The economy is desire.
Nikita Dhawan et al. 15 is Professor of Political Science at the Leopold-Franzen University Innsbruck and Director of the Frankfurt Research Center for Postcolonial Studies, Cluster of Excellence ‘The Formation of Normative Orders’, Goethe University Frankfurt. She has held visiting fellowships at Universidad de Costa Rica (2013); Institute for International Law and the Humanities, University of Melbourne, Australia (2013); Program of Critical Theory, University of California, Berkeley, USA (2012); University of La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain (2011); Pusan National University, South Korea (2011); Columbia University, New York, USA (2008). Her publications include Impossible Speech: On the Politics of Silence and Violence (2007), Decolonizing Enlightenment: Transnational Justice, Human Rights and Democracy in a Postcolonial World (editor, 2014); Postkoloniale Theorie: Eine kritische Einführung (with Maria do Mar Castro Varela, 2014). Antke Engel is Director of the Institute for Queer Theory in Berlin, a site where academic debate meets up with political activism and artistic/cultural practices (www.queer-institut.de). She received her PhD in Philosophy at Potsdam University and works as independent scholar in the fields of queer, feminist and poststructuralist theory, political philosophy and visual cultural studies. She held visiting professorships at Hamburg University (2003–2005) and at Vienna University (2011), and a research fellowship at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry (2007–2009). She has published numerous essays and the two monographs Wider die Eindeutigkeit (2002) and Bilder von Sexualität und Ökonomie (2009). Jule Jacob Gorvin is a PhD candidate in philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin and a research assistant at the Institute for Queer Theory, Berlin. After studying philosophy and comparative literature at Freie Universität and the University of Paris VIII, she published several articles, including Widerspenstige Körper: Ein Vergleich körperkonzeptueller Widerstandsstrategien bei Judith Butler und Pierre Bourdieu (2012). In her PhD project Aufbegehren und Begierden: Zum Verhältnis von Begehren und Ökonomie, she is focusing on the epistemological and socio-political entanglements of desire and economy in the light of neoliberalism. Her research interests include political and social philosophy, theories of desire, sexuality studies, body politics, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis and philosophy of economy. Christoph F. E. Holzhey is the founding director of the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. He received a PhD in theoretical physics (1993) and another in German literature with a dissertation on the critical potential of paradoxical pleasures (2001). His edited volumes include Tension/Spannung (2011), The Scandal of Self-Contradiction: Pasolini’s Multistable Subjectivities, Traditions, Geographies (with L. Di Blasi and M. Gragnolati, 2012), Situiertes Wissen und regionale Epistemologie: Zur Aktualität Georges Canguilhems und Donna J. Haraways (with A. Deuber-Mankowsky, 2013), Multistable Figures: On the Critical Potentials of Ir/Reversible Aspect-Seeing (2014) and Wendy Brown and Rainer Forst, The Power of Tolerance: A Debate (editor, with L. Di Blasi, 2014). Volker Woltersdorff (aka Lore Logorrhöe) is an independent scholar and affiliated fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. He received a PhD in Comparative Literature at the Freie Universität Berlin with a thesis on gay coming-out narrative and practice. From 1999 to 2010 he was research assistant at the Institute of Comparative Literature of Freie Universität Berlin and Member of the Collaborative Research Centre ‘Kulturen des Performativen’. His main research interests lie in queer and feminist theories, studies in sadomasochism, subcultural aesthetics and the intersection of heteronormativity and capitalism. He has published numerous essays and the monograph Coming out: Die Inszenierung schwuler Identitäten zwischen Auflehnung und Anpassung (2005). (Global Justice and Desire | “Introduction” | DOA: 4/19/2023 | SAoki)
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.