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3. Where would people be especially likely to survive a global catastrophe?

Government bunkers for private citizens, government bunkers for continuity of government, shelters purchased by private citizens, people working on submarines, and people living in remote locations would be especially likely to survive a global catastrophe. Examining these unintentional refuges will help us assess to what extent creating refuges of the type proposed above—or other types of refuges—would increase the chances of recovery from a global catastrophe.

A number of people have claimed that a full-scale nuclear war is likely to cause human extinction. I have investigated this issue in depth and concluded that even a full scale nuclear exchange is unlikely (<1%) to cause human extinction. By a full-scale war, I mean a nuclear exchange between major world powers, such as the US, Russia, and China, using the complete arsenals of each country. The total number of warheads today (14,000) is significantly smaller than during the height of the cold war (70,000). While extinction from nuclear war is unlikely today, it may become more likely if significantly more warheads are deployed or if designs of weapons change significantly. There are three potential mechanisms of human extinction from nuclear war: 1) Kinetic destruction 2) Radiation 3) Climate alteration Only 3) is remotely plausible with existing weapons, but let's go through them all. 1) Kinetic destruction There simply aren't enough nuclear warheads to kill everyone directly with kinetic force, and there likely never will be. There are ~14,000 nuclear weapons in the world, and let’s suppose they have an average yield of something like 1 megaton. This is a conservative guess, the actual average is probably closer to 100 kilotons. With a 1 megaton warhead, you can create a fireball covering 3 km², and a moderate pressure wave that knocks down most residential houses covering 155 km². The former kills nearly everyone and the latter kills a decent percentage of people but not everyone. Let's be conservative and assume the pressure wave kills everyone in its radius. 14,000 * 155 = 2.17 million km². The New York Metro area is 8,683 km². So all the nuclear weapons in the world could destroy about 250 New York Metro areas. This is a lot! But not near enough, even if someone intentionally tried to hit all the populations at once. Total land surface of earth is: 510.1 million km². Urban area, by one estimate, is about 2%, or 10.2 million km.² Since the total possible area destroyed from nuclear weapons is ~2.17 million km² is considerably less than a lower bound on the area of human habitation, 10.2 million km², there should be basically no risk of human extinction from kinetic destruction. The circle with the white border indicates the zone of moderate blast damage radius (5 psi): 7.03 km (155 km²) from a 1,000 kiloton warhead, link to nukemap If you want to check my work there, I was using nuke map. The even more obvious reason why kinetic damage wouldn't lead to human extinction is that nuclear states only threaten one or several countries at a time, and never the population centers of the entire world. Even if NATO countries and Russia and China all went to war at the same time, Africa, South America, and other neutral regions would be spared any kinetic damage. 2) Radiation Radiation won't kill everyone because there aren't enough weapons, and radiation from them would be concentrated in some areas and wholly absent from other areas. Even in the worst affected areas, lethal radiation from fallout would drop to survivable levels within weeks. Here it's worth noting that there is an inherent tradeoff between length of halflife and energy released by radionuclides. The shorter the half life the more energy will be released, and the longer the half life the less energy. The fallout products from modern nuclear weapons are very lethal, but only for days to several weeks. From Nuclear War Survival Skills, 1987 edition Let's try the same calculation we used with kinetic damage, and see if an attack aimed at optimizing fallout for killing everyone could succeed. Using Nukemap again, I'll go with the fallout contour for 100 rads per hour. 400 rads is thought too be enough to kill 50% of people, so 100 rads per hour is likely to kill most all people not in some kind of shelter. We need to switch to using a groundburst detonation rather than an airburst detonation, because groundbursts create far more fallout. A 1mt ground burst would create an area of about 8,000 km² of >100 rads per hour. Okay, multiple that by 14,000 warheads, and we get 112 million km². That's a lot! It's still less than the 510.1 million km² of earth's land mass, but it's a lot more than the ~10.2 million km² of urban space. Presumably this is enough to cover every human habitation, so in principle, it might be possible to kill everyone with radiation from existing nuclear weapons. The bright red and slightly less bright red indicate fallout contour for 1,000 rads and 100 rads per hour, covering 1,140 km² and 7,080 km² respectively, from a 1,000 kiloton ground burst. Nukemap settings In practice, it would be almost impossible to kill every human via radiation with the existing nuclear arsenals, even if they were targeted explicitly for this purpose. The first reason is that fallout patterns are very uneven. After a ground burst, fallout is carried by the wind. Some areas will be hit bad and some areas will be hardly affected by fallout. Even if most human population centers were covered, a few areas would almost certainly escape. Two other things make extinction by radiation unlikely. Many countries, especially in the southern hemisphere, are unlikely to be affected by fallout much at all. Since most of these countries are likely to be neutral in a conflict, and not near combatant countries, they should be relatively safe from fallout. While fallout might travel hundreds of kms, it still won't reach places separated by greater distances. Fallout that reaches the upper atmosphere will eventually fall back down, but usually after the period of lethal radioactivity. The other mitigating factor is that in typical nuclear war plans, ground bursts are usually restricted to hardened targets, and air bursts are favored for population and industry centers. This is because air bursts maximize the size of the destructive pressure wave. Air burst detonations result in little lethal fallout reaching the ground, so populations not downwind of military targets would likely be safe from the worst of the radiological effects in a war scenario. The final protection from extinction by radiation is simply large amounts of mass between people and the radiation source, in other words, fallout shelters. After several weeks, the radionuclides in fallout from ground burst detonations will have decayed to the point where humans can survive outside of shelters. Many fallout shelters exist in the world, and many more could be made easily in a day or two with a shovel, some ground, and some boards. Even if lethally radioactive fallout from ground bursts covered all population centers, many humans would still survive in shelters. The risks of extinction from nuclear-weapon-induced-radiation wouldn't be complete without discussing two factors: nuclear power plants and radiological weapons. I'm only going to cover these briefly, but they both don't change the conclusions much. Nuclear power plants could be targeted by nuclear weapons to create large amounts of fallout with a longer half-life but less energy per unit time. The main concern here is that nuclear power plants and spent fuel sites contain a much greater *mass* of radioactive material than nuclear missiles can carry. The danger comes primarily from spreading the already very radiative spent or unspent nuclear fuel. The risk this poses requires a longer analysis, but the short version is that while nuking a nuclear power plant or stored fuel site would indeed create some pretty long-lived fallout it would still be concentrated in a relatively small area. Fortunately, even a nuclear detonation wouldn't spread the nuclear fuel more than several hundred km at most. Having regions of countries covered in spent nuclear fuel would be awful, but it doesn't much raise the risk of extinction. Radiological weapons are nuclear weapons designed to maximize the spread of lethal fallout rather than destructive yield. The particular concern from the extinction perspective is that they can be designed to create fallout that continues to emit levels of radiation that can make an area uninhabitable for months to years. These kind of radiological weapons kill more slowly, but they still kill. In principle, radiological weapons could be used to kill everyone on earth. However, in practice, the same constraints that apply to standard nuclear weapons apply to weapons optimized for long-lasting fallout, as well as some additional constraints. Radiological weapons wouldn't produce more fallout than standard warheads, they would just produce fallout with different characteristics. As a result the amount of radiological weapons required to cover every part of earth's surface would be massively expensive (likely as expensive as the largest existing nuclear arsenals), and serve no military purpose. Their inefficiency in destruction and death compared to standard nuclear weapons is probably why radiological weapons have never been developed or deployed in large numbers. This makes them an ongoing theoretical concern, but not an existential risk in the immediate future. A concerning development is Russia's claim to have developed a large-yield (100mt) submersible nuclear weapon with the suggestion that it could be used as a radiological weapon, but even if this is true, it's unlikely to be deployed in large numbers. 3) Climate alteration The bulk of the risk of human extinction from nuclear weapons come from risks of catastrophic climate change, nuclear winter, due to secondary effects from nuclear detonations. However, even in most full-scale nuclear exchange scenarios, the resulting climate effects are unlikely to cause human extinction. Reasons for this: a) Under scenarios where a severe nuclear winter occurs as described by Robock et al, some human populations would likely survive. b) The Robock group’s models are probably overestimating the risk c) Nuclear war planners are aware of nuclear winter risks and can incorporate these risks into their targeting plans Before diving into each subject, it’s worth understanding the background of nuclear winter research. In the 1980s a group of atmospheric scientists proposed the hypothesis that a nuclear war would result in massive firestorms in burning cities, which would loft particles high into the atmosphere and cause catastrophic cooling that would last for years. Many found it alarming that such an effect could be possible and go unnoticed for decades while the risk existed. Some scientists also thought the proposed effect was too strong, or unlikely to occur at all. Until a few years ago, if you looked only at peer reviewed literature you would only find papers forecasting severe nuclear winter effects in the event of a nuclear war. Understandably, many people assumed that this was the scientific consensus. Unfortunately, this misrepresented the scientific community’s state of uncertainty about the risks of nuclear war. There have only ever been a small numbers of papers published about this topic (<15 probably), mostly from one group of researchers, despite the topic being one of existential importance. I’m very glad Robock, Toon, and others have spent much of their careers studying nuclear winter effects, and their models are useful in estimating potential climate change caused by nuclear war. However, I’ve become less convinced over time the Robock model is largely correct. See section B below for why I’ve changed my mind. However, I’m quite uncertain about the probability of strong cooling effects from nuclear war, and am still quite concerned about the potential for severe cooling, even if the risk of extinction from such events is small. A: Under scenarios where a severe nuclear winter occurs as described by Robock et al, some human populations would likely survive. The latest and most detailed model of potential cooling effects from a fullscale nuclear exchange comes from, Robock et al., “Nuclear winter revisited with a modern climate model and current nuclear arsenals: Still catastrophic consequences” found here. The effects from this model are severe. In the 150Tg case, after a year, summer temperatures in the Northern hemisphere are 10-30 degrees C cooler. The effects are less severe at the equator (5 degrees C), but basically all places in the world are affected. The most likely outcome is that most people starve to death. Many would freeze too, but starvation is likely the greatest risk. Even in this model, it appears that in equatorial regions, some farming would still be possible, enough for some populations to survive. After a 10-15 years, agriculture in most of the world would be possible at reduced capacity. Surface air temperature changes for the 150 Tg case averaged for June, July, and August of the year of smoke injection and the next year. Robock et al., 2007 Carl Shulman asked one of the authors of this paper, Luke Oman, his probability that the 150Tg nuclear winter scenario discussed in the paper would result in human extinction, the answer he gave was “in the range of 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 100,000.” This strikes me as quite plausible, though one expert opinion is no substitute for a deep analysis. The Q&A with Oman contains his reasoning for this assessment. Two different analyses are required to calculate the chances of human extinction from nuclear winter. The first is the analysis of the climate change that could result from a nuclear war, and the second is the adaptive capacity of human groups to these climate changes. I have not seen an in depth analysis of the latter, but I believe such an assessment would be worthwhile. My own guess is that humans are capable of surviving far more severe climate shifts than those projected in nuclear winter scenarios. Humans are more robust than most any other mammal to drastic changes in temperature, as evidenced by our global range, even in pre-historic times. While a loss of most agriculture would likely kill most people on earth, modern technology would enable some populations to survive. Great stores of food currently exist in the world, and it is l likely that some of these would be seized and protected by small groups, providing enough food to last for years. While even such populations with food stores wouldn’t have enough to survive for 10-15 years, such food stores would give groups time to adapt to new food sources. The organization ALLFED has explored a number of alternative food sources that could keep populations alive in the event of a nuclear war or other large solar disruption, and I expect great necessity to drive the discovery of even more in the event of such a disaster. B: The Robock group’s models are probably overestimating the risk The nuclear winter model at its simplest: Nuclear detonations → Fires in cities → Firestorms in cities → Lofted black carbon into the upper atmosphere → black carbon persists in upper atmosphere, reflecting sunlight and causes massive cooling Each step is required in order for the effect to occur. If nuclear war causes massive fires in cities but does not lead to firestorms that loft particles, then no long term cooling is going to occur. Some of these steps are easier to model than others. Based on my reading of the literature, the greatest uncertainties involve the dynamics of cities burning after a nuclear attack, and whether the conditions would produce firestorms sufficient to loft large numbers of particles high enough in the atmosphere to persist for years. We’re finally beginning to see some healthy debate about some of these questions in the scientific literature. Alan Robock’s group published a paper in 2007 that found significant cooling effects even from a relatively limited regional war. A group from Los Alamos, Reisner et al, published a paper in 2018 that reexamined some of the assumptions that went into Robock et al’s model, and concluded that global cooling was unlikely in such a scenario. Robock et al. responded, and Reisner et al responded to the response. Both authors bring up good points, but I find Reisner’s position more compelling. This back and forth is worth reading for those who want to investigate deeper. Unfortunately Reisner’s group has not published an analysis on potential cooling effects from a modern full scale nuclear exchange, rather than a limited regional exchange. Even so, it’s not hard to extrapolate that Reisner’s model would result in far less cooling than Robock’s model in the equivalent situation. C: Nuclear war planners are aware of nuclear winter risks and can incorporate these risks into their targeting plans A very simple way to reduce risks from nuclear winter is to refrain from targeting cities with nuclear weapons. The proposed mechanism behind nuclear winter results from cities burning, not ground bursts on military targets. I’ve spoken with some of the officials in the US defense establishment responsible for nuclear war planning, and they’re well aware of the potential risks from nuclear winter. Of course, being aware of the risks does not guarantee they will have reasoned about the risks well, or have engaged in good risk management practices. However, the fact that this risk is well publicized makes it more likely that nuclear war planners will take steps to minimize blowback risk from climate effects. It’s hard to know to what extent this has been done. Nuclear war plans are classified, and as far as we know current US nuclear war plans do target cities under some circumstances but not under others. However, the defense establishment has access to classified information and models that we civilians do not have, in addition to all the public material. I’m confident that some nuclear war planners have thought deeply about the risks of climate change from nuclear war, even though I don’t know their conclusions or bureaucratic constraints. All else being equal, the knowledge of these risks makes military planners less likely to accidentally cause human extinction. Conclusion This post discussed the three plausible mechanisms of human extinction caused by nuclear weapons. The fact that one of these mechanisms, nuclear winter, wasn’t characterized until the 1980s, is a good reminder of the possibility of unknown unknowns. While nuclear tests provided information about the effects of these weapons, the test environments were significantly different than war environments. Large model uncertainties remain. Given that the greatest existential threat from nuclear war appears to be from climate impacts, it would be great to see more researchers study the climate effects from nuclear war and the resilience capacity of different human groups.

Although nuclear war is the oldest of these technogenic threats to civilization and human survival, and although important steps to restraint, particularly at the end of the Cold War, have been achieved, the nuclear world is increasingly changing in major ways, and in almost entirely dangerous directions. The third “bombs away” phase of the great debate on the nuclear-political question is more consequentially divided than in the first two phases. Even more ominously, most of the momentum lies with the forces that are pulling states toward nuclear-use, and with the radical actors bent on inflicting catastrophic damage on the leading states in the international system, particularly the United States. In contrast, the arms control project, although intellectually vibrant, is largely in retreat on the world political stage. The arms control settlement of the Cold War is unraveling, and the world public is more divided and distracted than ever. With the recent election of President Donald Trump, the United States, which has played such a dominant role in nuclear politics since its scientists invented these fiendish engines, now has an impulsive and uninformed leader, boding ill for nuclear restraint and effective crisis management. Given current trends, it is prudent to assume that sooner or later, and probably sooner, nuclear weapons will again be the used in war. But this bad news may contain a “silver lining” of good news. Unlike a general nuclear war that might have occurred during the Cold War, such a nuclear event now would probably not mark the end of civilization (or of humanity), due to the great reductions in nuclear forces achieved at the end of the Cold War. Furthermore, politics on “the day after” could have immense potential for positive change. The survivors would not be likely to envy the dead, but would surely have a greatly renewed resolution for “never again.” Such an event, completely unpredictable in its particulars, would unambiguously put the nuclear-political question back at the top of the world political agenda. It would unmistakeably remind leading states of their vulnerability It might also trigger more robust efforts to achieve the global regulation of nuclear capability. Like the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that did so much to catalyze the elevated concern for nuclear security in the early Cold War, and like the experience “at the brink” in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the now bubbling nuclear caldron holds the possibility of inaugurating a major period of institutional innovation and adjustment toward a fully “bombs away” future.

Nuclear war was arguably the first existential risk that humanity created. It seems to be a very clear one: a full scale nuclear war leads to human extinction. However, we apply a strict definition of existential risk: only events leading to actual human extinction count. It is actually quite hard to make humanity go completely extinct with nuclear warfare. Cities can get bombed relatively easily, but places with low population density would be much harder to destroy. Therefore, complete extinction because of direct effects of nuclear war, although very important for non-existential reasons, is not the main existential threat. The main route towards extinction because of nuclear war would probably be nuclear winter. In case of a nuclear war, firestorms from targeted cities would create giant columns of smoke which rise high into the stratosphere. They might remain there for about five years, blocking sunlight. This could lead to a global temperature decrease of seven degrees during those years, after which temperatures would slowly return to normal. This fall in temperature would make growing food impossible in many of the currently most productive areas, probably leading to mass hunger. There is a possibility that nuclear war would cause extinction, but the possibility is only very slight, estimated at 0.1% for the next hundred years. It is actually quite hard to make humanity go completely extinct with nuclear warfare. Cities can get bombed relatively easily, but places with low population density would be much harder to destroy.

So what does a better system look like? I don’t have a complete answer, and I don’t believe any one person does. But I think I see a rough framework emerging. Part of it is provided by the ecological civilisation proposed by Jeremy Lent, one of the greatest thinkers of our age. Other elements come from Kate Raworth’s doughnut economics and the environmental thinking of Naomi Klein, Amitav Ghosh, Angaangaq Angakkorsuaq, Raj Patel and Bill McKibben. Part of the answer lies in the notion of “private sufficiency, public luxury”. Another part arises from the creation of a new conception of justice based on this simple principle: every generation, everywhere, shall have an equal right to the enjoyment of natural wealth.

I believe our task is to identify the best proposals from many different thinkers and shape them into a coherent alternative. Because no economic system is only an economic system but intrudes into every aspect of our lives, we need many minds from various disciplines – economic, environmental, political, cultural, social and logistical – working collaboratively to create a better way of organising ourselves that meets our needs without destroying our home.

This sexual revolution confronts abuse of power at every level. And this book deal explicitly with abuse, exploitation and trauma, not just as individual problems but as political phenomena. This logic of abuse is central to the way in which power operates – from world governments, institutions and industries, to individual families. This book argues that many traditional models of social organisation, from the nuclear family to parliamentary politics, do not simply enable abuse – they require abuse. They require that exploitation, bullying, male supremacy and white supremacy be normal and normalised. Our culture is shaped and reshaped by abuse, and by the scars it leaves on the individual and collective psyche. But abuse has rarely been deemed worthy of political attention. Instead, where it is spoken of at all, it is usually something that has to be borne in private, healed in isolation - and that's useful, because it places all the responsibility for change on the individual who suffers, and not on the systems that cause suffering. Just in case anyone fails to get the message, those who do speak out about abuse can expect punishment and public humiliation, especially if they are women. But speaking about abuse, exploitation and trauma are crucial if we want to understand how oppression operates. People who learn from a young age that adults are allowed to hurt children, that men are allowed to hurt women, that police officers are allowed to hurt people from marginalised communities, that the strong are allowed to prey upon the weak and the weak cannot rely on help arriving, will reshape their imaginations around that narrative. They will be more, not less, likely to accept bullying and exploitation as a normal part of their working lives. And this logic of exploitation has been upheld, time and time again, in recent years of political upheaval. Even as women and children have begun to speak out in ever-more confident chorus about their experience of abuse, known abusers have been elevated to the highest positions of public office and political responsibility. Watching violent bullies be rewarded hurts in a way that is hard to look away from if you have been a victim of abuse yourself, as a very great many of us have, even if we don't like to think of ourselves that way. Victims, in fact, routinely seem to burden themselves with the shame that should properly belong to those who victimise others. In fact, the amount of shame still attached to being a person who has experienced violence or persecution today has everything to do with the desire to silence victims and normalise abuse. Again, on every level, from the institutional to the individual, the attempt to come to terms with the injustice and scale of abuse has created chaos. People and communities have torn themselves apart trying to square their desire for justice with their desire not to think about wrongdoing. Victims and survivors have struggled to hold the centre of themselves in the storm of cognitive dissonance that buffets anyone who knows that something terrible and unfair has happened to them, but who still thinks on some level that it was their fault, that they're wrong to complain, that they don't deserve to be believed, that they cannot allow themselves to believe the evidence of their own experience. Revolution does not begin in the streets. Revolution begins in the head, and in the heart. Sexual revolution happens whenever a person decides, in the face of years of carefully nurtured self-loathing, in a culture that tells her every day that her body does not belong to her, that her sexuality is a commodity for men's consumption, that her pleasure does not matter, that her ambition makes her unlikeable and her desires make her disgusting and her exhaustion make her weak - sexual revolution happens when a person who has learned all these things decides to like herself anyway and to treat herself as if she were a person worthy of respect, as if she were a person who does not owe her body or her energy or the work of her life as the rent for existing in a man's world. When a woman behaves as if her life matters and her happiness counts, a tiny revolution takes place. And when many millions of them do, all at once, the world changes for ever. As Shulamith Firestone wrote in The Dialectic of Sex: Just as to ensure elimination of economic classes requires the revolt of the underclass (the proletariat) and, in a temporary dictatorship, their seizure of the means of production, so to assure the elimination of sexual classes requires the revolt of the underclass (women) and the seizure of control of reproduction: not only the full restoration to women of ownership of their own bodies, but also their (temporary) seizure of control of human fertility.

Historically, both Marxist and queer embrace of justice is marked by ambivalence. For Marx, justice was deeply entangled in ideology as there is no possibility of justice under capitalism and no need for justice after communism (Jakobsen 2011: 21). Furthermore, justice is traditionally associated with the idea of redistribution of goods and wealth, which leaves unaddressed the question of control of means of production (ibid). As sexual relations are also relations of production, this is also significant for queer politics. However, justice’s opposing term, namely ‘freedom’, has also lost its attraction for contemporary Marxist and queer-feminist approaches. As outlined by queer theorists, the neoliberal interplay between politics of freedom and politics of sex reveals the inextricable link between sexual freedom/choice and capitalism (ibid.: 23). Critical theorists are consequently drawing on the vocabulary of transnational in/justice to examine economic and political disenfranchisement in the era of neoliberal globalization. In addressing issues of economic justice and sociopolitical participation, feminist and queer scholars highlight the role of sexuality in addition to the gendered division of labour (Alexander 1997; Cornell 1998; Nussbaum 2000; Lorenz and Kuster 2007). They also draw connections between economic justice and sexual justice (Duggan 2003; Bedford and Jakobsen 2009), and reveal the heteronormative bias that fosters international gender and development policies (Bedford 2009; Lind 2010). In light of these discussions, this volume explores to what extent desire can provide an analytical tool in understanding sexual and economic justice. We are confronted with the following questions: How do justice, desire and economy intersect and conflict? How does their intertwinement form a complex dynamic of differential meanings, social effects and political affects? Taking these questions as the point of departure, the aim of this volume is to expound an understanding of economy as a key ingredient in the dynamic interplay between modes of subjectivity, governance and social life, and to explore how specific and different ways of doing economy may evolve from these dynamics. Employing feminist, queer and postcolonial perspectives, the volume focuses on questions of justice that emerge from economic processes. While these are questions of equality, distribution and recognition, we propose that they are also questions of desire and that analyzing justice through the lens of desire – as well as considering desire through the lens of justice – may prove useful to develop analytical tools for exploring economic processes. Since we understand analytical tools not merely as descriptive but also as unfolding performative potential, we suggest that the rethinking of justice/desire can foster transformative forces. Despite the possible heteronormative connotations of romance, ‘roses’, as a metaphor of political protest, may signify a desire that is much more multifarious, a desire to subvert the distinction between natural needs and deviant desires, a desire that is sexual in polymorphous ways, perhaps also queer. Desire is considered both a motor of economy and a force to be generated and disciplined by economy. Challenging the presumption of economy as sexuality’s other, we claim that desire is central to socio-economic processes, to the sphere of consumption, to working worlds, and to their modes of subjectivity; last but not least, it is embedded in economic exploitation, which often implies a lack of sexual autonomy and vulnerability to sexual violence (Castro Varela and Dhawan 2011b). We focus on desire as a key term that facilitates exploring the entanglements of economy and sexuality. Like desire, sexuality is not separate from the ways in which we feed, clothe and house ourselves. Sex is always-already ‘contaminated’ by economic needs, wants and conditions, and ways of organizing sexual relations influence economic processes. Current global economic processes constitute specific sexual identities and practices that collaborate in relations of exploitation, domination and subjectivation, and they are often heteronormative (Kulpa and Mizielinska 2011; Castro Varela and Dhawan 2011b; Lind 2013). At the same time we also argue that heteronormativity is not the only modality for the regulation of desire, even as the salience of heteronormativity cannot be simply subverted by fostering non-normative sexualities and genders and the transgression of heteronorms. Given the multiplicities of rationalities and technologies of power, we propose an approach that draws on queer theory, but does not reduce its scope to questions of gender and sexuality alone, instead understanding sex, gender, sexuality and desire as intricately intertwined and necessarily articulated through a whole set of complex, socio-historical differences. This view, which may be captured under the buzzword ‘intersectionality’ (Crenshaw 1989), has been extensively discussed within queer studies (Cohen 2005; Eng et al. 2005; Dietze et al. 2007; Hashemi et al. 2013). Accordingly, desire is understood to have constitutive effects not only on subjectivities and intimate social relations but also on normative symbolic orders and macro-political processes and institutions. Hierarchical gender arrangements, relations of exploitation and their colonial histories equally structure sexuality. We propose that queer theory and queer politics uphold the idea of a multiplicity of perspectives – the impossibility of foreclosing meaning or forms of social organizing – and accordingly fostering ongoing political struggles and non-dominant futures. The various chapters of this book explore how such forms of queer, feminist and postcolonial theory and politics, which are mutually productive, may contribute to more just and more desirable economies. Herein, the term ‘justice’ is critically engaged with in order to explore both its enabling and disempowering functions in the context of debates about economy and desire. Instead of functioning as an ideal and universal norm, the term ‘justice’ is employed as a contestable term; it is open to debate and it offers possibilities for political practice. This means asking questions about the distribution of resources, forms of value and modes of recognition and representation. In order to articulate the demand for sexual justice as a crucial aspect of the struggles for economic justice, our understanding of justice must be reconfigured, so that struggles for economic justice do not marginalize sexual injustice and its economic consequences, even as struggles for sexual rights address economic issues (Bedford and Jakobsen 2009; Castro Varela and Dhawan 2011b). A postcolonial-queer-feminist critique of justice neither entails a rejection of the idea of justice for its Eurocentric origins nor claims to ‘recover’ pure, uncontaminated and authentic non-Western notions of justice (Randeria 2002; Dhawan 2011a, 2011b). Rather, justice may be understood as a ‘travelling norm’ whose roots must be distinguished from the routes of the idea (Gilroy 1995). The three sections of the volume, ‘Entanglements of desire and economy’, ‘Intersections of sexual and economic justice’ and ‘The political economy of queer embodiments’, respectively address specific aspects of the key concepts outlined here. Furthermore, the variable interdependencies and unexpected interrelations of all three moments are peppered throughout the volume. Following such a complex, dynamic and open-ended approach enables the volume to draw attention to divergent, if not contradictory, geo-political formations in an unevenly globalized world, including countless internal differentiations that arise due to differing power relations and systems of knowledge. What difference does it make, for example, to employ the concept of neoliberalism, capitalism or cultural economy in order to understand sexualized class relations – in a Western rural region or a megacity in the global South? Why should one refer to love, desire or the erotic as a means of explaining property relations and the way they are – heteronormatively – reproduced? When is it politically more promising to draw on universal human rights than to highlight the unacknowledged legal pluralism in, for example, India or South Africa? What about queer desires that wish to participate in local power struggles of civil society rather than become cosmopolitan by adopting transnational discourses (cf. Gressgård, Chapter 5 in this volume)? Instead of answering such questions in a way that would subsume them under one overarching framework, this volume seeks to incite debate and a multiplicity of perspectives and politics.

This book picks out the patterns in the contemporary wreckage of sex and power, seeking a map to a more life-sustaining world. It starts in the tender, vicious underbelly of political economy. It starts with sex. Sexual freedom doesn’t exist. Not yet. In most democracies, most of us are legally free to love who we want, live how we like and pursue pleasure however we choose – but only in the same way that most of us are free to buy a Maserati, or a mansion, or an election. In practice, most people cannot afford sexual freedom. Most women, and most LGBTQ people of all genders, cannot afford sexual liberation – because the social costs of simply naming their desires are still so high. Sexual liberation cannot be achieved while sexual power is unequally distributed. Today, in almost every society on earth, straight men still have far more social, political and economic agency than women, girls and LGBTQ people. Patriarchy and white supremacy are political systems that give men more power over women and white people over Black, brown and Indigenous people. This isn’t power that all white people and all men have. It’s not power that all of them asked for. But it’s power they were raised to expect, power that feels painful to lose. It is structural power, economic power, power that means that, on the whole, white people are richer, freer and more independent than women and queer people of colour, still negotiate for sexual and bodily autonomy under conditions of inequality. The best way to correct power imbalances in society is for the weaker players to organise collectively. When women come together to argue, for example, for a change in the way rape is prosecuted, that is collective bargaining. When women being to share stories of sexual harassment at work and to demand that there be stronger consequences for abusive employees, that is collective bargaining. When people who can become pregnant decide not to do so until the material conditions of parenthood improve, that too is collective bargaining. That’s what sexual revolution is all about. You can’t have a sexual revolution without addressing sexual violence for the same reason you can’t have an economic revolution without addressing workers’ rights. A sexual ‘revolution’ that simply makes sex easier to access for people who have more power is in no way radical. In fact, any sort of revolution that preaches liberation while leaving the rich and powerful free to exploit, bully and abuse will inevitably begin to rot in the damp heat of its own contradictions. This sexual revolution is different. This sexual revolution goes deeper, because it deals not just with sexual license, but with sexual liberation. It is not just about freedom from, but freedom to. It is a fundamental reimagining of gender roles and sexual rules, work and love, trauma and violence, pleasure and power. The new sexual revolution is a feminist one. And the most important thing to realise about the sexual revolution is that it is already happening. Here’s why it is happening. Not very long ago, power in most human societies were organised around a strict gender binary, based roughly on reproductive sex. There were men and women, and men were strong and powerful, and women were nurturing and powerless, and women were property of men. On the basis of bimodal sex, humans were forced to take on the roles of soldiers or victims in a strict gendered power hierarchy. Half of humanity was coralled into the political category of ‘womanhood’ – which meant that their bodies and desires were men’s to dispose of. Their role was to care for men and boys, to bear and raise children, and to take only a decorative role in public life unless they happened to be a hereditary monarch. The earliest political theorists explicitly excluded women and children from the ‘social contract’ that is the foundation of modern statehood. The economic and social structures of every modern culture were built on the bones of those assumptions. All of us were born and raised in those structures. But over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, something changed. Advances in medical science meant that, for the first time in human history, women were able to reliably control their own fertility. Safe medical abortion and advances in contraceptive technology meant that women and girls could – in theory – decide when and if they had children, which meant that the stakes of human sexuality and society changed for ever. It meant that it was no longer so easy to keep women and girls shamed into sexual compliance and dependent on marriage. The consequences of this technological shift have been profound, and we have only begun to cope with them. Today, despite the devastating impact of pandemic and recessions on women’s employment, there are more women and queer people in the traditional male workplace than there have been for centuries; more women and queer people making art, making laws, making history. Meanwhile, the once fundamental social structures of family and faith are falling apart. More and more women and girls are boycotting marriage and motherhood. In fact, women’s increasing freedom has led to a demographic time bomb, as parenthood becomes an unsustainable choice in developed nations that still refuse to pay for the work of care and childrearing. This is work that has, until now, been mostly done by women, mostly for free. But as motherhood becomes harder and less affordable, as governments refuse to pay for work of social care, and as women refuse to be bullied into making babies in impossible circumstances, birth rates are plummeting across and beyond the Global North. To put it another way, women and queer people, particularly women and queer people of colour, are simply refusing to be held hostage to male fragility. They are refusing in numbers too big to ignore. As economist and journalist Paul Mason observes his work Clear Bright Future, anti-feminism is now a key recruiting ground for the new right, a phenomenon Mason traces back to: The reversal of male biological power, through birth control and equal rights legislation, that took place during the last decades of the twentieth century… In the fifty years following the rollout of the contraceptive pill, developed world society has experiences what Federal Reverse chief Janey Yellen called ‘reproductive shock’. The results do not come anywhere close to women’s liberation… [but] the basic assumption behind misogyny, that women are destined to stick their biologically determined role as child-bearers and unpaid domestic workers, has been blown to smithereens. Alongside these shifts in power relations between men and women, the ‘basic assumptions’ of heterosexuality and gender identity have also been exploded. The gender binary itself is being superseded as a form of social control. Since the early 2010s there has been a seismic cultural shift in the cultural visibility of trans and non-binary people. A great many young people in particular are coming out en masse as transgender, genderqueer or non-binary, and that’s a positive change. It is a great deal more normal to be openly trans than it was even decades ago, but social conservatives are loudly resisting this change, as are many political-interest groups afraid of a world beyond the gender binary. In this book, when I talk about ‘men’ and ‘women’ and what they do, I am not talking about biological essentialism. This book does not subscribe to any authoritarian view of gender that divides the world into immutable biological categories, pink and blue, binary and biddable, nor does it believe in imposing political identity on diverse human bodies without their consent. Essentialism is invariably conservative. When I write about ‘men’ or ‘women’, I am including everyone who locates themselves in those categories. I identify as genderqueer myself, meaning that the category of ‘women’ does not fully describe any lived experience. Gender roles and gender stereotypes are imposed on our bodies from birth, without our consent – and the process of learning to occupy the gender you have been assigned is often traumatic. A great many cis men I interviewed in the course of writing this book carry profound emotional scars from decades of savage social policing, of being punished for any deviance from perceived ‘masculine’ norms. There is no universal experience of womanhood or of manhood. Instead, this book describes many common experiences of sex, consent and power, and invites every reader of every gender to try them on for size.

Working in ‘the economy’ alone couldn’t satisfy our needs. It still cannot. Trashpicking is just one example of an economic innovation by poor, queer, and working-class people in response to laws and policies that ignore the needs of marginalized folks. Yet rarely are these innovations acknowledged in traditional economic study; they become visible only as ‘alternatives to’ capitalism, and only if economic gains are quantifiable. In development studies, such activities are denigrated as ‘economies of affection’, viewed within that framework as a cause for poverty and a hindrance to progress (Escobar 1995; Scott 1996). The full range of economic activities enacted by poor, queer, and working-class people is missing from economic analysis. As noted by Binnie, class is an analytic of power by which people are differentiated from one another on the basis of differential access to material inequalities. Binnie argues for the integration of class into an intersectional analysis of sexuality, and an integration of sexuality into an intersectional analysis of class. This chapter answers Binnie’s call by utilizing an intersectional sexuality–class analysis of different economic innovations by poor, queer, and working-class folks. I have a queer desire. I want to convince you that there are worlds of economic activities that go unnoticed in traditional economic study. My goal is to explain the benefits of those ‘other activities’ – the alternative capitalist and noncapitalist activities – despite their being marked as ‘outside’ wage-earning capitalism. I want you to value them because they matter to people’s survival. To do this, I have to blend some strangely personal queer, poor, and working-class stories with a scholarly attempt to dethrone ‘the economy’ as a unified, closed system. Economic bodies: multiplying vulnerable desires I argue that queer desires inspire people to engage in clusters of nonnormative economic arrangements. These clusters of economic activity can best be understood metaphorically as ‘economic bodies’. I imagine these economic bodies engaging the world much like living and nonliving bodies interacting with other living and nonliving bodies. They take in nutrients and excrete waste. They create and destroy, mimic and hide, hibernate, reproduce, and die (although not necessarily in that order).2 One could consider capitalism as one type of economic body, although certainly not the only type. Economic bodies consist of people, tools, equipment, technical devices, algorithms, as well as non-human substances (e.g. food, plants, minerals, currencies), and actions such as labor, exchanges, and gifting. Economic bodies can exist at a large scale, similarly to how ‘capitalism’ is conceived, or at smaller scales such as micro-economies, families, groups, and individuals.3 The relationships of and between economic bodies can be understood only through engaging a radical analysis that incorporates intersectional analytics of power, including but not limited to gender, race/ethnicity, class, sexuality, nationality, embodiment, and other structural forms of power.4 Why not then use the term ‘actor’ as developed by Callon and Latour in actornetwork theory (also known as ANT)5 (Callon and Latour 1981; Callon 1986, 2005; Latour 1987, 2005)? Latour’s ‘actor’ calls to mind a human being who acts in relation to others, and whose actions can only be understood in connection to others, similarly to how I describe economic bodies functioning relationally to other bodies. Callon describes ‘actors’ as being made up of ‘human bodies but also of prostheses, tools, equipment, technical devices, algorithms, etc.’ (Callon 2005: 4). My description of economic bodies again aligns, although it elaborates further. My observations of green, queer, and alternative economies (Heiliger 2011, 2012, 2013) leads me to articulate three reasons to use the metaphor of ‘bodies’ in this chapter – rather than ‘actor’, ‘economy’, or ‘economic actor’ – to describe an assemblage of people, parts, relationships, and actions that make up economic activities: (1) to pluralize and multiply economic systems; (2) to emphasize the vulnerability of the human bodies living and working under conditions of structural inequality;6 and (3) to utilize the power of metaphor to insert images of vulnerable economies in the minds of readers. While ANT allows for a multiplying and plurality of economies via its concept of ‘networks’, in which multiple ‘actors’ can (inter)act, ANT does not meet the other two characteristics of green/queer/ alternative economies.7 My purpose in using ‘bodies’ as a metaphor is to call to mind both the humans included in economic activities and their vulnerability, a vulnerability mirrored in economic bodies. In Precarious Life, feminist and queer scholar Judith Butler writes that the vulnerability of our bodies is what connects us to one another. Our bodies signal ‘dependency, vulnerability, agency: the skin and flesh expose us to the gaze of others, but also to touch and to violence’ (2004: 26). This vulnerability of bodies is also what creates porousness: a body’s capacity to help and to harm, to be assisted and to be hurt is interwoven with the dependency of bodies (Butler 2004). Economic bodies are equally vulnerable, a point which I address later in this section. I pluralize the metaphor of body, using ‘economic bodies’ (rather than economic body) to counter powerful existing metaphors that promote the idea of a singular, unified, economic totality such as ‘the body of Capitalism’ and ‘the Market’. In making this argument, I align with Gibson-Graham (1996, 2006) in recognizing multiple forms of capitalism and the need to partially dis-unify the powerful ideology of ‘the economy’ or ‘Capitalism’ as a closed system. I also draw on embodiment theorists in recognizing the porousness of bodies, and on queer theorists to articulate how queer desires are pursued through economic bodies. The communal, polymorphous, intersubjective components of queer, feminist, and embodiment theories amplify the metaphor of ‘bodies’. The communal, polymorphous, and intersubjective components also diffuse the idea of a monolithic economic process such as ‘the market’ or ‘capitalism’ into easily recognizable clusters of activity. It becomes possible to see my mother’s teaching job, neighborhood foodsharing, charity clothing donations, and trashpicking as a connected cluster of economic activity that enabled my family’s survival, rather than as a capitalist economic activity (teaching job) and several alternative capitalist and noncapitalist activities. Therefore, reading this metaphor of economic bodies through recent scholarship allows a more complex picture of multiple economic processes, particularly those utilized by poor and other marginalized people as survival strategies. It may appear that the difference between ‘body’ and ‘bodies’ as an economic metaphor is so slight as to be insignificant. Yet recent studies by cognitive scientists Thibodeau and Boroditsky (2011, 2013) demonstrate that even slight, oneword differences in the metaphor used to describe a social or political issue can have profound impacts upon decision-making processes by individuals. Metaphors influence the kinds of solutions we think of and also direct us towards solutions that are consistent with the metaphor (Thibodeau and Boroditsky 2011). Furthermore, metaphors influence our thinking whether or not we are explicitly aware of the metaphor’s role in our decision-making process (Thibodeau and Boroditsky 2013). Therefore, I argue that those who consider all economic activities part of a singular, unified entity such as ‘the economy’ will seek out economic solutions for a singular, unified economy, convinced these are the best solutions regardless of data. If the same people are willing to think of economies as bodies – as lots of different kinds of ‘people’ moving through the world interacting with other ‘people’ – they will look for economic solutions that meet the needs of diverse people who will function best by interacting with others to meet their needs.8 I propose bodies as a metaphor for economies because human bodies are not closed systems; they have complex interactions with other bodies and their environments via border crossings of flesh and consciousness ‘more porous than previously imagined’ (Grosz 2001). My family’s intimate engagement with other people’s refuse is one example of blurred boundaries: between us and other families; between work-for-pay and nonmarket activity; and between what no longer has possibility (trash) and what newly has possibility (trash-turned-treasure). Klapeer and Schönpflug concept of ‘queer commons’ in Chapter 9 of this volume illustrates the porous boundaries of human bodies more fully. If one considers identity as something formed in relation to others, rather than owned by one’s individual self – as argued by Klapeer and Schönpflug – then my family’s class identity and my mother’s queer desires formed in relation to multiple others, both within and adjacent to our class. Human contact is porous in its overlaps: fingerprints left on trash meet fingerprints on trash-turned-treasure,9 creating liminal spaces where my family’s queerly classed identity was formed and re-formed. We interacted with one another as family members sharing the same material and social resources, and we brushed up against those whose trash became a means to my family’s desires and survival. Moira Gatens (1996) argues that the permeability and transitivity of human bodies is possible with any ‘body’ with which we have an affective relation, including corporate social bodies. Pushing out from Gatens, I suggest that economic bodies, as a form of social body, are controlled through human forces, behave in human ways, actively engage with other economic bodies, and utilize forms of social control and power. Bodies are vulnerable to racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and ableism (Butler 2004), which serve neoliberal aims through their visual and discursive association both with certain human bodies and with nonnormative economic bodies. Nonnormative economic bodies include intelligent, deliberate, and relationship-making processes such as bartering, gifting, trading, careshift collectives, trashpicking, and repurposing. However, these economic activities are frequently racialized, feminized, eroticized, and colonized, imagined in economic discourse as geographically located in the global south or in ‘inferior’ areas of the global north (e.g. inner-city urban or lower-class rural) (Escobar 1995). What we imagine about bodies interrelates with the socio-historic formations of economic realities and current understandings of economic ‘truth’. Thus stereotypes about human bodies are transferred onto what we imagine about economic bodies, and imaginings about economic bodies cross the borders of ‘social bodies’ and become soaked up by the sponginess of the diverse human bodies that labor in the environments of that particular economic body. The bodies of the people in an economy – in an economic body – create meaning for that economy. What we imagine about bodies, our own and others’, has powerful effects on how we relate to those bodies. This transitivity of bodies from material to imagined and back again in simultaneous time, combined with the spongelike ability of bodies to hold multiple meanings, is what I refer to here as the porousness of bodies, both human and economic. How then might we use this porousness of bodies to imagine and engage in productively promiscuous economies? I take up this question in this chapter, offering five examples of porously queer economies that function like human bodies:10 a single-mother desiring beautiful furniture, art, and possibility despite living in poverty; a homeless person making a livelihood on their own terms; medically altering one’s body to better match one’s gender regardless of age or ability to pay; moving cross-country despite being told that persons with disabilities ought to be satisfied with their current living situations; and creating social healing through cultivating queer black intergenerational community across state lines and in the absence of legal ties. I demonstrate that these queer desires inspire complex weavings of market, alternative market, and nonmarket economic activities. These blended activities in pursuit of queer desires are what I call ‘queer economies’. Queer economies I define queer economies as economic bodies animated by queer desires. J. Jack Halberstam defines queerness as referring ‘to nonnormative logics and organizations of community, sexual identity, embodiment, and activity in space and time’ (2005: 6). The ‘queer’ part of queer desires, in this chapter, signals desires shaped by nonnormative logics of community, sexual identity, embodiment, and activity – including economic processes – in space and time. When queer desires motivate economic bodies, we can see that queer economies are shaped and moved by human bodies pursuing queer desires. Because queer economies blend economic activities, these kinds of economic bodies have radical potential for transformation, extending options to survive and thrive through deliberately relational activities such as bartering, trading, careshift collectives, and trashpicking. Another feature of queer economies is their engagement with the erotic. In her seminal essay ‘Toward a Queer Ecofeminism’ (1997), Greta Gaard articulates how Western culture’s devaluing of women, nature, and colonized peoples parallels a devaluation of both queerness and the erotic. Scholars such as Arturo Escobar (1995) and Catherine Scott (1996) have made similar claims that economic development discourse conceptually connects nature, women, indigenous people, and colonized nations. Given Gaard’s eco-feminist theorization that colonization projects attempting to stamp out queer expressions of gender and sexuality simultaneously created a fear of the erotic (1997), I am intrigued by the idea that erotophobia might be preventing us from valuing a range of economic bodies. Can we conceive of nonnormative economies as queerly erotic bodies, sparking and enflaming queer desires? I can imagine them flaming, butch, dyke, crip, leather, trans*, closeted, polyamorous – even dandy! Yet I wish also to include ‘punks’ and ‘welfare queens’ amongst these queerly defined and imagined economic bodies that inspire queer desire (Cohen 1997: 438). For Cathy J. Cohen, using ‘queer’ politically allows for an expansive definition of identities linked to sexuality, labor, and visibility, a definition that includes those who blur gender/ sexual boundaries as well as unmarried mothers or youth who reject capitalism in favor of anarchy. When our queer economies rub up against the skin of other queer economies, there lies powerful potential for desire and economy outside the (re)productive. I suspect many forms of queer economy go unnoticed because they represent refusals to ‘sleep with’ or ‘be faithful to’ a white hetero-malecapitalism. Thus, just as lesbians and queer women may be punished for refusing sexual availability to heteronormative demands, so too are queer economies deplored, ignored, and decimated for cheeky ‘failures’ to live up to capitalist expectations of profit, efficiency, and progress. One example of a ‘failure’ to properly engage capitalism is that of contemporary trashpickers in LA County. They are typecast as homeless, male, dirty, and incapable of making rational decisions for their own well-being.11 Yet evidence about scavenging demonstrates that at least some of those assumptions are false: collecting recyclables is a consistent means to make money. It requires skill and awareness, planning and follow-through. Trashpicking also requires patience and a certain amount of strength and mobility, although it doesn’t have to be one’s own legs or arms – wheelchairs and grabber-sticks are useful tools (Farrell 2006). Scavenging can be effective in teams or solo, or by collaborating with someone for company while collecting for oneself. Trashpicking allows for making a livelihood on one’s own terms outside of or in addition to work for pay. I list trashpicking as evidence of queer economy, partly because my own queer survival has depended upon it. I see it in action in every place I have ever traveled or lived. Trash also brushes uncomfortably against the erotic, frequently cast in moral terms as a judgment: as dirty, unclean, something to be discarded and not thought about again. Those who engage in close, embodied contact with trash are categorized in the same way as the trash itself: disposable, unclean, and certainly not compatible with a middle- or upper-class status. At the same time, the embrace of ‘trashiness’ in popular culture – understood as a gendered and sexualized cultural performance – leaves me loath to romanticize trashpicking. It is dirty work, but hardly immoral: one might even argue that repurposing keeps valuable resources out of landfills and reduces greenhouse gasses, thereby improving local environments. This is where feminist, queer, and antiracist theories help us to see the language and practices used to denigrate particular human bodies. I propose that when we hear sexist, racist, ableist, classist, homophobic, or trans*phobic comments, there is an opportunity to observe queer economies that challenge the unity, singularity, and totality of ‘capitalism’. Why do I suggest that economies function like bodies? Contemporary English-language economic discourse frequently touts both the singularity of economy – ‘the economy is sick’ – and economy’s presumed human qualities – ‘the economy is sick’. Existing descriptions of economies as gendered, racialized, disabled, and otherwise anthropomorphized in human terms bolster my claim that economies are already conceived at least partially in embodied terms. The anthropomorphized terms rely on a Western framework that values certain ‘masculine-affiliated’ qualities over ‘feminine-affiliated’ others. Catherine Scott illuminates that the gendered nature of economic discourse is fundamental to imbuing imperial and capitalist regimes with unearned power (1995: 4). Yet within this gendered, anthropomorphized language is ‘the economy’s’ Achilles heel. The tendency to anthropomorphize ‘the economy’ also serves to break down an image of the economy as singular: ‘the’ economy is variously described as masculine, feminine, hard, soft, sick, dying, racialized, reproducing, and lazy. In paying attention to such discourses, one can only conclude that ‘the economy’ consistently changes genders, has multiple personalities, or is not as singular in form as dominant hegemonic discourse would lead us to think. Each of these scenarios holds promise for imagining multiple, diverse economic bodies. Those invested in racism, sexism, ableism, erotophobia, heteronormativity, nationalisms, and colonial power are likely to take my suggestion that there are as many kinds of economies as there are types of human bodies as proof of the superiority of capital ‘c’ Capitalism (Gibson-Graham 1996), much as they take for granted the privileges and power granted to bodies upholding whiteness, maleness, wholeness, productivity, reason, heterosexism, the nation-state, and imperialism. My argument is not for them. I suggest thinking of economies as bodies so that those invested in valuing a range of diverse human bodies and relationships can claim our queer economies – our labors in service of queer desires – with the same ferocity that we claim our diverse, queer selves. Benefits of economic bodies The need for an ‘economies as bodies’ framework grew out of my research on two brands from so-called ‘ethical trade’: Café Femenino® and Product (Red)™ (Heiliger 2011, 2012, 2013). These brands and their campaigns are examples of a larger ‘ethical consumerism’ trend in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, which is a social and economic phenomenon encouraging shoppers, primarily in the global North, to buy products that claim to make the world a better place for all. Gibson-Graham’s dismantling of monolithic ‘Capitalism’ into ‘capitalisms’ (1996) proved critical for describing ways Café Femenino’s Fair Trade economic processes differed from Product (Red)’s version of shopping for a social justice cause. However, once I began to analyse economic activities that blended market, alternative market, and nonmarket transactions, Gibson-Graham’s (1996, 2006) framework of diverse economies no longer effectively described what I observed. One flaw in Gibson-Graham’s description of diverse economies is its limited framing of diverse economies as consisting of transactions/labor/ enterprise, which are conceived as taking place in one of three places: (1) markets, (2) alternative markets, or (3) nonmarkets. Depending upon how economic exchanges are compensated, Gibson-Graham categorize economic activities as either (1) capitalist, (2) alternative capitalist, or (3) noncapitalist. Yet economic bodies do not fit neatly into any one of these categories as strictly capitalist, alternative capitalist, or noncapitalist. Instead, diverse economic bodies – including queer economies – overlap different areas of Gibson-Graham’s framework. The actions of economic bodies may include a combination of capitalist, alternative capitalist, and noncapitalist activities. Here, the metaphor of porousness is useful for understanding the ways that queer economies do not have defined boundaries around market, alternative market, and nonmarket activities. Rather, all three of these activities intermingle in queer economies to support nonnormative people as they pursue queer desires for surviving, thriving, and justice. Gibson-Graham’s framework of diverse economies may not preclude the matrix of queer economies. However, it does not adequately theorize the ways queer economies mix economic activities in pursuit of specific queer desires. Contemporary forms of trade such as ethical consumerism are a merger of capitalisms and alternatives such as Fair Trade (Heiliger 2011; Barnett et al. 2008). Instead of describing Café Femenino as functioning under a ‘subsystem of capitalism’ or Product (Red) as ‘a more ethical capitalism’, the framework of economic bodies catalogues each as its own economic body. Both are new economic bodies formed through an economic marriage. These are two different economies that have adapted quickly in response to critiques of globalization, and which play with one another on a global scale, as well as in local markets. In the coffee world, certified Fair Trade became more entrenched in legal documentation, a result that some considered a hindrance to the transformative possibilities of Fair Trade. In response, other forms of ‘ethical’ trade such as transparent contracts and direct trade spun off from Fair Trade and formed their own economic bodies, some of which continue to engage with formal, certified Fair Trade. Other economic bodies previously considered alternative have modified to more closely resemble conventional trade (e.g. Silk brand soy products). Economic offspring form just as human ones do: through unions sometimes clandestine, occasionally sexy, possibly expensive, but generally without much of note to alert the media. This merger of ideological interests (if not actual practices) and social justice concerns is strange. It strikes me that current bodies of ethical economies operate a bit like idealized liberal American upwardly mobile heterosexual couples: practical, yet kind. When I am asked to comment on Fair Trade’s radical potential, I can only say that I am in favor of Fair Trade in the same way that I am in favor of samesex marriage. Whereas same-sex marriage allows increased legal benefits, protections, and responsibilities to those who participate, certified Fair Trade provides increased access to global markets, some financial protection, and responsibilities to a cooperative or group of farmers. Yet it must be noted that both same-sex marriage and certified Fair Trade provide benefits only to those who fit a limited profile. To participate in same-sex marriage in the United States, one must have a recognized citizenship and a legally recognized gender, only one adult partner who consents to marry you, money for a marriage license, and access to a state government that permits same-sex marriage. Fair Trade is similarly limited to those who are privileged. To participate in Fair Trade, one must have certification of Fair Trade practices, ownership of or access to land to grow crops, membership in a cooperative, and access to income or assets. Fair Trade provides major social and economic benefits to farmers and producers who participate, yet Fair Trade does not intervene in the lives of the very poorest farmers in most cases (Jaffee 2007). Certainly there are social, legal, emotional, and economic benefits of both Fair Trade and gay marriage to those who participate. However, both are solutions that work within existing legal and economic structures, systems designed to privilege heterosexuality, whiteness, existing wealth, able-bodiedness, and the nation-state. It is undeniable that some people – some bodies – will never be qualified to participate in either project, whereas others will not want to. As Lyn Ossome argues in Chapter 7 of this volume, a teleological view of economic justice can blind observers to those who cannot ‘move forward’ in the prescribed way. Ossome additionally questions whether justice can possibly be held within the embrace of capitalism. I want to focus primarily on Ossome’s critique of attempting to locate justice within capitalism, for this leaves room to consider how justice might be struggled for across, through, and around capitalism by those who deliberately engage in queer economies – that is, a variety of capitalist, alternative capitalist, and noncapitalist activities motivated by queer desires – in order to survive and thrive. Therefore, I wish to stipulate that while a framework of economic bodies could chart progressive and liberal economies not usually visible within conventional economic discourse, more is needed to develop this concept in order to locate and describe radical, transformative, queer economies of desire. The next section elaborates on what I mean by queer economic bodies, and articulates ways these economies make queer survival possible. Queer desires multiply economic possibilities As I gather evidence of multiple, interrelated, queer economies through a process of witnessing, storytelling, and internet ‘eavesdropping’ (Facebook), it is obvious that queer people – using Cohen’s radical political potential to include a wide range of individuals – co-create communities and economies blending capitalist, alternative capitalist, and noncapitalist activities into economic bodies. These economic bodies become queer economies if the blended activities are used to pursue queer desires shaped by (as Halberstam describes ‘queer’ to indicate) nonnormative logics of community, sexual identity, embodiment, and activity – including economic processes – in space and time. One example of this blending for queer desires is the Trans*ition Fund Collective (T*FC), a Tumblr begun in January, 2012 to ‘highlight the projects of trans* individuals fundraising for their transition while sharing some awesome trans*-friendly products and resources. Submissions are always welcome!’ (T*FC; see website in notes at the end of the chapter). More than 15 individuals posted fundraising efforts and personal stories on T*FC during the first month, primarily for surgery and follow-up care for themselves or a loved one. Some fundraisers sell pre-made items such as video games, sex toys, or books, while others offer their skills in trade or to personalize a special gift. Most create art such as t-shirts, screen prints, jewelry, and paintings to fund medical costs. The remaining Tumblr posts include resources, information about moderators Ariel and Codi, binder giveaways, and general encouragement of trans* individuals. I classify the Trans*ition Fund Collective as a queer economy because it is prompted by the nonnormative desire to medically change one’s body to better match one’s self-identified gender, and it blends capitalist (the medical-industrial complex), alternative capitalist (fundraising via Tumblr), and noncapitalist (bartering, trading, and gifting) economic activities. The T*FC additionally manifests queer desires by not focusing solely on profit; its features include strengthening ties between individuals and their supporters via Tumblr. Its use of multiple economic processes (art, bartering, trade, gifting, collaborating, fundraising) alongside an engagement in the medical-industrial complex is an unconventional kind of economic arrangement, an economic body neither fully inside nor wholly outside a conventional profitmaking capitalism. Additionally, its relationship-building (supporting, connecting, communicating, promoting) across in-person and internet interactions provides a model of community engagement and transformation for other trans* people. Porously queer economies One reason for the intermingling of various economic activities in a porous queer economy may be that the politically queer humans laboring in queer economies are themselves diverse and experience intersecting forms of systemic oppression that must be met with multiple forms of resistance. Engaging in different forms of economic activity – in different kinds of enterprise – is one strategy for resistance and survival. So, too, is engaging in a variety of relationships and forms of community. An example of a queer economy pursuing ‘nonnormative logics and community’ is a Tumblr called To the Other Side of Dreaming (TTOSOD; see website in notes at the end of the chapter). TTOSOD documents the journey of disability justice/transformative justice activists Mia Mingus and Stacey ‘Cripchick’ Milbern to move together from the US south to the Bay Area of California, despite immense economic and social limitations to mobility faced by people with disabilities. In pursuing this endeavor, they said to their communities in the blogosphere: [We] have decided to live together and create/cultivate interdependent queer disabled korean diasporic radical women of color home together. We are embarking on a journey together to put pieces of disability justice into practice, love each other and live on the other side of dreaming. A huge part of this is our need, as crips, as queers, and women of color, as korean (and all) diasporic people; we need each other and we need you. (TTOSOD) Mingus and Milbern ask for assistance finding affordable, accessible housing and creating a community care collective in Berkeley, California, to assist with Milbern’s needs until the state of CA approves her application and provides home assistive care. They transgress complicated state regulations and social norms that make it difficult for persons with disabilities to move. They explicitly name love and healing a variety of inter-related traumas as part of their relationship-building. The response towards To the Other Side of Dreaming in the first two weeks was remarkable: members of their online and in-person community offered advice and connections to affordable housing and began creating a schedule for a careshift collective. Some online community members sold books, while another friend organized an Etsy shop to raise money for their move and transition. The kinds of support To the Other Side of Dreaming required to prepare to move across the United States differs from the kinds of day-to-day support needed after moving and settling in. Questions of quantity of assistance as well as quality of relationships are critical. Enough people have to be involved to avoid burnout – and those who commit to assisting need to be honest about what they can contribute and for how long. Some ‘allies’ stuck around to provide access for less than six months, perhaps not knowing or caring how their absence can shift a situation of thriving to one of surviving. TTOSOD, as queer economy, relies particularly on creativity, flexibility, and interdependence, as well as access to money, able-bodied persons with access, and state services. In Chapter 7 of this volume, Lyn Ossome challenges the teleological view of most discussions of economic justice, and her arguments apply here: that TTOSOD remains a functioning queer economy, but one that defies the linear narrative of progress and invites the question whether rubbing queer economies against other queer economies is always or necessarily pleasurable, particularly when some economies operate from greater privileges. Queer economies, queer relationships Like other economic bodies, queer economies engage in relationship-making and a variety of economic processes for survival of nonnormative human bodies. Some of these processes may look like a poor imitation of capitalisms – for example, so-called ‘economies of affection’ with activities such as gifting, trading, bartering, trashpicking, and repurposing. However, I would argue they no more mock capitalisms than a dildo mocks a penis. Each of these noncapitalist exchanges offers relational pleasures and responsibilities. Profit-making is not the sole point of these economic activities. Relationships and tool-usage matter as much as form and purpose. Gibson-Graham (1999) and Escobar (1995) reveal that a Western ideological framework invisibilizes some economic activities, while denigrating and calling for the destruction of others. Success and survival within this context become linked to one’s ability to perform as an ideal ‘rational’ economic actor for capitalism. As Escobar has argued, ‘through economic sciences (classical political economy) and broader philosophical conceptions (derived from the Enlightenment, utilitarianism, empiricism), this system produced a certain subjectivity, namely, that embodied in the modern producing subject’ (2005: 142). Cultivating a sense of the profit motive was seen as a crucial component of becoming an ideal producer for the global market, while gift-giving, charity, bartering, and other forms of noncapitalist exchange were ridiculed as being non-rational and non-productive (Escobar 1995; Harvey 2005; Scott 1995). My fifth example of a queer economy embraces many ‘nonrational’ economic activities. Mobile Homecoming (MBHC) is designed by Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, black queer feminist poet and revolutionary, and her partner, Julia Wallace, revolutionary black queer filmmaker, to record the stories of queer black elders in the US. They reached out to online and in-person communities to raise funds for a mobile home to travel to the homes of queer black elders to conduct interviews. Gumbs and Wallace build relationships and raise money through holding freedom schools, selling poetry and books, creating films and teaching resources available online for free and for sale, sharing meals, asking for donations of money, love, and support, and connecting with other queer radicals in North Carolina, USA, and around the globe. According to Gumbs and Wallace’s MBHC (see website in notes at the end of the chapter), the point of their work is to heal, love, and honor black queers, and to support other revolutionary relationships. MBHC is explicitly not a nonprofit. They write: We understand that the modes of survival in our black queer communities which include: – social support organizing – artistic creativity – spiritual transformation – revolutionary interpersonal relationships are our key resources as we transform the meaning of life. (MBHC website) MBHC is queer economy for its intentional mixing of monetary exchange, creative resourcefulness, and deliberate community-building meant to generate love and structural healing. Celebrating the full range of black queerness fundamentally shapes MBHC and affiliated projects. ‘Community’ is defined not by geographic boundaries, nor by boundaries around race or gender, but by reaching out to like-minded social revolutionaries working for justice. There are thousands of people who belong to Gumbs and Wallace’s community – their project of celebrating black queer love and honoring queer intergenerational connection through listening projects and recording history clearly speaks to many. This is one example of how queer economies function – through connections, networks of respect and mutuality, and by speaking truth to power. Because ‘the economy’ is never enough: desiring (more) queer economic bodies In this chapter, I analyse five examples of queer economies to begin to think through what makes queer economies queer, and what makes queer economies valuable. In considering what makes queer economies queer, first, they are a type of economic body animated by queer desires. Economic bodies are inherently relational. Second, queer economies differ conceptually from ‘the economy’, because they are not a singular, unified entity like ‘Capitalism’ – they are multiple and allow us to ‘have some more’. Third, queer economies differ from Gibson-Graham’s framing of multiple economies (as capitalisms, alternative capitalisms, or noncapitalisms) because queer economies – like many economic bodies – weave together two or more kinds of economic activities in pursuit of queer desires. Finally, queer economies function differently from other economic bodies because they focus on nonnormative arrangements of community and relationship-building while pursuing queer desires. The value of queer economies comes from this bundle of characteristics. The relationship-making aspects of queer economies are as important as their plurality and their blending of economic activities. Relationship-making – between people and between economies – enables queer economies to sidestep larger structural forces that disenfranchise queer people and thwart queer desires. Specifically, TTOSOD and MBHC name desires such as love and healing personal and structural wounds as key goals motivating the activities of their economic bodies. Attempting to diffuse or heal structural harms is also clear in T*FC’s use of Tumblr to provide emotional support for trans* youth who experience social pressure to pretend to be the sex/gender assigned to them at birth. Scavengers like my family and trashpickers in Los Angeles have a nonnormative relationship with trash, which pushes back against structural norms that insist ‘nice people’ spend money to pursue their desires or that those who don’t have money don’t deserve to thrive. One reason queer economies might be difficult to identify and describe is that many are utilizing forms of alternative and noncapitalist exchange that are typically categorized as non-economic. Queer economies work differently from how we have been taught that capitalisms function, even as queer economies operate through, within, and outside them. Therefore, queer economies have the potential to create justice through desires for nonnormative logics of community, sexual identity, embodiment, and activity – including economic processes – in space and time.12 This requires flexibility and creativity, as well as the pleasurable and often-difficult work of building relationships and being accountable for our actions. Re-theorizing economies as bodies is not merely an intellectual exercise – I mean to multiply our options for engaging in economic activities. Naming and describing queer economies makes clear the unconscious links between economies-as-bodies and the embodied persons laboring within them in service of queer desires. So I ask: what queer desires move your economic bodies? What relationships must you engage in to manifest your desires? With whom will your economic bodies collaborate, flirt, merge, avoid, fight, make up, bargain, or trade? What – or who – will your queer economies long for? Applying our ideas about human bodies leads to greater recognition of – and perhaps participation in – economies already animated by queer desires and justice. What will your queer economies do? Because ‘the economy’ simply isn’t enough to hold all your queer possibilities.

So what is the alternative? This simple question announces a political project, begs for a grammar of possibility (here expressed in gerunds and the passive voice, among other grammars of pronouncement), and expresses a basic desire to live life otherwise. Academics, activists, artists, and cartoon characters have long been on a quest to articulate an alternative vision of life, love, and labor and to put such a vision into practice. Through the use of manifestoes, a range of political tactics, and new technologies of representation, radical utopians continue to search for different ways of being in the world and being in relation to one another than those already prescribed for the liberal and consumer subject. This book uses “low theory” (a term I am adapting from Stuart Hall’s work) and popular knowledge to explore alternatives and to look for a way out of the usual traps and impasses of binary formulations. Low theory tries to locate all the in- between spaces that save us from being snared by the hooks of hegemony and speared by the seductions of the gift shop. But it also makes its peace with the possibility that alternatives dwell in the murky waters of a counterintuitive, often impossibly dark and negative realm of critique and refusal. And so the book darts back and forth between high and low culture, high and low theory, popular culture and esoteric knowledge, in order to push through the divisions between life and art, practice and theory, thinking and doing, and into a more chaotic realm of knowing and unknowing. In this book I range from children’s animation to avant- garde performance and queer art to think about ways of being and knowing that stand outside of conventional understandings of success. I argue that success in a heteronormative, capitalist society equates too easily to specific forms of reproductive maturity combined with wealth accumulation. But these measures of success have come under serious pressure recently, with the collapse of financial markets on the one hand and the epic rise in divorce rates on the other. If the boom and bust years of the late twentieth century and the early twenty- first have taught us anything, we should at least have a healthy critique of static models of success and failure. Rather than just arguing for a reevaluation of these standards of passing and failing, The QueerArtofFailure dismantles the logics of success and failure with which we currently live. Under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world. Failing is something queers do and have always done exceptionally well; for queers failure can be a style, to cite Quentin Crisp, or a way of life, to cite Foucault, and it can stand in contrast to the grim scenarios of success that depend upon “trying and trying again.” In fact if success requires so much effort, then maybe failure is easier in the long run and offers different rewards. What kinds of reward can failure offer us? Perhaps most obviously, failure allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior and manage human development with the goal of delivering us from unruly childhoods to orderly and predictable adulthoods. Failure preserves some of the wondrous anarchy of childhood and disturbs the supposedly clean boundaries between adults and children, winners and losers. And while failure certainly comes accompanied by a host of negative affects, such as disappointment, disillusionment, and despair, it also provides the opportunity to use these negative affects to poke holes in the toxic positivity of contemporary life. As Barbara Ehrenreich reminds us in Bright- sided, positive thinking is a North American affliction, “a mass delusion” that emerges out of a combination of American exceptionalism and a desire to believe that success happens to good people and failure is just a consequence of a bad attitude rather than structural conditions (2009: 13). Positive thinking is offered up in the U.S. as a cure for cancer, a path to untold riches, and a surefire way to engineer your own success. Indeed believing that success depends upon one’s attitude is far preferable to Americans than recognizing that their success is the outcome of the tilted scales of race, class, and gender. As Ehrenreich puts it, “If optimism is the key to material success, and if you can achieve an optimistic outlook through the discipline of positive thinking, then there is no excuse for failure.” But, she continues, “the flip side of positivity is thus a harsh insistence on personal responsibility,” meaning that while capitalism produces some people’s success through other people’s failures, the ideology of positive thinking insists that success depends only upon working hard and failure is always of your own doing (8). We know better of course in an age when the banks that ripped off ordinary people have been deemed “too big to fail” and the people who bought bad mortgages are simply too little to care about. In Bright-sided Ehrenreich uses the example of American women’s application of positive thinking to breast cancer to demonstrate how dangerous the belief in optimism can be and how deeply Americans want to believe that health is a matter of attitude rather than environmental degradation and that wealth is a matter of visualizing success rather than having the cards stacked in your favor. For the nonbelievers outside the cult of positive thinking, however, the failures and losers, the grouchy, irritable whiners who do not want to “have a nice day” and who do not believe that getting cancer has made them better people, politics offers a better explanatory framework than personal disposition. For these negative thinkers, there are definite advantages to failing. Relieved of the obligation to keep smiling through chemotherapy or bankruptcy, the negative thinker can use the experience of failure to confront the gross inequalities of everyday life in the United States. From the perspective of feminism, failure has often been a better bet than success. Where feminine success is always measured by male standards, and gender failure often means being relieved of the pressure to measure up to patriarchal ideals, not succeeding at womanhood can offer unexpected pleasures. In many ways this has been the message of many renegade feminists in the past. Monique Wittig (1992) argued in the 1970s that if womanhood depends upon a heterosexual framework, then lesbians are not “women,” and if lesbians are not “women,” then they fall outside of patriarchal norms and can re- create some of the meaning of their genders. Also in the 1970s Valerie Solanas suggested that if “woman” takes on meaning only in relation to “man,” then we need to “cut up men” (2004: 72). Perhaps that is a little drastic, but at any rate these kinds of feminisms, what I call shadow feminisms in chapter 5, have long haunted the more acceptable forms of feminism that are oriented to positivity, reform, and accommodation rather than negativity, rejection, and transformation. Shadow feminisms take the form not of becoming, being, and doing but of shady, murky modes of undoing, unbecoming, and violating.

At its heart, neoliberalism is an economic theory built on the primacy of the market. The reigns of Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US were iconic for a governing style that rolls back welfare support and invites the individual to succeed in life by navigating the market as an independent consumer. Feminist and queer scholars are highly critical of how neoliberal thought has spread to nearly all aspects of life in the US, UK, and Germany today; how it distracts from systemic oppression by “encourag[ing] people to see themselves as individualized and active subjects responsible for enhancing their own well-being” (Wendy Larner 2000, 13); and how it supposedly empowers individuals to solve nation-wide problems—such as the lack of affordable healthcare in the US or insufficient child-care options in Germany—on their own. They find that neoliberalism disproportionately affects women (Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff 2011), asking them to think of themselves as the ultimate DIY project and optimize their success in the marketplace and in life (the two of which are grotesquely intertwined). Women are expected to monitor, control, and improve their appearance, health, careers, relationships, marriages, and children. Marketing rhetoric has co-opted feminist messages by emphasizing women’s “empowerment” and “freedom to choose” (how to look, how to live), but social pressures make it clear that there are right and wrong choices. The ideal neoliberal female subject is one who “epitomizes ‘self-responsibility,’ and who no longer demands anything from the state or the government, or even from men as a group [. . .]” (Catherine Rottenberg 2014, 428).6 And this points to a paradox of neoliberalism: it simultaneously seems to offer the opportunity to destabilize gender roles while also reifying those roles (Volker Woltersdorff 2011, 173). In other words, despite being offered an apparent freedom to shape one’s life as one chooses, women are supposed to become the best possible version of themselves, a version that combines “both professional success and personal fulfillment, which almost always translates into motherhood” (Rottenberg 2014, 428). Having children matters in neoliberal society for several reasons. First, children become consumers, and even as babies, they drive the economy by inspiring new purchases (toys, gear, maternity clothes, baby showers, etc.). Second, and most relevant to countries with declining birth rates, future generations will care for the aging, either indirectly (for example, by working and contributing to social security) or quite literally; and this care is more urgently needed as social support for the elderly is reduced and out-of-pocket costs for care increasingly outstrip personal savings. Third, having children is central to neoliberalism’s deep connection to futurity. Neoliberalism is forward thinking, it directs the attention of the subject to an imagined future in which perfection (with regard to appearance, health, self, and lifestyle) can be achieved, one’s financial situation will be improved, and childless women become mothers. The child signifies all of humanity’s promise. Subjects under neoliberalism have value in their productive and consumptive capacities. Women under neoliberalism have value in their reproductive capacities, i.e., their ability to produce new consumers. Returning to the image from Alice in my introduction, Alice alone at the swimming pool is not the model neoliberal citizen. She consumes and acquires few objects (only her towel, newspaper, and sunscreen). She is also neither partnered nor a parent, indicating that she is overlooked in a society that ranks consumption and reproduction so highly. As a non-reproducing subject, Alice is nearly without value. And at the same time, she is precisely the type of woman that German policy would like to see reproduce: white, educated, middle-class. For we must acknowledge that some potentially reproductive women have more value in neoliberal society than others. The two works of literature I discuss here, Wetlands and Alice, frustrate neoliberal expectations of white, potentially child-bearing women. They offer two provocative examples: a protagonist who willfully rejects the prescribed narrative of romance and motherhood—or at least, who thinks she does—and a second protagonist who seems to exist completely outside the normative framework of marriage and family. At the same time that both literary works activate nationalist fear underlying the demography debate, they offer moments of resistance to neoliberal gender expectations.

*TW: This card frequently talks about sensitive issues of sexual assault.

Sexual assault is the language in which girlhood is spoken. Male sexual violence is a near-universal experience for girls growing up, but that does not make it fine, or normal. Sexual violence is not normal - it is normalised, and deliberately, savagely so. This is the trauma that shapes our collective understanding of gender and power, and it doesn't 'get better' as we grow beyond girlhood. This ritual of violence and silence plays out right through every industry and institution of power. There is far more at stake here than simply ending sexual violence, though that would be a start. The rabbit hole of rape culture and misogyny goes deeper than most of us have dared to contemplate. Human beings create outsized monsters so that they don't have to face up to the everyday monstrosity in their homes, their schools, their communities. In the conspiracy theories that cosset conservative culture, there is enormous anxiety about shadowy groups of elites abusing women and children. The women and children targeted by these fictional conspiracies do not exist, and, as such, don't demand anything of their rescuers. The sheer strangeness of these conspiracy theories could only have come from a culture desperate not to face the fact that sexual violence is ordinary, and everyday, and everywhere. In the same way, most women who are raped are raped by someone who is known to them, often a close friend, a partner or a spouse - and yet our cultural and legal understanding of what a rapist looks like still seems to involve a dark alley and a stranger with suspicious facial hair. This frankly freakish othering of rapists and abusers is a crucial pressure-release valve. It allows the rest of us to live more comfortably within economic and social structures that are entirely predicated upon abuse. If rape is a unique crime perpetrated by a few 'bad apples', there's no need to dig up the whole orchard. Sometimes people say the quiet part out loud when protecting predators. Newspapers reacted with surprise and disgust at a ruling passed down by Monmouth County Judge James Troiano on whether to charge a sixteen-year-old boy as an adult in a rape case where a sixteen-year-old girl accused the boy of raping her at a party while she was unconscious. According to media reports, the boy filmed the encounter and shared the video with his friends along with a text message that read, 'When your first time having sex was rape.’ Troiano pointed out that the boy was destined for ‘a good college', was from a 'good family', and was an Eagle Scout. The defendant had no problem understanding his own actions as rape - just not the sort of rape that men like Troiano consider criminal. What had happened to the girl was not a 'traditional case of rape', Troiano said, which typically involved 'two or more generally males involved, either at gunpoint or weapon'. Like all monsters, the imagined rapist is invoked as a warning-not to men, but to women. Don't wear that dress, don't talk too loud, don't want too much. You know what happens to girls who don't follow the rules. There's a reason why this story is so hard to shake. If rapists are monsters, rather than human beings like the rest of us, then knowing someone to be a human being with hopes and dreams and habits and feelings means we can cease to believe that he might also be a rapist. 'He's a good guy' is usually code for 'she must be lying’. This is a comforting fantasy for the frightened, angry child inside every entitled man, desperate to be loved unconditionally; it reassures him that the monsters disappear when you close the book, and that women are unreliable narrators of their own experience. It's not that the dedicated predator, the pathological serial rapist, does not exist. But when he does, he is accommodated quite as often as he is hunted down and stopped. Hundreds of people knew something about what Harvey Weinstein was doing in Hollywood. Weinstein was protected, just as Bill Cosby was protected, just as the pedophile Jimmy Savile was protected by television companies and charities in Britain, because the reputations of powerful men and the networks they build to armour their abuses are usually valued more highly than the safety of women and children. Acknowledging the rapist in the room makes everyone uncomfortable, so collective social comfort is purchased at the cost of women's lives. As society continues to grapple with the stigma attached to sexual assault survivors, those in power have continued to exploit that stigma. In November 2018, a defence lawyer in a Cork rape case passed around the seventeen-year-old complainant's underwear to the jury. The article of clothing proved that the girl was 'open to meeting someone', the lawyer said. ‘You have to look at the way she was dressed. She was wearing a thong with a lace front.’ Only months earlier in Belfast, a nineteen-year-old woman who accused several rugby players of rape was cross-examined for eight days and her underwear was also passed around to the jury. If prosecutors continue to use this line of defence, it's only because it continues to work on juries and judges. Canadian Judge Robin Camp was called out in the press after asking an alleged sexual assault victim why she could not just keep her knees together' or put her 'bottom down into the basin so he couldn't penetrate you?’ Again and again, from courts of law to intimate relationships, those with a stake in the status quo repeat the story that it is not men's responsibility to refrain from rape, but women's responsibility to guard against it, not just physically but by controlling how they behave, how they dress and where they go. The omnipresence of rape is the enforcing mechanism for heteronormative patriarchy as a political system, just as police violence and the carceral justice system is the enforcing mechanism for the political system of white supremacy - and, in many cases, police officers themselves are the disciplinary agents for both. In 2020, Louisville police broke into twenty-six-year-old emergency medical technician Breonna Taylor's home and shot her in her bedroom during a botched raid. At least one of the officers responsible for her death had been accused of sexual assault by multiple women and had twice been investigated for sexual harassment on the job but, like most American law-enforcement officers, faced no substantive consequences. This expectation of impunity is what allowed Daniel Holtzelaw, a police officer in Oklahoma, to systematically target vulnerable African American women and coerce them into sex. When Holtzclaw was finally arrested, it was on thirty-six charges, including multiple counts of rape and sexual battery. In the United States and elsewhere, the idea that cops protect women from rape and sexual assault is often used as an argument against defunding and demilitarising the police. This argument is nonsensical, as the police have never prioritised punishing sexual violence, to the extent that the majority of rapes and sexual assaults still go unreported. The only circumstance in which law enforcement has historically concerned itself with rape is when the accused is a Black man and the alleged victim a white woman - whether or not the allegations are true. In fact, as this book explores in more depth later, the spectre of the 'outsider' rapist - the imagined Black or brown man as a threat to fragile white women, who require protection from white men - has been weaponised for centuries to justify racist violence. This poisonous myth has been central to the narrative of white supremacy, and to the stories white people tell themselves to justify racial inequality. White men, by contrast, can usually count on protection from law enforcement when accused of rape. During the British occupation of India, the rape of Indian women by British army Officers was a routine occurrence - and it is now known thar those officers 'could and did use the term "outrage" rather than "rape" when unruly soldiers raped Indian women,’ according to historian Nancy L. Paxton, who notes that conversely, British judges could, and occasionally did, redefine an incident involving an Indian man who touched an Englishwoman, as "sexual assault".’ Despite this, the popular understanding of rape in British India was of a relentless sexual threat posed to colonising white women by Indian men - and these racist 'rape scripts’ were used to justify the violent suppression of political unrest for generations. In the United States and elsewhere, Black men are still imagined as sexual aggressors, and Black women and girls as promiscuous, wanton and therefore undeserving of respect or protection. These dehumanising stereotypes still serve to justify white violence and minimise white guilt - because throughout American history, it has, in fact, been white men who have sexually terrorised Black and Indigenous women, and not the other way around. Sexual violence is a means of enforcing political and military dominance - and it always has been. During the Second World War, both the Axis and Allied powers used rape as a means of terrorising and subduing enemy civilians.10 Gang rape and complicity with rape by conquering armies are deliberately employed to create a feeling of bonding and cohesion among soldiers, according to researchers like Dara Kay Cohen and Gayatri Spivak. It is not only in the context of wars of invasion that rape is used to oppress civilian groups. In the United States, for many generations after the end of chattel slavery, the rape and assault of Black, brown and Indigenous women by white men was so common and so rarely prosecuted that it was functionally legal. In 1944, in Alabama, twenty-four-year-old Recy Taylor was walking home from church when she was brutally gang-raped by six white men. The campaign to prosecute and punish Taylor's rapists was taken up by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People - a civil rights organisation - and championed by activist Rosa Parks. Taylor and her family received death threats and had to go into hiding when their home was firebombed by racists furious that a Black woman was daring to challenge white male violence, but Parks and Taylor did not back down. The case helped galvanise the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The mere fact that women of colour were refusing to accept sexual subjugation was a profound political statement - and a challenge to a white supremacist culture that believed only white women were worth protecting from violence. It is clear that when we speak of 'rape culture', we are speaking of a form of biopower that is intimately involved with racism and colonial logic. It is just as clear that resistance to rape culture is inseparable from resistance to white supremacy. Challenging rape culture is not just about preventing rape. It is a direct reckoning with power. To refuse to tolerate the assault of women and children within institutions of power is to defy the articles of faith that hold these institutions together: that powerful men make the rules; that the more powerful they are, the more they are allowed to trample gleefully over other people's boundaries; that the reputation of men is worth more than the safety of women and girls; that men are worth more than women and girls, full stop. Her pain is necessary, whoever she is; his discomfort is unbearable, whatever he did. She must make allowances, because she is a girl, and that's what girls are for. He has his whole life ahead of him, or if he is older, he has a brilliant career, or if he is older still, an important legacy, one that cannot and ought not to be analysed in the context of all the lives and legacies damaged along the way. Think about his future. But feminists and queers and radicals aren't the ones who are afraid of the future. When people who are working for a world where more of us can live meaningful lives demand better from men, from sex, from love, from government and from one another, they are thinking about how the future will work for everyone, including for men and boys. The call for a new culture of consent, a new way of treating one another, is the simple, thrilling conviction that there might be lives ahead of all of us, maybe even better ones. Consent is the queer and throbbing core of the new sexual revolution - and consent is not just about sex. It is about power. It is about agency. It is about work, and love, and desire. It is about how much we are prepared to sacrifice to protect the fragile fantasy of masculinity that flattens all human mutuality into featureless transaction or outright violence. An ethos of exploitation is the twisted thread stitching together our relationships to power, to security, to pleasure, and to each other. To talk about building a culture of consent is to speak sincerely about all the ways in which abuse and exploitation are normalised in everyday life - at work, in politics, in our homes and families, and institutions. The opposite of consent is not only rape, but coercion and abuse of all kinds. And coercion is the logic that sustains both patriarchy and state power in oppressive societies.

Apocalyptic scenarios dominate the rhetoric of those opposed to same-sex marriage. Straight opponents see the end of marriage, the nation and democracy on the horizon. George W. Bush wants to ban same-sex marriage because “the preservation of marriage rises to the level of national concern.” This is because “marriage cannot be severed from its cultural, religious and natural roots without weakening the good influence of society.” National well-being depends on the vitality of “the most fundamental institution of civilization.” Finally, same-sex marriage must be resisted because it undermines democracy: “arbitrary court decisions” and renegade local officials are trumping “an overwhelming consensus in our country.”1 However, queer critics of marriage, too, are concerned about the effects of marriage — albeit on queer community and citizenship. For example, Judith Butler expresses her and others’ unease, namely that “their sense of an alternative movement is dying. Sexual politics was supposed to be about finding alternatives to marriage.”2 Same-sex marriage thus seems to spell the end of lesbian and gay community or politics. Their opposition to same-sex marriage puts queer marriage critics, as Michael Warner acknowledges, in the strange company of “homophobic dinosaurs.”3

Why this doomsday rhetoric, which outpaces and exceeds the likely consequences of same-sex marriage? Because same-sex marriage calls into question the perpetuation of community in the face of mortality. In one case, reproduction of community quite literally is understood as sexual reproduction of community; homosexuality in this instance is presented as lethal because it is non-reproductive. Queer opposition to marriage, on the other hand, presents marriage as a lethal force to a community that does not raise its succeeding generations. In this case, the fear is that an instrument of heteronormativity overwhelms precarious queer processes of socialization and regeneration. In short, both arguments are concerned with the perpetuation of community in light of the absence of gay sexual reproduction.4

One of the key questions for critical social theory in general, and postcolonial, queer, feminist in particular, is the challenging question of why subjects desire their own subjugation. In one of the most interesting analyses of the complex discontinuity between desire and interest, Gayatri Spivak in ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1988) critiques Deleuze and Foucault’s claim that the oppressed know about the conditions of their exploitation and are able to speak for themselves. In Spivak’s view, their position risks conflating desire and interest, thus constructing an undivided political subject. They thereby fail to address contemporary forms of economic exploitation, especially the superexploitation of women in the global South, by ignoring the gendered ideological subject constitution on both sides of the colonial divide. By focusing on the incoherence between desire and interest, Spivak emphasizes the importance of critique of ideology even as she contests any simplistic understanding of politics as the rational and economic pursuit of justice and rights (Castro Varela and Dhawan 2014; also cf. Weiss, Chapter 4 in this volume). According to her, economic and political transformation is incomplete without the accompanying intervention in the subject production of the hegemon and subaltern in both the global North and South. While desire for economic justice is often coded in terms of reducing all value to its pecuniary equivalent, desiring other economies can take the form of envisaging alternate modes of recognizing value other than financial compensation (GibsonGraham 2006). In contrast to discussions on sexual and economic justice that primarily attend to demands for redistribution and recognition, often presenting them as oppositional or adversarial (Hennessy 2000; Fraser and Honneth 2003), we suggest a shift of focus. Supplementing debates about redistribution and recognition, we propose that issues of representation are equally essential (GibsonGraham 1996; Butler 1998; Spivak 1999; Engel 2002; Kapur 2005; Gressgård, Chapter 5; Binnie, Chapter 8; and Kapur, Chapter 6 in this volume). Accordingly, it is imperative to assess whether the subjects who are affected by unjust structures have a say in the apparatuses of value-coding (Spivak 2012: 59). Thus, a politics of sexual and socio-economic justice raises the question of how people are involved in the decision-making processes of intervening in and transforming these arrangements of value-coding. Drawing on Marx, Spivak argues that ‘the logic of capitalism weaves the socius like the textile of a particular set of relationships. Power and validation within this socius are secured by denying that web and transforming/ displacing it into “natural” readability’ (Spivak 2012: 59). From a queer perspective, naturalized heterosexuality is part of weaving the socius – like kinship, ethnic and transnational relations – into the structures of neoliberal political economy, while at the same time rendering these mechanisms invisible. Problematizing any straightforward relations between justice and capitalism, this book highlights how postcolonial-queer-feminist struggles for economic and sexual justice are not just about organizing material goods for the suffering classes or mobilizing (sexual) rights for disenfranchised communities – where the deprived are reduced to their needs, which are coded as transparent to our reading practices. Rather, they are about engaging with the imagination and desires of both dispensers as well as receivers of justice.

Setting aside briefly the assumption that the law anticipates and is capable of satisfying the justice claims of queer groups, or indeed that it is its application that activism ought to focus upon,16 it is worth considering the mediating space between the dispensers of justice and those who receive it. This space problematically places those ostensibly with the power to ‘guarantee’ justice on one end and those in need of some form of redress, whether redistribution or recognition, on the other, and assumes that this distribution takes place through the allocation of particular goods or services. However, a distributive understanding of power as a possession of particular individuals or groups misses the supporting and mediating function of third parties (Young 1990), and misses the structural phenomena of domination (Hartsock 1983). Critiquing distributive paradigms, Young (1990: 16) displaces talk of justice that regards persons as primarily possessors and consumers of goods to a wider context that also includes action, decisions about action, and provision of the means to develop and exercise capacities. She formulates a concept of social justice that includes all aspects of institutional rules and relations insofar as they are subject to potential collective decision, arguing that concepts of domination and oppression, rather than the concept of distribution, should be the starting point of a conception of social justice. In the context of a queer feminist politics of resistance, this means, for example, paying regard to the ways in which power is reproduced (by the powerful) through discourses such as ‘corrective rape’. While queer feminists increasingly question the usefulness of this term, and insist on the need for an alternative term (Matebeni 2013) that describes the specific oppression being lived when black, economically marginalized lesbians are targeted on the basis of sexuality, this task in itself is impossible if it does not take into account the structure of oppression that is experienced not only by queer groups but by all the other social movements that are struggling at the margins of capitalism. These movements are densely spread across South Africa’s urban and rural settlements, protesting the failure of the state in dispensing services such as water, electricity, decent housing and sanitation, demonstrating against police brutality and insecurity, and demanding jobs and better schools. These are the groups recognized by the capitalist, ‘predatory’ state as the real threat, the ones the state identifies with claims for social justice and (often with brutality) responds to. This recognition is in part due to the fact that these groups are highly critical of the African National Congress (ANC) government, and reject as a façade the idea that the current government is concerned with the welfare of the economically oppressed. These groups are struggling to insert new codes into their justice claims, and through this process can provide a critical space out of which the voice of the queer subaltern can also re-emerge. Such a politics of coalition requires blurring the distinction between cultural and economic oppression, between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ oppression, but, most importantly, insisting, as Butler (2008) does, that difference remain constitutive of any struggle.

Bennett insists that society must not affirm different ethical relations to mortality and sexuality. Citizenship is at stake. Bennett addresses citizenship in his discussion of a genetic predisposition to homosexuality. He is worried that an increasing number of children will grow up to be gay when the genetic argument for gay rights is recognized by state institutions. Two dangerous implications of legalizing same-sex marriage are hovering here. First, acceptance of homosexuality would undermine democratic self-governance. This follows from the notion that homosexuality is akin to addiction. The claim of addiction acknowledges that homosexuality may be deeply embedded in the individual. Nonetheless, individuals should strive to overcome it. Resistance to homosexual orientation itself is important to a “self-governing society,” which requires that individuals be able to reign themselves in. Democratic self-governance is at stake. How can individuals be trusted to conduct their affairs as citizens, if they are unable to ensure their personal well-being? Second, Bennett claims that there will be an increase in the number of gay men and lesbians due to same-sex marriage, with a concomitant decrease in heterosexual reproduction.49 The implication is clear: not only will growing acceptance of homosexuality undermine citizenship, it will decimate the nation.50 Demographic decline of the nation is thus the direct manifestation of an unhealthy way of life. As Kath Weston puts it elsewhere, “by shifting without signal between reproduction’s meaning of physical procreation and its sense as the perpetuation of society as a whole, the characterization of lesbians and gay men as nonreproductive beings links their supposed attack on ‘the family’ to attacks on society in the broadest sense.”51

Gay marriage is thus a radical threat to the future of the United States. Bennett realizes that such an argument might strike some as disingenuous, because “focusing on the alleged threat of homosexual marriage is itself a dodge, an attempt to avoid talking about the real threats to the American family, namely adultery, illegitimacy, and divorce.”52 Bennett acknowledges that divorce has hurt children and society tremendously. His book, moreover, tackles these problems of heterosexual life. At the same time, he insists that “homosexual marriage poses the greater threat.”53 Indeed, given the contemporary dissolution of marriage and family life, same-sex marriage would be the final nail in marriage’s coffin: “It strikes me as exceedingly imprudent to conduct a radical, untested, and inherently flawed social experiment on an institution so broadly under assault that nevertheless still stands as the keystone in the arch of civilization.”54

Good neoliberal subjects, then, are more or less successful enterprise-units.41 The income streams they generate enable them to maximize their utility functions (or, at least, the purpose of generating income streams is to amass the resources necessary to maximize utility, whether this is realized or not). Ultimately, what these enterprises produce (or at least endeavor to produce) is their own preference satisfaction. The income stream may be used to purchase (or attract) the raw materials—shelter, groceries, a mate, etc.—which may be combined with non-market labor to produce whatever the neoliberal subject wishes to consume (warmth, nutrients, orgasm, etc.). This way of construing human activity makes of each individual a self-interested bundle of sui generis preferences calculating the costs and benefits of every available option for conduct and relationship in view of his or her [their] own likelihood of satisfaction. Everything we do is to be understood as utility maximizing behavior based on preferences and calculation. Even our most intimate associations—with our parents, with our spouses, with our children—are explicable on this model, according to Becker.42 Generosity and self-sacrifice are investments; genetically related offspring are commodities for which close substitutes are scarce; 43 and friendships are valuable insofar as they maximize one’s utility function. Becker is famous for having analyzed criminal behavior in this way. Law-breaking, he argues, be it parking in a tow-away zone or selling narcotics, is market behavior, and if authorities want to reduce it, they have simply to reduce the incentives to engage in it. There is no qualitative difference between people who break laws and people who do not; the “delinquent” is not a special kind of person.44 Repetitions of the choice to break laws leading to multiple arrests and incarcerations might generate the label and even the sub- jective experience of oneself as “criminal” or “delinquent,” but those identities are simply shorthand for aggregated preferences as expressed and implemented choices over time. Obviously, the same case can be made for the “homosexual,” as well as for any of the other sexual identity categories generated through the twentieth century. Everybody starts with their own set of personal preferences. Neoliberal theorists are not interested in the whence and wherefore of those preferences; it simply does not matter (although advertisers are very interested in how to generate new preferences for market purposes). As neoliberals see it, we all make predictions regarding what will satisfy our preferences and enhance our utility, and then we calculate the costs and risks of attempting to achieve satisfaction in each of the ways available to us at a given time. Our lives are made up of these thousands of calculated choices. Our identities are to be understood not as some underlying truth that comes into the world with us at conception or birth, or even as the names for biological and psychological developmental outcomes, but simply as names for relatively long-term patterns of behavior that can be thought of as manifestations of choice and strategy.45 For identities to have any value or meaning in neoliberal regimes, they must play some role in markets. And they do. “Lesbians” are a population with certain preferences cohesive enough to form a market—for four-wheel drive vehicles, Birkenstocks, power tools, wedding planners, and reproductive technologies. Likewise “gay men” are a population with certain preferences (and statistically, being [white] men, with about 30% more income to allocate than lesbians); so they are a market—for vodka, magazines, sophisticated household furnishings, men-only cruise lines.46 We call these stereotypes, which make them seem detrimental, and they do have detrimental effects. But unlike older stereotypes, the detrimental effects fall not so much on those who do but rather on those who do not fit them. Whereas it was terrible to be a limp-wristed sissy, it is not so bad to be an urban sophisticate with artistic flare; in fact, it might greatly increase one’s income stream. What is terrible is to be bullied out of an education, to try to survive among the ranks of the working poor, to be ill without insurance, or to raise children or care for a disabled partner without the civil rights necessary to protect their interests. Neoliberalism has an answer to whatever discrimination people suffer, however. It is to let the market handle it. Some people have a taste for racism or homophobia, a preference for avoiding contact with blacks or Jews or gays. They calculate the costs and risks of satisfying that preference, and then they do so in whatever manner best maximizes their utility. However, as Milton Friedman notes, “The man who exercises discrimination pays a price for doing so.” 47 If he happens to be an entrepreneur, this price interferes with operational efficiency. “A businessman or entrepreneur who expresses preferences in his business activities that are not related to productive efficiency is at a disadvantage compared to other individuals who do not. Such an individual is in effect imposing higher costs on himself than are other individuals who do not have such preferences. Hence, in a free market they will tend to drive him out.” 48 Indeed, markets have remedied some discrimination against non-heterosexuals.49 As of 2008, according to an Equality Forum survey, 473 of Fortune 500 companies included sexual orientation in their non-discrimination policies.50 Increasingly, such companies offer partner benefits to employees in same-sex relationships. And the job market is not the only market to address discrimination. For example, for many years the Commonwealth of Virginia prohibited insurance companies from selling domestic partner health insurance policies in Virginia. Having discovered a lucrative market niche outside the state that they felt sure could be replicated within it, the companies lobbied hard to change the law. In fact, when gay and lesbian activists attempted to attend the General Assembly hearings on the question, insurance representatives urged them to stay away, so as not to confuse a free market issue with a social issue; the companies’ spokespeople would handle everything. And they did. The legal change that ensued was thus a result of market pressure, not of demands for equality or justice. Of course, this market approach only works to end discrimination if inclusion of the groups of people in question is profitable. When it is not, there simply is no remedy. Those lesbians and gay men, transpeople and queers of all sorts who are without sufficient human capital and resources to allocate in markets may well still be subject not only to discrimination but to harassment and violence. But to return to the question at hand, within a neoliberal framework, an identity is not coincident with a subject position. Neoliberal subjects are (or should be, if they are rational) self-entrepreneurs; it is up to them to acquire whatever discipline is needed to enhance their human capital and compete in the marketplace. Identities, when they come into play at all, are simply labels imposed on aggregated choices, which in turn are based on sui generis preferences; they are not the names of developmental trajectories, as they are in regimes of disciplinary normalization. Consequently, they will not be strictly enforced on every individual human body. And this brings us back to queer theory and politics. Queering in the Absence of Firm Identities The project of queering identities began in the early 1990s as a way of breaking down rigid delineations of experience and desire. Queer theorists pointed out numerous examples of ambiguous or veiled homosexual desire in apparently heterosexual images, tropes, characters, and plot lines in classical literature, drama, and film, as well as in popular culture. They showed us that our own real-life sexual and gender identities were simulacra, constantly requiring reenactment, reiteration, and representation to bolster and sustain themselves. They resisted and challenged homogeneity of identification by inciting identities to proliferate and endlessly differ from themselves. In short, where our normalized identities defined and imprisoned us, they excavated exits and melted bars. They showed us that those identities had histories and political investments and interests that transcended and sometimes opposed our individual lives and well-being. They laid bare the mechanisms of disciplinary normalization. They encouraged us to experience dis-identification and estrangement. In Foucault’s terms, they helped us to get free of ourselves.51 Now, however, if disciplinary normalization is receding where it is in tension with expanding regimes of security wherein circulation (of money, commodities, information, human bodies, etc.), not development, is paramount, how are queer theory and politics situated? If “queer” resists the forces that would contain us in normalized identities, can “queer” also resist the forces that would transform us into utility maximizers operating as entrepreneurial firms? Or is it more likely just to render us all more open to marketing across what used to be our normalized identity boundaries? The question is pressing because, on some fronts at least, it looks like queering identities facilitates the expansion and multiplication of markets. To attract a desired mate, a straight man might need to invest in his human capital by learning from—and then by purchasing the same products as—men with fashionable “queer eyes,” as depicted on an early twenty-first century reality TV show, “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.” Straight masculinity needs to be softened or refined; hence, a little queerness is good for everybody. In some queer youth cultures, boundary breaking and gender-bending strategies rely very heavily on deploying purchased products; one announces one’s challenges to identification through clothes, jewelry, hair styles, tattoos, personal electronics, and similar accoutrements and often through relatively rapid changes in these modes of personal stylization. After all, in a neoliberal world, what does refusing to be contained in an identity mean other than refusing to make consistent consumer choices? It will be argued that this popular culture appropriation of “queer” has little or nothing to do with the queer politics of the 1970s and 1980s or with the queer theory and politics of the 1990s. And there is merit in that argument. My point is not that the work done in those decades was misguided, only that, with the changes in notions of identity that have occurred with the advance of neoliberalism over the last four decades, that sort of work now will inevitably be appropriated and, to use a very old word, co-opted. It does not challenge neoliberal subjectivities directly enough not to be; its focus was disciplinary normalization. But can we turn queering into resisting neoliberalism? I believe so, and I believe we should. First, why should we? I will not make a comprehensive argument here. Instead, like Foucault in the first lecture of the 1977-1978 series, I will assert a “conditional imperative” 52: If we want to resist domination, if we want to resist the current political tendency to lock people down in a single grid of intelligibility and mode of living (and surely that is essentially what queer politics and queer theory have aimed to oppose all along), then in addition to resisting what remains of normalized disciplinary identities, we must resist and challenge the neoliberal reduction of people to calculating, self-interested entrepreneurs of themselves. This is the way of thinking and approaching life that we all are being pressed into within neoliberal regimes of power. For those few who actually succeed in turning themselves into self-entrepreneurs, viewing every aspect of their existence in terms of competition, investment, and profitable exchange, such a life is likely to be impoverished in every way except financial. And for those who fail—which is likely to be a large majority of people on our planet, including a majority of North Americans and Europeans—the material, if not also the psychological, results are little short of terrifying. What we must queer now, I believe, is not so much normalized identity but neoliberal subjectivity. If neoliberalism is able to impose its conception of human being fully, the world will be a much worse place, in my view, than it is now. Relationships, including communal and civic relationships, will be devalued to the breaking point, and material scarcity in the absence of those relationships will drive people to desperation. So, how can we queer neoliberal subjectivity? Queering, like queer “itself,” never appears in unity. There will be many approaches and possibilities, and they will not obey common distinctions between theory and practice. With that word of caution, I will conclude this essay by discussing three closely related courses of action. The first begins with a policing of our language. Let us pause and consider each time we find ourselves about to describe an action as an “investment.” This, I think, would be the first step in resisting the neoliberal financialization of lives and selves. Sometimes people do invest, such as when they allocate some of their incomes to 401(k)s. But why think of taking classes as “investing”? Why think of maintaining one’s home as “an investment”? Why think of getting to know colleagues at conferences as “investments”? There are other ways to describe these activities. In fact, all these things usually involve some pleasure in the moment and have many desirable effects besides increasing one’s net worth in the marketplace. Interrogating the use of financial language in everyday life is crucial for identifying the ways in which neoliberal discourses and values are shaping us and our relationships. I suspect, furthermore, that a sustained resistance to financial language might also lead us eventually to undertake a critique of neoliberal temporality with its multiple postponements into an apparently unending futurity of projected returns.53 A second, probably closely related practice of resistance to neoliberal domination might begin with simply taking note of desires and pleasures that are neither market-based nor market-valued. Non-(re)productive sexuality might be a prime example, as might friendship and communal relationships outside the kinship systems that are taken to be the fundamental units of capitalist consumption. To be sure, there are ways of construing such things in market terms if we choose to, as Gary Becker’s work makes clear, but if we pay close attention to what really brings us joy in those activities and relationships and find ways of expressing that joy or pleasure or desire in non-financial and non-market terms, collectively we may generate a basis upon which to live in resistance to neoliberal domination. Finally, in addition to examining the ways we speak of our own actions in everyday life and the ways we understand and live in relation to others, we might actually take a more activist stand against gay and lesbian market identities. By this I mean something more than simply challenging stereotypes, which has been done for decades. I mean, also, challenging the gay and lesbian organizations that promote our communities as markets and that buy into the idea that what justice for all amounts to is assimilation into the dominate market economy. Let me quickly add that I am not advocating a withdrawal from market economies (I believe that would be impossible), nor am I suggesting that we relinquish the gains made against discrimination in employment. Instead, I am suggesting, in a Foucauldian vein, that we problematize those goals and do what we can to render them questionable. As David Harvey wrote recently, “We are, often without knowing it, all neoliberals now.” 54 We have already been re-shaped to a great extent, and alternatives to neoliberal language and concepts are no longer readily available. But they can emerge if the radical contingency of our own ways of being make themselves felt in our questioning. In other words, alternatives can form and domination can be opposed through an antineoliberal practice of queer.

From at least the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah, scenarios of same-sex desire would seem to have had a privileged, though by no means an exclusive, relation in Western culture to scenarios of both genocide and omnicide. That sodomy, the name by which homosexual acts are known even today to the law of half of the United States and to the Supreme Court of all of them, should already be inscribed with the name of a site of mass extermination is the appropriate trace of a double history. In the first place there is a history of the mortal suppression, legal or subjudicial, of gay acts and gay people, through burning, hounding, physical and chemical castration, concentration camps, bashing—the array of sanctioned fatalities that Louis Crompton records under the name of gay genocide, and whose supposed eugenic motive becomes only the more colorable with the emergence of a distinct, naturalized minority identity in the nineteenth century. In the second place, though, there is the inveterate topos of associating gay acts or persons with fatalities vastly broader than their own extent: if it is ambiguous whether every denizen of the obliterated Sodom was a sodomite, clearly not every Roman of the late Empire can have been so, despite Gibbon's connecting the eclipse of the whole people to the habits of a few. Following both Gibbon and the Bible, moreover, with an impetus borrowed from Darwin, one of the few areas of agreement among modern Marxist, Nazi, and liberal capitalist ideologies is that there is a peculiarly close, though never precisely defined, affinity between same-sex desire and some historical condition of moribundity, called "decadence," to which not individuals or minorities but whole civilizations are subject. Bloodletting on a scale more massive by orders of magnitude than any gay minority presence in the culture is the "cure," if cure there be, to the mortal illness of decadence. If a fantasy trajectory, utopian in its own terms, toward gay genocide has been endemic in Western culture from its origins, then, it may also have been true that the trajectory toward gay genocide was never clearly distinguishable from a broader, apocalyptic trajectory toward something approaching omnicide. The deadlock of the past century between minoritizing and universalizing understandings of homo/heterosexual definition can only have deepened this fatal bond in the heterosexist imaginaire. In our culture as in Billy Budd, the phobic narrative trajectory toward imagining a time after the homosexual is finally inseparable from that toward imagining a time after the human; in the wake of the homosexual, the wake incessantly produced since first there were homosexuals, every human relation is pulled into its shining representational furrow. Fragments of visions of a time after the homosexual are, of course, currently in dizzying circulation in our culture. One of the many dangerous ways that AIDS discourse seems to ratify and amplify preinscribed homophobic mythologies is in its pseudo-evolutionary presentation of male homosexuality as a stage doomed to extinction (read, a phase the species is going through) on the enormous scale of whole populations. 26 The lineaments of openly genocidal malice behind this fantasy appear only occasionally in the respectable media, though they can be glimpsed even there behind the poker-face mask of our national experiment in laissez-faire medicine. A better, if still deodorized, whiff of that malice comes from the famous pronouncement of Pat Robertson: "AIDS is God's way of weeding his garden." The saccharine luster this dictum gives to its vision of devastation, and the ruthless prurience with which it misattributes its own agency, cover a more fundamental contradiction: that, to rationalize complacent glee at a spectacle of what is imagined as genocide, a proto-Darwinian process of natural selection is being invoked—in the context of a Christian fundamentalism that is not only antievolutionist but recklessly oriented toward universal apocalypse. A similar phenomenon, also too terrible to be noted as a mere irony, is how evenly our culture's phobia about HIV-positive blood is kept pace with by its rage for keeping that dangerous blood in broad, continuous circulation. This is evidenced in projects for universal testing, and in the needle-sharing implicit in William Buckley's now ineradicable fantasy of tattooing HIV-positive persons. But most immediately and pervasively it is evidenced in the literal bloodbaths that seem to make the point of the AIDS-related resurgence in violent bashings of gays--which, unlike the gun violence otherwise ubiquitous in this culture, are characteristically done with two-by-fours, baseball bats, and fists, in the most literal-minded conceivable form of body-fluid contact. It might be worth making explicit that the use of evolutionary thinking in the current wave of utopian/genocidal fantasy is, whatever else it may be, crazy. Unless one believes, first of all, that same-sex object-choice across history and across cultures is one thing with one cause, and, second, that its one cause is direct transmission through a nonrecessive genetic path--which would be, to put it gently, counter-intuitive--there is no warrant for imagining that gay populations, even of men, in post-AIDS generations will be in the slightest degree diminished. Exactly to the degree that AIDS is a gay disease, it's a tragedy confined to our generation; the long-term demographic depredations of the disease will fall, to the contrary, on groups, many themselves direly endangered, that are reproduced by direct heterosexual transmission. Unlike genocide directed against Jews, Native Americans, Africans, or other groups, then, gay genocide, the once-and-for-all eradication of gay populations, however potent and sustained as a project or fantasy of modern Western culture, is not possible short of the eradication of the whole human species. The impulse of the species toward its own eradication must not either, however, be underestimated. Neither must the profundity with which that omnicidal impulse is entangled with the modern problematic of the homosexual: the double bind of definition between the homosexual, say, as a distinct risk group, and the homosexual as a potential of representation within the universal. 27 As gay community and the solidarity and visibility of gays as a minority population are being consolidated and tempered in the forge of this specularized terror and suffering, how can it fail to be all the more necessary that the avenues of recognition, desire, and thought between minority potentials and universalizing ones be opened and opened and opened?

In the long tradition of queer criminality, we’ve expropriated literally everything we could. We wrote anthems and journals of exegesis, tended archives and prison distros, scammed pages by the thousands. We filled parcels with stolen fineries and sent them with love notes to distant friends. We determined each other deserving of the ten thousand things. We’ve fumbled through learning a thousand techniques of healing our broken bodies and spirits. We mastered the art of the dérive, wandering by instinct alone through the darkened streets of the varied metropoles seeking some ineffability we still can’t name. We’ve experimented with every permutation of drugs and hormones to find the alchemy that opens us up to the world. We developed addictions chasing highs between one uprising and the next, and later helped one another find other ways. We experimented badly with dozens of models for new relations, but continued even at our worst, because we learned the hard way that disposability isn’t an option. Eventually, aching flesh and the plant kingdoms revealed their secret languages. We learned love languages too: the inimitable joy of gifts and quiet declarations and eternities of now-time spent in affinity and in affection.

Now-time: a hard-won concept we only learned by way of a sequence of loss. We’ve hurt each other and had to learn to pick up the pieces of shattered relations. We’ve been betrayed too, but are disinclined to spill much ink on sellouts and turncoats. We’ve run away and we’ve returned humbled. Our friends and lovers have been taken from us, locked in cages, suicided by cops, burned up in dance parties at the margins of gentrifying cities. We know that our time with each other is fleeting, so we fight for every moment of interdependence and complicity.

More often than not, practices and discourses of peace and conflict make references to time, whether we speak of a “peaceful future”, “sudden” eruptions of violence, “intractable” wars, “long” reconciliation processes, or about how different narrations of the past legitimise or delegitimise present violence. Queer researchers, often drawing on postcolonial theories, have offered some of the most forceful analyses of how different conceptions of time, or temporalities, relate to power and violence, but also to resistance.

Certain conceptions of time underwrite efforts of domination, subordination, and elimination, and are at the heart of nationalist, racist, colonial, and heteropatriarchal politics. Such projects have often been guided by the idea that specific forms of living, knowing, loving, worshipping, producing, and reproducing are not only superior but “of our time”. This is used to justify the forced catching up, control, or elimination of those designated as temporal anachronisms, be they indigenous populations, sexual, religious, or ethnic minorities, or immigrant groups. Jacqui Alexander (2005, p. 193) argues that appeals to tradition and modernity are powerful forms of ideological authorisation, and that implicit in the tradition/modernity binary is a paradoxical conception of time as both linear and hierarchical. However, she notes that temporalities are not pure or internally coherent, but layered as multiple narrations of time can exist within the same temporality. As feminists have shown, nationalist linear storylines of a shared past, present, and future are articulated against the fond of an eternal, timeless, and feminised metaphor of the nation (Peterson, 1999). Similarly, heterosexuality is represented as a historical, natural condition of the nation, whereas queerness is seen as something new (either as evidence of national degradation or as a sign of its remarkable modernity).