Voting NEG transgresses heteronormativity through queer economic organizing.

The five features of a radical queer sexual politics are not yet accomplished facts; they are still tasks to be tackled, dimensions to be fleshed out. While queer radicalism is inherently a politics of sexual liberation – which is the queerest thing about it – a queer politics has to involve more than being visibly, defiantly sexual in queer ways. Each of the five tasks for a queer politics has to take shape in organising tactics, as well as changes in personal and community life. To achieve full sexual liberation, a queer politics has to challenge and win power at the level of the economy, state and other sites where power is concentrated. Without a strategic project, queer radicalism dooms itself to perpetual marginality. Queer politics in this sense has barely begun to be invented. Defining queer politics in this way contradicts common-sense thinking about sexuality, and what has largely become common sense even among radical queers. For capitalist cultures organised around the divide between public and private, the sexual is pre-eminently private. Radical queers disagree, of course; we understand that heterosexuality is publicly ‘flaunted’ every day, and that genuine queer equality demands bringing queer sex into the public sphere and insisting on its public recognition.1 But most queers see the sexual as predominantly cultural. Disgusted with what passes for politics under neoliberal hegemony and leaning towards a wholesale anarchist rejection of the politics of large-scale organisations and state institutions, many queers see sexual politics as a domain of individual or small-group action and cultural production. Inventing a true queer politics must begin by challenging this dichotomy and refuting this fallacy. The cultural and the personal do not exist in a separate realm apart from the economic, the political and the social; they are constantly deployed and manipulated by the powers that be to produce economic, political and social outcomes that are in their interests. ‘Neoliberalism was constructed in and through cultural and identity politics’, as Lisa Duggan has pointed out. Moreover, radical cultural and personal change is only possible by transforming the state, economy and other structures that form the foundation of cultural and personal life, at both the micro level of individuals and small groups and the macro level of the city, nation, region and planet. Transformation will not be possible as long as ‘cultural and identity issues are separated, analytically and organizationally, from the political economy in which they are embedded’.2 An agenda for a radical sexual politics therefore has to address multiple cultural, social, economic and political issues. In subverting gender, it has to be closely connected to a socialist feminist programme for reproductive freedom. In practising queer inclusion and global and anti-racist solidarity, it needs to focus on cutting-edge struggles like those of queer youth and trans people, and solidarity campaigns against Islamophobia, cuts in aid to poor countries and the ‘pinkwashing’ of Israel as a pro-gay state. At the same time, it should start from visions of queer intimacy and ‘families of choice’ to define a radical yet unifying approach to the issue of same-sex partnership. This means opposing the privatisation of care and the transmission of class privilege, while exploring new ways of supporting parents and creating flexible forms for intimate relationships. Blurring the Boundaries Today there is a push in many countries to incorporate lesbian, gay, bisexual and even trans people into the prevailing sexual and family order. That order is structured under gendered capitalism by having the vast majority of children raised and socialised by at least one biological parent in families formed by sexually and romantically linked heterosexual couples. Particularly in regions where the nuclear family has been consolidated as the predominant capitalist household form, these are the families in which the great majority of lgbt children grow up. This means that at best, even in the most supposedly enlightened enclaves, lgbt people are bound to face a period of differentiation and alienation in coming to terms with their distinct identity. Their own process of family formation is bound to be exceptional and complex. In short, the best this order can offer lgbt people is a kind of second-class citizenship. lgbt lives in this situation entail a constant choice between, or more accurately a varying combination of, adaptation and ghettoisation. Most lgbt people can only survive, let alone prosper, by doing waged work in heteronormative companies or institutions. Their survival is made easier if they find steady partners who also have steady jobs, and even easier if they both have reasonably supportive heterosexual family networks to fall back on. But work and family life of this kind involves a constant process of adaptation, of having or failing to correct spoken or unspoken assumptions and weighing one’s own words and gestures. Even the places where most people spend their free time are heteronormative – witness the hostility evoked by queer kiss-ins in straight bars and sometimes by any public signs of same-sex affection. This is not necessarily a reflection of straight people’s prejudice or unwillingness to understand; it is simply the result of the heteronormative ways in which life is structured. So most lgbt people escape from the dominant forms of work, family and leisure or complement them with life in a separate lgbt world, made up of more or less mainstream gay bars, clubs and associations, and more or less alternative queer and trans scenes. Even in the absence of prejudice or discrimination, this is what gay normality consists of: a combination of life in a heteronormative world and retreat into an lgbt ghetto. In contrast to the homonormative model of lesbian/gay people as a minority caught between adaptation and ghettoisation, a queer radical politics can look to a future beyond the gay/straight binary. This is in keeping with the early objectives of lesbian/gay liberation, and with Herbert Marcuse’s vision of a generalised freeing up of human eroticism. It is in lgbt people’s interests to contest the heteronormative order and develop alternatives to it: not just a queerer ghetto, but communities beyond norms and ghettos. Radical queers challenge the social frontiers between gay and straight in different ways. One way is simply acting sexually in ways or settings that transgress society’s heterosexual norm – same-sex tongue-kissing in straight singles bars, for example. They assert what Scott Tucker once called ‘our right to the world’.3 The full range of issues and adversaries that they take on comes across in the list of focus groups that Queer Nation San Francisco had at its height: the streets; the media; the military; government institutions; universities; suburban malls; communities of colour; other countries.