurations of gender and sexuality are constructed and privileged. Peterson (2020) pushes this line of analysis further by setting out a ‘critical genealogy’ of state-making practices that centralises the regulation of the family. She notes that ‘unruly’ sexual relations represent both a political and economic problem, since they threaten the (literal) ‘reproduction of the state/nation’, as well as ways in which interconnecting hierarchies of race, gender, and class are legitimated and maintained, notably through inheritance and citizenship laws (Peterson 2020:190). This framing is useful in that it very clearly places queer sexuality—and the concept of heteronormativity—within the more conventional boundaries of political economy research. It also underlines why intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality matter for understanding state formations across space and time. While much of the state-centric literature has focused on the Europe and North America, scholars such as Amy Lind (2009, 2012) have sought to unpack the relationship between state policies and heteronormativity in the Global South and to identify the linkages between North–South geopolitical spheres as produced through neoliberal development reforms and actors such as the World Bank (see also Bedford 2005, 2009). In addition to a state and structural orientation, this suggests another key dimension of a political economy approach to queer struggle: (3) a focus on the relationship between heteronormativity and capitalism across different scales and modes of governance. This dimension offers a means to explore the structural linkages and interplays between global capitalism and dominant sex/gender regimes—and how these unfold in concrete, material (and corporeal) ways—not just in relation to nation-states, but in relation to the ‘layers of institutions that are involved in defining and regulating our intimate lives’ (Lind 2009:35). Put otherwise, dimension 3 facilitates analysis of the materiality of queer sexuality as it is grounded and reproduced across multiple sites and scales, and through different modes of global (and local) governance. This includes inter- and surpa-national organisations, international financial institutions, development agencies, and NGOs. Although Peterson’s (1999, 2017, 2020) work also focuses on heteronormativity and the state, she uses queer theory in a more integrative fashion to push feminist scholars beyond binary ways of thinking about men and women in the global economy (Peterson 2002, 2003). In this articulation, the queer concern for deconstructing binaries and unsettling stable or taken-for-granted concepts is applied to both the gender binary and fixed categorisations of sexual orientation, and to other boundaries and dichotomies, such as ‘productive’ and ‘reproductive’, ‘public and ‘private’. Given the synergies between the queer project of unsettling binaries and wider feminist critiques of ‘masculinist/modernist dualisms’ (Peterson 2005, p. 507), I do not consider this to be essential to understanding queer struggle, per se, but more a cross-cutting concern within feminist and queer political economy. Similarly, while I am not specifically including a dimension on the relationality and multiplicity of oppressions, frequently conceptualised as ‘intersectionality’ (Crenshaw 1991), I see this as fundamental to a feminist political economy approach. As such, it is threaded throughout this paper’s theoretical discussion, framework, and analysis. Furthermore, I address the importance of understanding intersecting or, more specifically, co-constituting social relations—race, class, gender, sexuality—within the global economy in detail in my discussion of dimension 5. The state-centric literature has moved forward understandings of queer sexuality and capitalism in a number of valuable ways, notably by: incorporating the queer analytic of heteronormativity into political economy analyses; illuminating the key regulatory and coercive powers of the state vis-à-vis intimate and family relations; and interrogating how heteronormativity links to the cultural, legal, and the economic. However, rarely has this literature extended beyond analysis of the (re)production of heterosexist family and gender norms and models—typically construed as heterosexual couples living in male-breadwinner households with children—to connect these structures and dynamics to the actual lived experience of queer individuals in different settings. In other words, it frequently notes who is excluded—queer, transgender, and gender non-conforming individuals and couples, other queer configurations of love, desire, family, corporeality etc—but does not provide empirical insight into the lives of these excluded populations themselves (or into the forms of resistance they take up). As such, there is a way in which existing approaches to the study of queer sexuality in/and the state risk reproducing some of the same occlusions and oversights they seek to disrupt. This suggests a fourth key dimension in my theoretical framework: (4) a concern for the everyday political economies of queer lives and resistance. I am informed here by the turn to the everyday in feminist IPE (Elias and Roberts 2016, Elias and Rethel 2018), as well as longstanding feminist work that documents the gendered character of global economic processes and their implications for women’s everyday productive and reproductive lives. The point here is not simply that the ‘global’ affects the ‘local’, the ‘macro’ affects the ‘micro’, but that non-elite and, importantly, non-Western actors’ engagements with, and articulations of, everyday political economic processes may both reproduce and resist broader patterns of global economic transformation. Given the resonance of concepts of resistance within queer studies (Warner 1991:16), this seems an apt formulation for a political economy approach to queer struggle. Thus, while heteronormativity remains critical as an organising analytic for studying queer sexualities within political economy, this should be conceptualised to include more quotidian microlevel practices, formations, and relations (i.e. in addition to the state and supra-state levels), as well as the acts and modalities of resistance that challenge them (i.e. in addition to mainstream social movements). Interest in evolving modes of global governance and their impact on microlevel queer politics ties into a more longstanding concern among Marxist scholars of capitalism and sexuality: the relationship between axes of social differentiation—such as gender and sexuality—subjectivity, and the mode of production, including how this has shifted under conditions of neoliberal globalisation (D’Emilio 1983, Hennessy 2000, Altman 2001, Drucker 2015). From a theoretical perspective, this ‘globalisation frame’ is useful for analysing how changing material conditions—the restructuring of the economy, shifts in the organisation of production, patterns of work, income levels, standards of living, the social division of labour, the arrangement of the household—may enable and produce certain affective and/or erotic ties and ways of being, including sexual identities and practices. This is an important insight, since dimension 2—a structural rather than individually subjective orientation—should not be read as a call for political economists to jettison, tout court, questions of identity when it comes to understanding queer struggle; rather, it is to make the point that the identitarian is in itself intrinsically linked to the structural and the economic (and cannot be abstracted from this context). Put otherwise, bringing sexuality from the periphery to the core of our inquiries allows us, in the words of Peterson (2003, 1), to ‘map identities and culture in relation to conventional economic phenomena’. What a political economy framework does necessitate, however, is a move away from the account of politics and power typically associated with queer theory—i.e. in which power is diffuse and NEW POLITICAL ECONOMY 301 produced through discourse—towards one that holds to something more systematic and systemic in character. In other words, contra a poststructuralist queer account where power works in a ubiquitous, anti-totalizing way, a political economy approach understands separate ‘systems’ of oppression —gender, race, sexuality—as structurally related to, and therefore as structural features of, the global capitalist economy (see McNally 2017, Bhattacharya 2017, Petersen 2003). This question of structural interrelatedness brings me onto the fifth and final dimension in my theoretical framework. While dimensions 1–4 may seem relatively uncontroversial from a critical political economy perspective, the fifth dimension is, I anticipate, the more challenging one. This draws on recent work on sexuality and feminist IPE that talks explicitly of ‘queer/queering political economy’ (Smith et al. 2015, Smith 2016, 2018, 2020). Viewed through this queering IPE lens, it is insufficient to acknowledge sexuality as a variable in political economy analysis, what Smith calls an ‘add queer and stir’ approach. Rather, queering political economy requires an understanding of how political economic structures, processes, and transformations shape and are shaped by sexuality, as well as gender (Smith 2018, see also Pettman 1996, 2000, True 2012). In other words, it seeks to understand how the logics of heteronormativity—the complex web of social relations that normalise and naturalise sexual and gender difference—are imbricated in the logics of capitalist crises and other economic transformations. To this end, the queering IPE frame is not only useful for studying queer sexuality and struggle (though, as this paper argues, these are in themselves important and still overlooked topics of inquiry) but is in fact essential for understanding a whole range of political economic phenomena—globalisation, crisis, austerity—that are not obviously or ostensibly sexualised in character. Underpinning this argument is my earlier point about the constitutive role (rather than consequential effects) of sexuality within the global capitalist economy. Peterson’s (2005:499) conceptualisation of ‘empirical’ vs. ‘analytic gender’ is insightful for understanding this framing, which differentiates between ‘the study of how men and women … are differently affected by, and differently affect, political economy’ and the study of how ‘masculinity and femininity … produce, and are produced by, political economy’. Following a similar logic, sexuality is operating in this framework as an analytic rather than a variable to be observed in an exclusively empirical sense; it is, as Bilge and Scheibelhofer usefully describe it, ‘an axis of power both constituted by and constitutive of other axes of power and forms of dominance’ (2012:255, italics mine).3 In this sense, the ontological shift required to mobilise analytic sexuality must be preceded by an understanding of how social relations—race, gender, class—are not just entangled in but co-constituted through processes of production and reproduction. As per my discussion of governing sexuality, these relations (and their attendant inequalities) are further regulated and legitimated through particular legal-juridical and ideological practices.

Unlike the exploited workers and the misrecognized homosexuals, women as a collectivity is situated in the middle of the spectrum, combining features of both exploited class and despised sexuality. Gender injustice consists of both the gendered division of labors (within wage work, and between wage labor and unpaid domestic labor)8 and “androcentrism,” or the authoritative construction of norms that privilege masculinity and devalue femininity (Fraser 1997b, 20). As a group, women face a vicious cycle of economic and cultural subordination, which dialectically reinforce one another. Sexist and patriarchal norms are institutionalized in production relations, preventing women from full and equal participation in the economy. Simultaneously, unequal economic opportunities and distribution of resources generate dependency and oppression, which are then used to further perpetuate misogyny and male domination. Redressing gender injustices therefore requires both altering the unequal distribution of resources and changing the patriarchal signification of women and femininity.9 Writing in the post-1989 period under the “postsocialist” condition,10 Fraser sees her redistribution–recognition schema as an attempt to recenter class as a relevant social collective and economic redistribution as an indispensable half of the struggle for justice for all. While sympathetic to Fraser’s project, Butler takes her to task over her conception of sexuality as wholly rooted in cultural-valuational structure and homophobia as ultimately a matter of cultural recognition. In an essay titled “Merely Cultural,” Butler argues that the regulation of sexuality is not merely a matter of culture, but a matter central to the functioning of political economy. Conceptual models that fail to articulate the systematic ties between the regulation of sexuality and the mode of production will risk reproducing the division that locates certain struggles as part of political economy and others, such as queer struggle, as exclusively cultural and inessential (Butler 1997: 270).11 Contending that the oppression of non-normative sexualities is not merely a matter of cultural recognition, Butler writes: Is it possible to distinguish, even analytically, between a lack of cultural recognition and material oppression... ? [L]esbians and gays are rigorously excluded from state-sanctioned notions of the family. ..; are stopped at the border; are deemed inadmissible to citizenship; are selectively denied the status of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly; are denied the right, as members of the military, to speak their desires; or are deauthorized by the law to make emergency medical decisions about dying lovers, or to receive the property of dead lovers, or to receive from the hospital the bodies of dead lovers.... Is this simply the circulation of vilifying cultural attitudes or do such disenfranchisements mark a specific operation of the sexual and gendered distribution of legal and economic entitlement? (Butler 1997: 273) At one level, Butler simply points out the obvious, namely that symbolic representation of homosexuality, which excludes gays and lesbian from many aspects of legal personhood, also produces material disenfranchisement that is indissociable from cultural vilification. As such, redressing queer oppression requires both recognition and redistribution. This is not incompatible with Fraser’s analysis, however. In her original analysis, Fraser does not deny that queer people can face maldistribution so entrenched to the point where any prospect of recognition is completely impeded. She even concludes that “a politic of sexual redistribution may be needed both in itself and to help get a politics of recognition off the ground” (Fraser 1997b: 25). At a deeper level, however, Butler wants to deconstruct the cultural/economic and recognition/ redistribution binaries themselves. Consider, for instance, the co-production of the heterosexual-cisgender subjects as the normative and the homosexual, bisexual, transgender, and other queer subjects as the abject others. Butler argues that this is not simply a matter of symbolic representation, but a process of producing human beings themselves, their interrelations, and the material conditions of their life (Butler 1997: 271–72). This co-production of the sexually normative subjects and the sexually queer subjects (which I refer to as heteronormativity) serves an important economic function in capitalist production. The heteronormative logic is not arbitrary, and deeply implicated in the arrangement of productive and reproductive labor under capitalism: Is there any way to analyze how normative heterosexuality and its “genders” are produced within the sphere of reproduction without noting the compulsory ways in which homosexuality and bisexuality, as well as transgender, are produced as the sexually “abject,” and without extending the mode of production to account precisely for this social mechanism of regulation? It would be a mistake to understand such productions as “merely cultural” if they are essential to the functioning of the sexual order of political economy—that is, if they constitute a fundamental threat to its very workability. The economic, tied to the reproductive, is necessarily linked to the reproduction of heterosexuality. (Butler 1997: 274) This passage contains two radical claims. First, economic production and reproduction are necessarily linked to the reproduction of heteronormativity. This implies that any structural transformation of economic production and social reproduction (be it redistribution or revolution) will alter the production and reproduction of what qualifies as a person and a sex (Butler 1997: 276). Second, disrupting heteronormativity could potentially throw a wrench into the working engine of capitalism, undermining its workability. As such, representing the queer struggle as one for positive recognition without acknowledging its fundamentally subversive political economic implication is a mistake, both analytically and strategically when it comes to building revolutionary alliance. This also suggests that a diverse and equally flourishing social field of sexuality cannot be realized unless sexuality is understood as an integral component of an expansive economic sphere, which includes both the reproduction of goods and the social reproduction of persons (Butler 1997: 272). Contra Butler, Fraser sees sexuality as belonging “to a status order that is differentiated from, and complexly related [to] the economic structure.” This status order exists in a space of personal life, which is “disconnected from the imperatives of production and reproduction” (Fraser 1997a: 283–84). According to Fraser, there is no necessary link between heteronormativity, queer recognition, and capitalist production. And as I summarized earlier, confounding redistribution and recognition à la Butler risks masking the possible contradictions that arise when claims for recognition and redistribution are pursued simultaneously (Fraser 1997b: 34 esp. note 14). Claims to recognize the dignity and positive worth of queer sexuality could mark them off as a distinct social group and undermine claims for egalitarian distribution of socioeconomic resources and entitlements.12 In revisiting this exchange between Fraser and Butler, it is fascinating to note the affinity between Butler’s perspective and social reproduction theory, even if Butler uses the term reproduction only in a narrow sense.13 For scholars who are familiar with the works of Butler and Fraser, my suggestion here is likely a surprising reversal. Butler has never self-identified as a social reproduction theorist, nor is she recognized within the canon as one, whereas Fraser has been a key figure in the social reproduction literature, especially in her more recent writings (e.g., Fraser 2017b; Arruzza, Bhattacharya, and Fraser 2019). On the other hand, Butler’s writings, especially on gender performativity and the materiality of sex, are considered among the founding texts of queer theory. The overlooking of her insight that the regulation of sexuality is a constitutive feature of political economy is perhaps symptomatic of a broader omission of sex from radical political economic theorizing. Following Butler, I want to stage an intervention by elaborating on how social reproduction could be the missing tie that binds sexuality to production. This also serves as a rudimentary schema demonstrating the relationship between heteronormativity and capitalism, and the analytical gains we can have from a political economic interrogation of sexuality. At the core of Butler’s 1997 critique is the notion that sexuality is a fundamental part of the mode of production, and that queer struggle can pose a threat to capitalism’s workability. In particular, she highlights three areas where heteronormativity plays a critical role: in the sexual division of labor, in the normative heterosexual family, and in the production of a particular kind of sexgender persons as proper subjects for capitalism. Taking cue from her argument, in this section I sketch out the ways in which capitalism has benefited from the construction of workers whose production, reproduction, and personhood are articulated through and along heteronormative sex-gender categories. This is not to argue that heteronormativity is necessary for capitalist accumulation, or that a successful struggle against the heteronormative regulation of sexuality will spell the end of capitalism. Rather, I am suggesting that heteronormativity enables capital surplus accumulation while being perpetuated itself through capitalist relations of production and social reproduction. As such, queer struggle is always a political economic struggle: genuine queer emancipation cannot be achieved without an overhaul of the productive and reproductive structure. This dialectic is at the heart of a queer Marxist theory. First, let us consider the division of labor between men and women. Capitalists benefit from the gendered division of labor in production and reproduction, under which women’s labor is unrecognized, unremunerated, and devalued (Folbre 2021; Moos 2021). Empirical evidence points to the continuing existence of gender wage gap, glass ceiling, care penalty, motherhood penalty, and widespread implicit and explicit cultural biases against women in the labor market (Blau and Kahn 2017). At home, women perform three-quarters of all unpaid household work, totaling 4.5 trillion hours a year or the equivalence of 2.1 billion full-time jobs (Heintz 2019). This is unequivocally a material oppression of women, justified by discourses of femininity and womanhood in which housework and carework are presented not as work. Instead, they are represented as a natural attribute of women, an internal need coming from the depth of the female psyche that finds fulfillment in being housewives, mothers, caregivers, and nurturers (Federici 2012c; Brewer 1997). This identification is both a patriarchal restriction of the opportunities available to women in society and a concealment of the fact that these reproductive activities are essential to the reproduction of labor and capital. Notice, furthermore, that the gender division of labor and its concomitant discourses of femininity predicate on a prior conception of heterosexuality, one that presupposes an opposition between men and women: “Woman’s position as subordinate other, as (sexual) property, and as exploited laborer depends on a heterosexual matrix in which woman is taken to be man’s opposite” (Hennessy 2018: 25). At its core, heteronormativity is the unification of sex, gender, and desire in binaries where male is differentiated from/elevated above female, masculinity is differentiated from/elevated above femininity, and heterosexuality is differentiated from/elevated above homosexuality. Heteronormativity makes possible the constructions of gendered persons as “women” and “men.” As same-sex desire, trans-gender, and anatomically sexually ambiguous bodies threaten to expose this artificial engendering, heteronormativity works to counter those threats. Practices such as the determination of a newborn’s sex/gender based on bodily sex organs, the depiction of same-sex desire as gender inversion or as a rebellious phase that can be “cured” through conversion therapy, and the perversion and criminalization of transgender people into sexual predators are all part of the heteronormative regulation of sexuality which makes categories of men and women appear as “natural” and the social division of labor between them “normal.” This is what Butler alludes to when she argues that “it is not that nonheterosexual forms of sexuality are simply left out, but that their suppression is essential to the operation of that prior normativity” (Butler 1997: 274). This suppression is not a onetime event but an ongoing process that maintains the gender division of labor and foregrounds the gender oppression of women. To illustrate, consider Sylvia Federici’s argument that sex is sold to the working class as the “other” of work, as compensation for work and an escape from the alienating discipline of capitalist production. In reality, however, for women “sex is work. .. it is a duty. The duty to please is so built into our sexuality” (Federici 2012d: 24). Federici’s analysis captures vividly how women’s sexuality and their reproductive labor are exploited. My analysis here complements hers by identifying the heteronormative logic as what enables this exploitation. Heteronormativity naturalizes the category of women, builds the duty to please into their sexuality, and orients that sexuality toward a man (their husband) to the point where “giving pleasure to man is an essential part of what is expected of every woman” (Federici 2012d: 25). A queer challenge to heteronormativity, in this context, means interrogating “what is a woman?” and deconstructing the gender binary, thereby contesting the social assignment of labor and care along gendered lines. The queer challenge also means casting a critical look at the sites where the suppression of queerness and reproduction of normative heterosexuality take place. This occurs, first and foremost, in the family. As Butler notes, “the reproduction of gendered persons, of ‘men’ and ‘women,’ depended on the social regulation of the family and, indeed, on the reproduction of the heterosexual family” (Butler 1997: 272). At one level, she gestures toward the fact that it is at home where children first acquire their heterosexuality. It is often from parental choices over clothing (blue shirt or pink dress?), appearance (short hair or long hair?), toys (Barbie or Superman?), hobbies (ballet or soccer?), and so forth that the abstract heteronormative script containing what it means to be a girl/woman and a boy/man first crystallizes into concrete materiality. The reproduction of heterosexuality, therefore, relies on the reproduction of a heteronormative ideal of the family, one that is built around the axes of monogamous husband-wife and parent-children (Federici 2012a; Fraser 2017a). Embedded in this normative ideal is the representation of heterosexuality as the pinnacle of human sexuality, monogamous heterosexual marriage as the condition of “happily ever after,” and childbirth as natural and desirable (especially for women). At a second level, Butler’s statement also reflects the material reality that family is the privileged, taken-for-granted site of social reproduction under capitalism. Ideologically construed as a private domain, the family appears to be separated from and opposite to the market and the factory (or the office) (Fraser 2017a). But, as the physical space where labor power, social relations, kinships, customs, norms, and tradition are reproduced, the family is indispensable for the functioning of capitalism as such (Hewitson 2014; Naidu and Ossome 2018). As a site of nonmarket production, income pooling, mutual aids, and a source of genuine affection and reciprocity, the family is critical to the survival of the working class (Laslett and Brenner 1989). Through its social reproductive functioning, the family is a fundamental feature of the mode of production. At the same time, it can be a site of conflict and oppression. As a private, self-sufficient unit dedicated to aggrandizing its own consumption ends, family can be a source of dependency that ties workers and their dependents to continuing waged employment and exploitation (Nash 1993). It is within the family that the transmission of compulsory heterosexuality, the gendered division of labor, and the identification of femininity with unpaid reproductive labor take place. Queer struggle against heteronormativity, then, implies the question of how to survive without a (heterosexual) family when the precarity of surviving alone can become unbearable. Among minority communities, especially queer people of color, there is a rich tradition of “chosen family,” formed by persons unrelated by kinship but connected through a mutual desire for belonging. These flexible family formations certainly exceed the heteronormative mold, but can they be a bastion against capitalism’s alienation, or will they unwittingly replicate the dependency, exclusion, and exploitation endemic to the conventional family? A priori, both are possible. I take this unresolved (and perhaps unresolvable) ambiguity as a further reminder that the family is a fundamental part of the mode of production and reproduction, and therefore contains within it all of capitalism’s contradictions. Last but not least, let us turn to Butler’s argument that heteronormativity is “a mode of producing the subject” (Butler 1997: 276). Compulsory normative heterosexuality is not merely about recognizing some subjects as normal and vilifying other subjects as abnormal and unworthy. It is about the process of subject formation itself, the attempt to constitute legible personhood on the basis of heteronormative sex-gender. In this process, the sexually abjects are produced as something other than human, a non-subject Other. This foregrounds and naturalizes the cultural denigration and economic discrimination to which they are subjected. Rosemary Hennessy makes a similar observation that queers are the bottom rung “upon which socially favored categories and identities rest” (Hennessy 2018: xv–xviii; see also Rubin 1984). In a capitalist society built upon the myth of free exchange among equals, the consequence of being constitutively less-than-equal is that queers are always already worth-less, their labor power cheapened. This manifests in labor market discrimination and economic marginalization of queer workers. Empirical evidence shows that lesbian, gay, transgender, and gender-nonconforming workers face persistent discrimination and harassment in the workplace (Weichsalbaumer 2003; Tilcsik 2011, Schneebaum and Badgett 2019; Martell 2018; Baumle, Badgett, and Boutcher 2019). A disproportionately larger number of queer people live in conditions of abject poverty, surviving precariously in the margins by doing sex work, trafficking drugs, and performing other illicit and often dangerous work. Queer youths have one of the highest rates of mental illness, suicide, and homelessness. Under heteronormative capitalism, queer lives are marked by transphobia, homophobia, “compounded by the preoccupation with survival, the insecurity of work, and paralysis bred of fear and need” (Hennessy 2006: 394). In short, heteronormativity functions as a mode of exploitation that contributes to the accumulation of surplus value, not unlike how patriarchy enables the exploitation of women at home and in the workplace (Folbre 2021). The heteronormative production of the subject also fulfills capital’s critical “need to maintain political and ideological hegemony over a divided working class” (Vogel 2013: 168). Every time the homo/hetero, trans/cis, masculine/feminine binaries14 are reproduced as normatively opposite, the proletariat’s class consciousness gets displaced by internal hierarchies and division. Rosemary Hennessy’s studies of gay and lesbian operators in Mexican maquiladoras document how managers deploy homophobic discourses to brew tensions, distrust, and hostility between queer and non-queer workers (Hennessy 2006). Moreover, these hierarchies dialectically (re) produce one another. For instance, white supremacy is constructed not just through slavery and anti-Black racism, but also through discourse equating queer desires as sexually disabled and diseased (Ferguson 2003). Universalization of whiteness in America is accomplished not only by designating Blacks as a eugenic threat but also by promoting reproductive heterosexual marriage among whites as the cure (Carter 2007). Heteronormativity underlies the uneven development of heterogeneous subjects along categories of differences, a process fundamental to capital’s ongoing exploitation and domination. To sum up, heteronormativity, through its production of normative gender/sexual subjects, plays important roles in capitalist production. Combining insights from social reproduction theory and from Butler’s 1997 critique, I have clarified how heteronormativity functions to stabilize the gender division of labor, reproduce the normative reproductive family, constitute queer subjects as devalued and exploitable, and contribute to the internal stratification within the working class. The implication is that homophobia and transphobia are not simply problems of individuals acting in hateful and oppressive ways, nor could they be “competed-away” under market forces. They are hardwired into the structure of capitalist mode of production and reproduction. Queer struggle, therefore, cannot be dismissed as merely cultural and irrelevant to political economy. Instead, it must be situated as part of the broader struggle against capitalism, and alongside rather than displacing or being displaced by other revolutionary movements against racism, sexism, patriarchy, fascism and settler colonialism. Part of that struggle is in developing a queer Marxist theory capable of articulating how sex dialectically interrelates with other social relations of power to provide the condition of possibility for capitalist accumulation and reproduction.

I Education as enclosure and dispossession If education holds the promise of renewal and justice, it is also a practice that has been based on enclosure and dispossession. Education’s capacity for violence has received significant attention in critical scholarship, particularly in relation to the role of mass schooling in cultural assimilation, linguistic erasure and ‘epistemicide’ – the systematic destruction of knowledge (Santos 2014). In the settler colonial context of New Zealand, for instance, Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) has argued that schooling systems are part of state projects of enclosing Indigenous people, key vehicles for epistemological violence in which culture, life and being are dispossessed. There is a growing body of work that examines how modern schooling, even in its ‘progressive’ forms, contains or encloses people through its enduring ‘civilising’ missions (Fallace 2015; Simpson 2007) and its colonial and racialised hierarchies of knowledge (Coloma 2017; AUTHORS; Bain 2018). However, the material conditions of enclosure and dispossession that underpin these epistemic relations have not received as much attention. These are the foundational conditions of racial capitalism which we focus on here. Enclosure is the process of extracting value from land and in doing so dispossessing the people whose livelihoods and lifeworlds are connected to it. As Marx (1952) documents in the case of England, capitalism was characterised by the mass enclosure of ‘the commons’ and subsequent dispossession of land through the displacement of peasants. This act of enclosure and dispossession fundamentally altered the social relations of work and livelihood, but also the social relations of land (Melamed, 2015). In Marx’s (1952, 355) terms, this is a part of primitive accumulation: the act of enclosure was a moment when ‘great masses’ were ‘forcibly torn from their subsistence, and hurled as free and ‘unattached’ proletarians on the labour market. The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, [their] separation from the soil, is the basis of the whole process’. In other words, enclosure necessarily requires dispossessing, and this dispossessing involves radically denying the existence and worth of those who live there. For Marx and Engels? (2010, 21) this dual process of enclosure and dispossession was central to the colonial relations that underpinned the development of capitalism, as it ‘opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie’. We bring enclosure and dispossession together analytically to denote the constitutive mutuality of these two forces in the practices of racial capitalism. Working with Aileen MoretonRobinson’s (2015) examination of the ‘white possessive’, enclosing/dispossessing can be understood as a fundamental act of colonial violence. Writing about settler colonialism, Moreton-Robinson (2015) suggests that ‘possessive logics’ create the taken-for-granted conditions of settler colonisation in which land becomes propertied, a ‘thing’ to be laboured on and have value extracted from it. This foundational act of possession is at the same time an act of enclosure. In this act Indigenous people are rendered ‘propertyless’ and subjects of the colonial state to be controlled, contained, and – ultimately – possessed. Possession is centrally concerned with valorisation and the capacity to own and to make value from land, things, and people and is carried out by the state. As settler colonial theorist Patrick Wolfe (2001, 868) notes, ‘settler colonialism introduced a zero-sum contest over land on which conflicting modes of production could not ultimately coexist’. Here then, the colonial state becomes the ‘possessor’, and the project of enclosing/dispossessing continues to be carried out in the name of nationhood. The logics of the ‘white possessive’ under British settler colonialism as set out by MoretonRobinson, relates to Byrd, Goldstein, Melamed and Reddy’s (2018) discussion of ‘economies of dispossession’. Writing from the US context, they contend that economies of dispossession are used to articulate how ‘modes and relations of production, distribution, consumption, and reproduction’ are materially enacted and create ‘a specific systemic organization or logic of circuits of interaction and exchange’ (Byrd et al, 2018, 2). In this way, enclosing/dispossessing is centrally concerned with creating particular relations to land, value, labour, and things that are underpinned by capital and property. Private property holds that land can be worked on to extract wealth, making land something to be owned, laboured upon, and commodified. In the Australian context, the logics of the ‘white possessive’ became rationalised through the assertion of ‘terra nullius’, an idea made possible by understanding land as a property requiring particular forms of ‘settlement’, ownership and labour, and by the wilful dismissal of Indigenous knowledge, care and labour (Pascoe, 2014). The colonial capitalist nation state is founded upon, and continues to be steeped in, this declaration of terra nullius: the denial and dispossession of Indigenous people continues to legitimise settler ‘ownership’ of land - a clear example of how capitalism is racial capitalism. The racial regime of ownership under settler colonialism requires, as Brenna Bhandar (2018, 9) outlines, ‘continual renewal and reinstantiation to prevail over other ways of being and living’. Education, we suggest, has been a potent force for this renewal. Indeed, enclosure/dispossession is at the very foundation of education institutions. Consider, for example, the material buildings of schools and education institutions. As Sharon Stein (2020) documents in the US context, the Morrill Act of 1862 established oft-celebrated public (state) land grants that aided the formation of higher education institutions.1 This expropriation of Indigenous land re-embeds practices of enclosure/dispossession which denied – and continue to deny – Indigenous claims to the land upon which these institutions sit (Stein, 2020). Stein’s analysis points to the ongoing processes of enclosing/dispossessing in which social institutions of the nation state – such as public education – cannot escape its past-present-future relation to racial capitalism (see also Bhambra & Holmwood, 2018). Indeed, in her discussion Stein argues that critiques of, and resistances to, neoliberal privatisation of education need to take better account of the violence of such ‘public’ claims, and how these ‘public institutions’ reinforce racial divisions even as they claim to broaden access to education. As Clayton Pierce (2017, 42) discusses, the ‘public’ school system in the U.S., often held up as a site for democratic potentiality, is built upon racialised divisions in humanity, and ultimately the ‘fungibility of Black bodies’ (original emphasis). There are many more examples of enclosure/dispossession in education we can point to: the building of international branch campuses as part of the expansion of education institutions,2 1 For details, maps and narratives, see the database at Land Grab Universities https://www.landgrabu.org/ 2 There is a growing literature on ‘off-shore’ university campuses, much of it focusing on pedagogic models and experiences (Siltaoja et al. 2019; Dobos 2011). However we were unable to identify studies that focused explicitly on matters of land acquisition, material infrastructures, and displacement/gentrification in relation to the expansion of Higher Education through international branch campuses. the infrastructures of platform capitalism in education,3 and the securing of ‘public’ land, which is unceded Indigenous land, by private schools.4 Take for example Eliot Tretter’s (2015) analysis of how US universities’ increasing role as ‘land developers’, particularly through industry partnerships, is rationalised through anti-Black racism. Under projects of ‘urban renewal’, universities are actively involved in land seizures and clearance, and therefore the displacement and impoverishment of existing communities (Tretter, 2015; see also Baldwin 2021). Tretter (2015, 54) examines two urban renewal schemes by the University of Texas where, ‘approximately one thousand people were displaced, mostly African Americans, and countless businesses, many African American-owned, were forced to close’. University-led expansion occurs, Tretter argues, through a racist theory of value, an idea we return to later. He suggests University of Texas administrators and city officials worked with the assumption that African American neighbourhoods, households, and bodies were simply less valuable and desirable than those of whites. Since the university was going to change the ‘colour’ and character of the neighbourhood by removing its inhabitants, it was also going to improve its value. (Tretter, 2015, 49). As these examples attest, the expansionist and extractivist projects of education systems under capitalism – the capitalisation of land, buildings, infrastructures – require racialised enclosing/dispossessing.

(Kevin, ‘Codename Geronimo: settler memory and the production of American statism,’ Settler Colonial Studies, Special Issue on Globalizing Unsettlement)

I agree with their assessments, but would also add that what we see here, as we can with the many other examples of these forms of identity appropriation, is that the work of settler memory is fundamental to the reproduction and legitimation of settler colonial assemblage through a relationship to the past that is not about forgetting. It is a powerful form of national remembering. In the contemporary era, I would include politics itself as among the facets of existence that settler colonialism colonizes. That is, settler colonial assemblage defines and seeks to bound that which is legitimately subject for debate and contestation as it concerns the distribution and role of power, identity, interest and institutions. Before one can even ask the question of settler colonial violence, dispossession, and appropriation, the question may be rendered moot, outside the bounds of legitimate, or realistic, politics. In this light, my suggestion here is that the response to such appropriations as that of Geronimo's name should not be to ask the White House for an apology, and thus concede the status of this statist institution. Instead, the association should be embraced, in one key respect. To embrace the association is not to stand in alliance with Osama Bin Laden or Al Qaeda at all or the US military, but rather to re-assert the fact that Geronimo was, indeed, an enemy of American statism and settler colonialism. It is to maintain the political posture of friend versus enemy, and to render as important and necessary the status and actions of what political theorist Joel Olson called the zealot or fanatic as an important political category that holds out the possibility for more radical transformation of the political order.27 It is to say that the use of Geronimo's name is not simply the sign of an absence of respect or sensitivity for Indigenous people, but is more evidence of the active presence of settler colonial assemblage in the specific form of US liberal colonialism. In sum, in critiquing the problem with the Codename Geronimo case, we should seek to avoid either reproducing a politics of recognition and multicultural discourse or diagnosing it as a sign of collective amnesia, as if only people knew all the ‘facts’ of history things would be fine, or better. Rather, in this regard, LaDuke and Harjo get it right I believe in emphasizing the persistent posture of American warfare against Indigenous people. While this is a difficult framework to ponder, it is the appropriate one for a decolonizing, unsettling politics which insists on drawing clear lines for and against settler colonialism. In this sense, the unsettling response here is to put settler memory front and center as an active contemporary practice, in which Geronimo's name is utilized by the US military because the invocation of his legend habitually calls forth – possibly unlike any single figure in US-Indigenous history – the appropriative violence of settler colonial conquest that fundamentally shapes, as an active verb in the twenty-first century, the political development and status of American liberal colonialism.

Black, Indigenous, and other minority groups tend to congregate in the solidarity economy, also known as the third sector, as a place of refuge when they are marginalized and alienated from the state and private sectors. Not everyone can participate equally in the economy, a fact that is especially true for people of African descent. Economist Gordon Nembhard (2014a), in her work on structures of wealth building in low-income African American communities, argues that building an intentional community allows excluded people to create their own wealth systems. These teachings of collectively building wealth are not new. In “Caliban, Social Reproduction and Our Future Yet to Come,” Black Canadian scholar Mullings (2021) shows that when Caribbean people have had their humanity stripped away, they learned to build in ways that make their own lives whole, as well as those of others they care about. This is the work of the solidarity economy: correcting an inhumane market system that relegates people of African descent, Indigenous people, and other minority groups to the sidelines (see Hossein, 2018). The risk inherent in challenging dominant economic systems forces the solidarity economy into hiding—sometimes in plain sight. People who choose to come together even knowing the risks are building a new economy because they cannot dare to chase formal charities and businesses (Spade, 2020). Research on the social economy highlights the work of White organizers, especially those working to “interact” with other sectors, in this way erasing the cooperative economies of people of color. The Ogoni people of the Nigerian delta (Carr et al., 2001), the Self-Employed Women's Association in India (Bhatt, 2007), the Kuy people in Cambodia (Lyne, 2017), and the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST Landless Workers’ Movement) of Brazil (Dias Martins, 2000) are some of the examples of people using solidarity economies to bring change in business and society. So too are the bottom up efforts of Quilombos of Brazil, the Zapatistas of Mexico, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, the Underground Railroad, and the Neechi Commons of Manitoba, Canada. As Black women scholars working in political economy, we choose to use the term, solidarity economy. In our rejection of the language of the social economy, we say no to the erasure of collective organizing done by excluded groups outside in the Global South and historically excluded groups in the West. By choosing the solidarity economy, we highlight the contributions the Black diaspora, Indigenous, and Global South people have made to social economics. We only ever use the “social economy” when the word Black is in front of it. This way, we nullify the generic use of the “social economy” because its European origins do not resonate for many people (Hossein, 2018). We know that many Western countries opt for the term “social economy,” but this concept fails to acknowledge the tensions and exclusions within the economy and the social economy itself. The social economy is also known as the third sector—a sector in which actors are neither state nor business firms. In the third sector, nonstate and noncapitalist institutions remake economies that are inclusive of those left out. The social economy is often told with its origins located in France. In France, the social economy has a “long tradition of defending the right to work and of searching for routes into work,” with a push to consider the inclusion of socially disadvantaged groups (Spear et al., 2017, p. 111). Canada's social economy legacy includes the Antigonish movement on the east coast and the Desjardins movement (cooperative banks) in Quebec. The former movement arose out of a search for solutions to the chronic socioeconomic problems that plagued the Atlantic provinces from the late 1800s (St. Francis Xavier University, 2018). With the help of two priests Coady and Tompkins, poor fisher folk organized into cooperatives to escape poverty and to gain power over their own means of production. Alphonse and Dorimène Desjardin set up the first Caisse Populaire in Levis, Quebec, beginning in the early 1900s, which became one of the most successful cooperative movements in the world (MacPherson, 2007). But it is the story of the working class artisans known as the Rochdale Pioneers, who protested against hazardous work and low wages that has come to dominate what we know about cooperativism (ICA, 2018). Through their cooperative, they provided quality foods and other basic goods at lower prices to the cooperative's members. “Most scholars” recognize this group of pioneers as the first cooperative, dating back to 1844 (Wilhoit, 2005). While these accounts are important to the rich history of the social economy, this history is Eurocentric and acknowledges only formal activities that interact with the state and private sectors. Historians John Curl (2012) and Richard C. Williams (2007) both highlight the contributions of Indigenous, African descended people and folks in the south. Professor Ash Amin (2009) in his edited collection takes note of the ways people, through the situated practice of knowing the local context, come together. In the 1990s, the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo took to the streets of Buenos Aires to mobilize against the murders and kidnapings of their sons, husbands, and brothers by the state (Navarro, 1990). This form of protest by the women of Argentina was collective and it took a lot of courage, and they were in no position to negotiate with state officials who were harming them at the time. Those who support an “interactive social economy” miss the point that many people cannot (or will not) interact with the government or private sectors because of the danger to their lives. To assume that actors in the third sector are socially inclined to work with the private and public sectors is a wrong one. Societies which are culturally stratified makes for complications in the allocation of goods. In the edited collection in the Black Social Economy (2018), the point was that the social economy like any other sector contains the tiering of class, race, and gender that affect its actors. Futures of Black Radicalism (Johnson & Lubin, 2017), edited by Gaye Theresa Johnson, and Alex Runin, reveal that many people who have endured enslavement, colonization, systemic racism, and racial capitalism are not ready to cooperate with their oppressors. They also show that Black people and other racially marginalized people will organize on their own. While the social economy is not equipped to reform a corrupt political economic system, the solidarity economy is mindful of action by racially marginalized people as noted in the work of Gordon Nebhard (2014). The solidarity economy is curated by those who have been excluded and who agitate for complete transformation. Black, Indigenous, and racialized people, especially those living in White-dominated countries, have had to struggle and contest openly to make change—and this can be deadly at times (Gordon Nembhard, 2014b; Hossein 2019; Mbembe, 2017). In the first section of our article, we define social economy and solidarity economy to understand why we choose the latter term. In the second section, we explain our use of Black feminist theory, building on Hill Collins’ (2000) political economy work and anchoring our understandings in G.K. Gibson-Graham's theories. We also situate our work within Gordon Nembhard's (2014a) research on intentional communities and organizing during adversity and hostility. The methods we draw on to complete this analysis are based on critical discourse analysis and case studies. In the concluding section, we draw on case studies to show why solidarity helps oppressed people. The social economy has served as a place of refuge for racially marginalized people to access and achieve financial and social goals. However, the history of the social economy largely excludes racialized populations, whose stories of organizing go untold within the Eurocentric perspective of the social economy's white gaze. The stories that dominate our learning about the social economy are the Rochdale Cooperative in the United Kingdom, the Antigonish movement on Canada's east coast, and the Desjardins cooperative movement in Quebec.1 Many social economy practitioners and scholars ignore such examples of the Black experience, failing to grasp the contributions of Black and racialized people, especially women, in informal arenas (Banks, 2020; Hossein, 2013, 2019). The monies for social innovations are redirected away from people, women with the lived experience to bring lasting change. Defining the Social Economy Definitions of the social economy often assume that sectors can interact (Quarter & Mook, 2018). In Canada, the social economy is defined as “a bridging concept for organizations that have social objectives central to their mission and their practice, and either have explicit economic objectives or generate some economic value through the services they provide and purchases they undertake” (Quarter et al., 2017, p. 4). This means that the social economy is distinct from both the public sector (the government) and the private sector (corporations and for-profit businesses). The concept of “bridging” assumes this overlapping of sectors is useful, and while this is true in some contexts, it is not the case everywhere. This definition also presupposes that the three sectors can “engage” and “interact” and that perhaps this is the goal. Nevertheless, how can all three sectors “interact” when conflict and harms are taking place? The definition does not consider the possibility that these three sectors may be in complete opposition to one another. What happens when a segment of society is harmed by and fears the state and corporations or chooses to self-exclude and to not overlap with them? The Fallacy of Bridging Given these tensions in the social economy, it cannot “bridge” the state and private sectors. The meaning of “bridge” in the social economy literature cannot encompass those who are left out or how their needs can be heard. Quarter et al. (2017) offer a classification of the social economy as a means by which to visualize the third part of a capitalist economy. In it, they suggest four categories for social economy organizations: public sector nonprofits, community economic developments, social economy businesses, and civil society organizations. These categories largely comprise a white-washed and generic list of organizations whose work does not prioritize profit. Despite the social economy's definition as “bridging” the state and private companies (Quarter & Mook, 2010), the idea that the three sectors—private, public, and social economy—can work toward a common goal is a fallacy. It discounts the struggles being undertaken in the solidarity economy and the exclusions of groups from the social economy. No room is made for those left out of the system because of racial inequities or racial capitalism. The concept of belonging is lost when we assume that we can “bridge” and build “partnerships.” Such an assumption is erroneous, as the following quote of John A. Powell, a civil rights expert and director of the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley, shows: “Belonging is based on the recognition of our full humanity without having to become something different or pretend we’re all the same. We are always both the same (humanity) and different (human), and are also multiple and dynamic, constantly renegotiating who we are” (Powell, 2021). Powell thus notes that difference is key to making people feel they are free to engage in the economy and society. His point highlights that this notion of “belonging”— that is, taking note of people's identities—is important in considering how goods are shared. The “bridging” concept should recognize the need for extra steps in the current ecosystem of the social economy to remove the alienating politics from within it and to listen to excluded groups and minorities to ensure they have a sense of belonging. Some scholars have invested in this idea of bridging when they write about the social economy. However, they ignore the bias that is within the social economy when they push for this bridging. The Venn diagram in Figure 1 displays the interactive social economy according to Quarter et al. (2017). The spheres depict the overlapping of the three sectors, but the diagram fails to show the exclusions. The actors of the social economy who can negotiate with the dominant powers do so, and those who cannot are relegated to the vague space called “civil society.”

Informal work has not only persisted on an international scale since the 1970s, but has also expanded and appeared in new guises in the context of globalization, neo-liberalism and cross-border and rural-urban migration, all of which are highly gendered processes (Bach, 2003; Carr and Chen, 2002; Chant and McIlwaine, 1995; Chen et al., 2004; ILO 2002b, 2007a; Valenzuela, 2005). While more women now participate in paid employment than at any other time in history, labour markets across all geographical regions are sexsegregated with women “concentrated in lower quality, irregular and informal employment” (Heintz, 2006: 1; see also Abramo, 2003; El-Solh, 2003; FernándezPacheco, 2003a, b; Silveira and Matosas, 2003; Valenzuela, 2005; Xaba et al., 2002). As increasing global integration and competition has fuelled a “race to the bottom” in which multinational corporations may relocate numerous times in search of increasingly cheaper labour (see for example, Chan, 2003; Jauch, 2002), women in the informal economy find that they are the “weakest links” in global value chains. Poor women workers of the Global South, as well as female migrant workers in a range of international contexts, generally fare worst of all (Carr and Chen, 2002: 11; see also Chakravarty et al., 2006; Kaplinsky, 2000; Mehrotra and Biggeri, 2002; Perrons, 2004, 2005; Rossignotti, 2006). Women remain concentrated in “invisible” areas of informal work, such as domestic labour piece-rate homework, and assistance in small family enterprises, which offer precarious employment status, low, irregular or no remuneration, little or no access to social security or protection, and limited ability to organize to ensure the enforcement of international labour standards and human rights (Abramo and Valenzuela, 2006; Carr and Chen, 2002; Fernández-Pacheco, 2003a, b; Reinecke et al., 2006; Vega Gramunt, 2004). Poor women employed in the informal economy also face a number of serious health and safety risks, including dangerous working conditions, gendered violence and increased susceptibility to HIV/AIDS (Ambert et al., 2007; Chant and McIlwaine, 1995; Nelson, 1997). They must also often contend with deficient infrastructure and a range of time and space constraints on their productivity (Lund and Srinivas, 2000; see also Chant, 1996, 2007c; Kantor, 2002; Lessinger, 1990; Lopez-Estrada, 2002; Miraftab, 1996; Vera-Sanso, 1995, 2006b). Gendered earning differentials in the informal economy mirror, and in many cases surpass, those in the formal sector (Abramo and Valenzuela, 2006; FernándezPacheco, 2003b; Silveira and Matosas, 2003), due to both vertical and horizontal segregation in employment and continuing gendered inequalities associated with women’s unpaid reproductive work (Lund and Srinivas, 2000; see also Boulde, 2006; Chant, 2006, 2007a, c; Gates, 2002; Perrons, 2005). In this context, the complex relationships between informality, gendered relations of power and poverty require careful analysis. This discussion paper provides a review and analysis of the International Labour Office’s (ILO) research on women, gender and the informal economy. In particular, it compares and contrasts analytical and methodological frameworks used in various studies; identifies research gaps and directions for future research; and pulls out key findings that may assist concerned ILO units in taking action and formulating policy directions. The report has been commissioned by the ILO’s GENDER, DECLARATION and INTEGRATION departments as a follow-up document for the ILO Tripartite Symposium on the Informal Economy, held in Geneva in November 2007. Both the paper and the symposium are linked to ILO’s Decent Work Agenda and the promotion of International Labour Standards, including the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work (1998) and the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) Ministerial Declaration on Decent Work (2006). While drawing on wider academic and policy sources to theoretically and empirically ground and exemplify key analytical and methodological issues pertinent to women, gender and the informal economy, the bulk of paper has been prepared on the basis of a review of ILO research and policy documents (in both English and Spanish), as well as a select number of informal interviews with key officials conducted at ILO headquarters in Geneva in September 2007. 1 An indicative assessment of ILO research on gender and informal economy is provided here. However, it is hoped this report will serve as the basis for more comprehensive and in-depth analysis of, and action on, gendered dimensions of informality in the future. The focus is on the relationships between gender and informal work in the Global South, making links to industrialized and transition countries where possible, and pertinent. In line with current ILO orthodoxy, the term “informal economy” (rather than “informal sector”) is used to indicate the need to include both own account workers and wage workers in discussion and analysis of informal work. This term also signals how informal work cross-cuts a range of sectors and areas of work, and frequently overlaps with work within the formal economy. Indeed, informal and formal work should not be understood as dichotomous, but rather as intimately linked. Furthermore, it should be acknowledged that, given that formal wage labour has never been relevant to more than 50 per cent of the population in many parts of the Global South, the categories of “formal” and “informal” may not always be the most relevant or useful categories of analysis (Vaillancourt-Laflamme, 2005: 26). “Gender” is, within this paper, understood as a relational concept, which is constituted differently across various social, cultural and geo-political contexts in and through its interaction with other axes of social differentiation, including “race”, ethnicity, sexuality, class, religion, age and ability, among other variables. While the analysis focuses mainly on how informality affects poor women in a range of international contexts, a critical gender analysis necessitates paying attention to gendered relations of power which position and affect different groups of women and men in different ways. Strategies for achieving gender justice with respect to informality must thus address “the pervasive gendered constructs, roles and power relations which structure the wider social context” in which different forms of work arise (ibid.). The paper begins with an overview of the ILO’s work on gender and the informal economy, linking it to its wider Decent Work Agenda. It then considers certain analytical and methodological approaches employed in ILO studies, assessing their overarching strengths and limitations. The remainder of the report is dedicated to a more detailed review and assessment of ILO studies across a range of themes, linked to the ILO’s key areas of research and technical cooperation.

Scholars who have written on the topic of slavery, colonialism, and capitalism in recent decades therefore generally have agreed with the premise of racial capitalism, whether or not they used this term. To invoke racial capitalism is to recognize the primal role of race in development and maintenance of capitalism. Although Cedric Robinson coined the term in Black Marxism (1983), W.E.B. Du Bois in Black Reconstruction (1935) detailed decades earlier how the racial division of labor and racist violence served capitalism. Racial capitalism also devastated the Indigenous, deeming them unworthy of the land and waters that had given them sustenance since the beginning of recorded time. There were (and are) commonalities among those brutalized by racial capitalism, whether they were (and are) Asian, Pacific Islander, African, Latin American, Indigenous and/or Native. Du Bois saw that by the end of the nineteenth century, the twinned conditions of capitalism and colonialism made racism a global dilemma. “The problem of the twentieth century,” he famously wrote in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), “is the problem of the color-line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.”75 Scholars can argue whether or not capitalism began as a global system, but they should agree that racial capitalism certainly did: that it continued as a global system, continually expanding into new areas in order to create an endless supply of surplus for reinvestment in a continuous loop.76 It was through an imperialist infrastructure, a world-system, that racial capitalism was and has been able to feed its hunger for resources, labor, and markets. Rather than characterizing imperialism as the “highest stage of capitalism,” as his contemporary in Russia did, it is probably more useful to see, as Du Bois did, that the reverse was true: early modern and modern imperialism created the conditions for racial capitalism.77 As scholars like Gerald Horne have detailed, imperial violence and encroachment allowed racial capitalism to spawn and spread.78 This process, of course, took centuries. 1492 marked simply a beginning. The same with 1619. The patterns of global inequities that we see today were mostly set in the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries.79 As the discussion above suggests, capitalist empires relied on mixed methods of production, with both labor that was clearly capitalist (waged) and labor that some scholars characterize as non-capitalist (non-waged). Capitalist expropriation— again, the negation of the ability to live or build wealth outside of the market system—gave those that became capitalist earlier the ability to prevent or hamper others from retaining or building wealth. So, not only was the ladder kicked away, but it was used as a weapon to batter others down. To say capitalist imperialism with “capitalism” as the adjective modifying “imperialism” suits our purposes today better than the other way around as Lenin did. Lenin used “imperialism” as a modifier for “capitalism” for the narrow purpose of explaining the function of colonization to capitalist powers in his contemporary world. From about 1870, when Lenin was born, to 1916, when his essay came out, a great part of the world was under the colonial dominion of Europe, Japan, and the United States. Lenin was not considering pre-nineteenth century imperialism in his formulation. For a longer historical view, it is more useful to say capitalist imperialism because doing so acknowledges pre-nineteenth century imperialism, but also emphasizes capitalism as a rupture in the long world history of empires. The scale and scope of imperialism in the modern, capitalist era, as well as its intrusiveness in daily life distinguished it from earlier imperialisms such as those of the Roman, Greek, Mughal, Mongol, Han, Aztec, Songhai, premodern Caliphates, etc.80 Capitalist empires, distinct from pre-modern and early modern empires, both appropriate and expropriate. They seize tribute, wealth, and goods from subject peoples, and they take away wealth-making capacities of subject peoples by restructuring their labor and resources so that they are mostly (although not totally) oriented towards the market needs of the empire. So, to repeat the definition above: modern imperialism is when a stronger polity subjects a weaker one to its own economic preferences through the expropriation of resources and labor.

Drawing on the intellectual production of twentieth-century Black anticapitalists, I theorize modern U.S. racial capitalism as a racially hierarchical political economy constituting war and militarism, imperialist accumulation, expropriation by domination, and labor superexploitation.14 The racial here specifically refers to Blackness, defined as African descendants’ relationship to the capitalist mode of production—their structural location—and the condition, status, and material realities emanating therefrom.15 It is out of this structural location that the irresolvable contradiction of value minus worth arises. Stated differently, Blackness is a capacious category of surplus value extraction essential to an array of political-economic functions, including accumulation, disaccumulation, debt, planned obsolescence, and absorption of the burdens of economic crises.16 At the same time, Blackness is the quintessential condition of disposability, expendability, and devalorization. My operationalization of capitalism follows Oliver Cromwell Cox’s explication in Capitalism and American Leadership. 17 Modern U.S. racial capitalism arose in the context of the First World War, when, as Cox explains, the United States took advantage of the conflict to capture the markets of South America, Asia, and Africa for its “over-expanded capacity.”18 Cox further expounds upon this auspicious moment of ascendant modern U.S. racial capitalism thus: By 1914, the United States had brought its superb natural resources within reach of intensive exploitation. Under the stimulus of its foreign-trade outlets, the financial assistance of the older capitalist nations, and a flexible system of protective tariffs, the nation developed a magnificent work of transportation and communication so that its mines, factories, and farms became integrated into an effectively producing organism having easy access to its seaports.… [Likewise,] further internal expansion depended upon far greater emphasis on an ever widening foreign commerce.… Major entrepreneurs of the United States proceeded to step up their campaign for expansion abroad. The war accentuated this movement. It accelerated the growth of [modern] American [racial] capitalism and impressed upon its leaders as nothing had before the need for external markets.19 Relatedly, Peter James Hudson argues that the First World War fundamentally changed the terms of order of international finance, allowing New York to compete with London, Paris, and Berlin for the first time in the realm of global banking. This was not least because the Great War “drastically reordered global credit flows,” with the United States transforming from a debtor into a creditor nation.20 In addition to Latin American and Caribbean nations and businesses turning to the United States for financing and credit, domestic saving and investment patterns were altered to the benefit of imperial financial institutions like the City Bank.21 Although the United States is, to use Cox’s terminology, more a “lusty child of an already highly developed capitalism” than an exceptional capitalist power, the nation perfected its techniques of accumulation through its vast natural wealth, large domestic market, imbalance of Northern and Southern economies, and, importantly, through its lack of concern for the political and economic welfare of the overwhelming masses of its population, least of all the descendants of the enslaved.22 Modern U.S. racial capitalism is thus sustained by military expenditure, the maintenance of an extremely low standard of living in “dependent” countries, and the domestic superexploitation of Black toilers and laborers. Cox notes that Black labor has been the “chief human factor” in wealth production; as such, “the dominant economic class has always been at the motivating center of the spreads of racial antagonism. This is to be expected since the economic content of the antagonism, especially at its proliferating source in the South, has been precisely that of labor-capital relations.”23 In a general sense, racial capitalism in the United States constitutes “a peculiar variant of capitalist production” in which Blackness expresses a structural location at the bottom of the labor hierarchy characterized by depressed wages, working conditions, job opportunities, and widespread exclusion from labor unions.24 Furthermore, modern U.S. racial capitalism is rooted in the imbrication of anti-Blackness and antiradicalism. Anti-Blackness describes the reduction of Blackness to a category of abjection and subjection through narrations of absolute biological or cultural difference; ruling-class monopolization of political power; negative and derogatory mass media propaganda; the ascent of discriminatory legislation that maintains and reinscribes inequality, not least various modes of segregation; and social relations in which distrust and antipathy toward those racialized as Black is normalized and in which “interracial mass behavior involving violence assumes a continuously potential danger.”25 Anti-Blackness thus conceals the inherent contradiction of Blackness—value minus worth—obscuring and distorting its structural location by, as Ralph and Singhal remark, contorting it into only a “debilitated condition.”26 Antiradicalism can be understood as the physical and discursive repression and condemnation of anticapitalist and/or left-leaning ideas, politics, practices, and modes of organizing that are construed as subversive, seditious, and otherwise threatening to capitalist society. These include, but are not limited to, internationalism, anti-imperialism, anticolonialism, peace activism, and antisexism. Anti-Blackness and antiradicalism function as the legitimating architecture of modern U.S. racial capitalism, which includes rationalizing discourses, cultural narratives, technologies of repression, legal structures, and social practices that inform and are informed by racial capitalism’s political economy.27 Throughout the twentieth century, anti-Blackness propelled the “Black Scare,” defined as the specter of racial, social, and economic domination of superior whites by inferior Black populations. Antiradicalism, in turn, was enunciated through the “Red Scare,” understood as the threat of communist takeover, infiltration, and disruption of the American way of life.28 For example, in the 1919 Justice Department Report, Radicalism and Sedition Among the Negroes, As Reflected in Their Publications, it was asserted that the radical antigovernment stance of a certain class of Negroes was manifested in their “ill-governed reaction toward race rioting,” “threat of retaliatory measures in connection with lynching,” open demand for social equality, identification with the International Workers of the World (IWW), and “outspoken advocacy of the Bolshevik or Soviet doctrine.”2 Here, anti-Blackness, articulated through the fear of the “assertion of race consciousness,” was attached to the IWW and Bolshevism—in other words, to anticapitalism—to make it appear even more subversive and dangerous. Likewise, antiradicalism, expressed through the denigration of the IWW and Soviet Doctrine, was made to seem all the more threatening and antithetical to the social order in its linkage with Black insistence on equality and self-defense against racial terrorism. In this way, “defiance and insolently race-centered condemnation of the white race” and “the Negro seeing red” came to be understood as seditious in the context of modern U.S. racial capitalism. The link between my theory of modern U.S. racial capitalism and Robinson’s catholic theory of racial capitalism, beyond his “suggest[ion] that it was there,” is vivified through the prison abolitionist and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who writes: “Capitalism…[is] never not racial.… Racial capitalism: a mode of production developed in agriculture, improved by enclosure in the Old World, and captive land and labor in the Americas, perfected in slavery’s time-motion, field factory choreography, its imperative forged on the anvils of imperial war-making monarchs.”30 Racial capitalism, she continues, “requires all kinds of scheming, including hard work by elites and their compradors in the overlapping and interlocking space-economies of the planet’s surface. They build and dismantle and reconfigure states, moving capacity into and out of the public realm. And they think very hard about money on the move.”31 Perhaps more than Gilmore, though, my approach aligns with that of Neville Alexander as described by Hudson.32 Like Alexander, who focused on South Africa, I offer a particularistic understanding of racial capitalism, mine being rooted in the political economy of Blackness and the legitimating architectures of anti-Blackness and antiradicalism in the United States. Gilmore qua Robinson offers a more universalist and transhistorical conception. Like Alexander, my theory of modern U.S. racial capitalism is primarily rooted in (Black) Marxist-Leninists and fellow travelers. This is an important epistemological distinction: whereas Robinson finds Marxism-Leninism to be, at best, inattentive to race, my theory of modern U.S. racial capitalism is rooted in the work of Black freedom fighters who, as Marxist-Leninists, were able to offer potent and enduring analyses and critiques of the conjunctural entanglements of racialism, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness, on the one hand, and capitalist exploitation and class antagonism on the other hand.33

Dussel, Quijano, and Wynter lead us to the understanding that what happened in the Americas was a transformation and naturalization of the non-ethics of war—which represented a sort of exception to the ethics that regulate normal conduct in Christian countries—into a more stable and long-standing reality of damnation, and that this epistemic and material shift occurred in the colony. Damnation, life in hell, is colonialism: a reality characterized by the naturalization of war by means of the naturalization of slavery, now justified in relation to the very constitution of people and no longer solely or principally to their faith or belief. That human beings become slaves when they are vanquished in a war translates in the Americas into the suspicion that the conquered people, and then non-European peoples in general, are constitutively inferior and that therefore they should assume a position of slavery and serfdom. Later on, this idea would be solidified with respect to the slavery of African peoples, achieving stability up to the present with the tragic reality of different forms of racism. Through this process, what looked like a "state of exception" in the colonies became the rule in the modern world. However, deviating from Giorgio Agarnben's diagnosis, one must say that the colony--long before the concentration camp and the Nazi politics of extermination--served as the testing ground for the limits and possibilities of modernity, thereby revealing its darkest secrets." It is race, the coloniality of power, and its concomitant Eurocentrism (and not only national socialisms or forms of fascism) that allow the "state of exception" to continue to define ordinary relations in this, our so-called postmodern world. Race emerges within a permanent state of exception where forms of behavior that are legitimate in war become a natural part of the ordinary way of life. In that world, an otherwise extraordinary affair becomes the norm and living in it requires extraordinary effort." In the racial/ colonial world, the "hell" of war becomes a condition that defines the reality of racialized selves, which Fanon referred to as the damnes de la terre (condemned of the earth). The damne (condemned) is a subject who exists in a permanent "hell," and as such, this figure serves as the main referent or liminal other that guarantees the continued affirmation of modernity as a paradigm of war. The hell of the condemned is not defined by the alienation of colonized productive forces, but rather signals the dispensability of racialized subjects, that is, the idea that the world would be fundamentally better without them. The racialized subject is ultimately a dispensable source of value, and exploitation is conceived in this context as due torture, and not solely as the extraction of surplus value. Moreover, it is this very same conception that gives rise to the particular erotic dynamics that characterize the relation between the master and its slaves or racialized workers. The condemned, in short, inhabit a context in which the confrontation with death and murder is ordinary. Their "hell" is not simply "other people," as Sartre would have put it-at least at one point - but rather racist perceptions that are responsible for the suspension of ethical behavior toward peoples at the bottom of the color line. Through racial conceptions that became central to the modern self, modernity and coloniality produced a permanent state of war that racialized and colonized subjects cannot evade or escape. The modern function of race and the coloniality of power, I am suggesting here, can be understood as a radicalization and naturalization of the non-ethics of war in colonialism." This non-ethics included the practices of eliminating and enslaving certain subjects-for example, indigenous and black-as part of the enterprise of colonization. From here one could as well refer to them as the death ethics of war. War, however, is not only about killing or enslaving; it also includes a particular treatment of sexuality and femininity: rape. Coloniality is an order of things that places people of color within the murderous and rapist view of a vigilant ego, and the primary targets of this rape are women. But men of color are also seen through these lenses and feminized, to become fundamentally penetrable subjects for the ego conquiro. Racialization functions through gender and sex, and the ego conquiro is thereby constitutively a phallic ego as well." Dussel. who presents this thesis of the phallic character of the ego cogito, also makes links, albeit indirectly, with the reality of war. And thus, in the beginning of modernity, before Descartes discovered ... a terrifying anthropological dualism in Europe, the Spanish conquistadors arrived in America. The phallic conception of the European-medieval world is now added to the forms of submission of the vanquished Indians. "Males," Bartolome de las Casas writes, are reduced through "the hardest, most horrible, and harshest serfdom"; but this only occurs with those who have remained alive, because many of them have died; however, "in war typically they only leave alive young men (mozos) and women.""5 The indigenous people who survive the massacre or are left alive have to contend with a world that considers them to be dispensable. And since their bodies have been conceived of as inherently inferior or violent, they must be constantly subdued or civilized, which requires renewed acts of conquest and colonization. The survivors continue to live in a world defined by war, and this situation is peculiar in the case of women. AsT. Denean Sharpley-Whiting and Renee T, White put it in the preface to their anthology Spoils oJ War: Women oJ Color, Cultures, and Revolutions: A sexist and/or racist patriarchal culture and order posts and attempts to maintain, through violent acts of force if necessary, the subjugation and inferiority of women of color. As Joy James notes, "its explicit, general premise constructs a conceptual framework of male [and/or white] as normative in order to enforce a politicaljracial, economic, cultural. sexual] and intellectual mandate of male [and/or white] as superior." The warfront has always been a "feminized" and "colored" space for women of color. Their experiences and perceptions of war, conA ict, resistance, and struggle emerge from their specific racial-ethnic and gendered locations ... Inter arma silent leges: in time of war the law is silent," Walzer notes. Thus, this volume operates from the premise that war has been and is presently in our midst.” The links between war, conquest, and the exploitation of women's bodies are hardly accidental. In his study of war and gender, Joshua Goldstein argues that conquest usually proceeds through an extension of the rape and exploitation of women in wartime." He argues that to understand conquest, one needs to examine: I) male sexuality as a cause of aggression; 2) the feminization of enemies as symbolic domination; and 3) dependence on the exploitation of women's labor-including reproduction." My argument is, first, that these three elements came together in a powerful way in the idea of race that began to emerge in the conquest and colonization of the Americas. My second point is that through the idea of race, these elements exceed the activity of conquest and come to define what from that point on passes as the idea of a "normal" world. As a result, the phenomenology of a racial context resembles, if it is not fundamentally identical to, the phenomenology of war and conquest. Racism posits its targets as racialized and sexualized subjects that, once vanquished, are said to be inherently servile and whose bodies come to form part of an economy of sexual abuse, exploitation, and control. The coloniality of power cannot be fully understood without reference to the transformation and naturalization of war and conquest in modern times. Hellish existence in the colonial world carries with it both the racial and the gendered aspects of the naturalization of the non-ethics of war. "Killability" and "rapeability" are inscribed into the images of colonial bodies and deeply mark their ordinary existence. Lacking real authority, colonized men are permanently feminized and simultaneously represent a constant threat for whom any amount of authority, any visible trace of the phallus is multiplied in a symbolic hysteria that knows no lirnits.?" Mythical depiction of the black man's penis is a case in point: the black man is depicted as an aggressive sexual beast who desires to rape women, particularly white women. The black woman, in turn, is seen as always already sexually available to the rapist gaze of the white, and as fundamentally promiscuous. In short, the black woman is seen as a highly erotic being whose primary function is fulfilling sexual desire and reproduction. To be sure, any amount of "penis" in either one represents a threat, but in his most familiar and typical forms the black man represents the act of rape- "raping" -while the black woman is seen as the most legitimate victim of rape- "being raped." In an antiblack world black women appear as subjects who deserve to be raped and to suffer the consequences-in terms of a lack of protection from the legal system, sexual abuse, and lack of financial assistance to sustain themselves and their families-just as black men deserve to be penalized for raping, even without having committed the act. Both "raping" and "being raped" are attached to blackness as if they form part of the essence of black folk, who are seen as a dispensable population. Black bodies are seen as excessively violent and erotic, as well as being the legitimate recipients of excessive violence, erotic and otherwise." "Killability" and "rapeability" are part of their essence, understood in a phenomenological way. The "essence" of blackness in a colonial anti-black world is part of a larger context of meaning in which the death ethics of war gradually becomes a constitutive part of an allegedly normal world. In its modern racial and colonial connotations and uses, blackness is the invention and the projection of a social body oriented by the death ethics of war." This murderous and raping social body projects the features that define it onto sub-Others in order to be able to legitimate the same behavior that is allegedly descriptive of them. The same ideas that inspire perverted acts in war--particularly slavery, murder, and rape--are legitimized in modernity through the idea of race and gradually come to be seen as more or less normal thanks to the alleged obviousness and non-problematic character of black slavery and anti-black racism. To be sure, those who suffer the consequences of such a system are primarily blacks and indigenous peoples, but it also deeply affects all of those who appear as colored or close to darkness. In short, this system of symbolic representations, the material conditions that in part produce and continue to legitimate it, and the existential dynamics that occur therein (which are also at the same time derivative and constitutive of such a context) are part of a process that naturalizes the non-ethics or death ethics of war. Sub-ontological difference is the result of such naturalization and is legitimized through the idea of race. In such a world, ontology collapses into a Manicheanism, as Fanon suggested."