Fiscal redistribution is built around questions of the heternormative nuclear family – divisions of labor and household configurations undergird the basis for wealth through a filtration of all those that love and be in the wrong way – analysis must start with the individual subject rather than institutions to build bottom up solutions that unleash beautiful resistances from the ground up.

The snapshots of contemporary queer struggle that opened this paper demonstrate two ostensibly simple points: firstly, that the state represents a key battleground for queer activists and movements around the world; and secondly, that macrolevel structures, processes, and practices have important implications for queer individuals’ lived experience, within and beyond their erotic/embodied lives. When I say within and beyond here, I mean that queer oppression is shaped by the interactions and interconnections between multiple axes of oppression—i.e. not exclusively sexual orientation or gender identity—and, moreover, that sexual injustices have material bases and drivers—i.e. not just cultural-symbolic ones. These insights are foundational to a political economy approach to queer struggle and, as such, provide the first two dimensions of my framework, which I summarise as: (1) an interest in the role of the state in shaping, regulating, and disciplining queer sexualities; (2) a structural rather than individually subjective orientation Underlying this first dimension is another foundational concept: the queer analytic of heteronormativity.2 Dimension 1 is thus intended to shed light into the role of sexuality—and specifically heterosexist norms—in maintaining and perpetuating particular economic structures and power relations within the historical and contemporary nation-state. It further illuminates—at an ideological level—how heteronormative logics work to legitimate and uphold culturally and historically-contingent divisions of labour and household configurations by grounding these in ideas of ‘universality’ (Sears 2017, p. 173). These questions of historicisation and spatialisation are important, since it is evident that capitalism does not, always and everywhere, depend on the heteronormative family unit. This is the case, for example, in some Global North contexts where significant sections of the population now ‘live through wage labor outside of heterosexual families’ (Fraser 1997, p. 272). Yet it is also evident that capitalist society continues to work through, promote, and perpetuate heteronormative family structures and the gender division of labour (albeit in shifting and transformative ways) across many other contexts, including parts of the Global South. This concern for heteronormativity and the state is informed by the ‘state-centric’ approach to queer sexuality and capitalism (Bergeron and Puri 2012, Lind 2012, Peterson 2017, 2020). In this vein, Suzanne Bergeron and Jyoti Puri (2012) call for scholars to theorise sexuality and (Marxist) political economy beyond reproductive and sexual labour (within the family) and in relation to the institutional, legal, and structural mechanisms through which hegemonic configurations of gender and sexuality are constructed and privileged. Peterson (2020) pushes this line of analysis further by setting out a ‘critical genealogy’ of state-making practices that centralises the regulation of the family. She notes that ‘unruly’ sexual relations represent both a political and economic problem, since they threaten the (literal) ‘reproduction of the state/nation’, as well as ways in which interconnecting hierarchies of race, gender, and class are legitimated and maintained, notably through inheritance and citizenship laws (Peterson 2020:190). This framing is useful in that it very clearly places queer sexuality—and the concept of heteronormativity—within the more conventional boundaries of political economy research. It also underlines why intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality matter for understanding state formations across space and time. While much of the state-centric literature has focused on the Europe and North America, scholars such as Amy Lind (2009, 2012) have sought to unpack the relationship between state policies and heteronormativity in the Global South and to identify the linkages between North–South geopolitical spheres as produced through neoliberal development reforms and actors such as the World Bank (see also Bedford 2005, 2009). In addition to a state and structural orientation, this suggests another key dimension of a political economy approach to queer struggle: (3) a focus on the relationship between heteronormativity and capitalism across different scales and modes of governance. This dimension offers a means to explore the structural linkages and interplays between global capitalism and dominant sex/gender regimes—and how these unfold in concrete, material (and corporeal) ways—not just in relation to nation-states, but in relation to the ‘layers of institutions that are involved in defining and regulating our intimate lives’ (Lind 2009:35). Put otherwise, dimension 3 facilitates analysis of the materiality of queer sexuality as it is grounded and reproduced across multiple sites and scales, and through different modes of global (and local) governance. This includes inter- and surpa-national organisations, international financial institutions, development agencies, and NGOs. Although Peterson’s (1999, 2017, 2020) work also focuses on heteronormativity and the state, she uses queer theory in a more integrative fashion to push feminist scholars beyond binary ways of thinking about men and women in the global economy (Peterson 2002, 2003). In this articulation, the queer concern for deconstructing binaries and unsettling stable or taken-for-granted concepts is applied to both the gender binary and fixed categorisations of sexual orientation, and to other boundaries and dichotomies, such as ‘productive’ and ‘reproductive’, ‘public and ‘private’. Given the synergies between the queer project of unsettling binaries and wider feminist critiques of ‘masculinist/modernist dualisms’ (Peterson 2005, p. 507), I do not consider this to be essential to understanding queer struggle, per se, but more a cross-cutting concern within feminist and queer political. economy. Similarly, while I am not specifically including a dimension on the relationality and multiplicity of oppressions, frequently conceptualised as ‘intersectionality’ (Crenshaw 1991), I see this as fundamental to a feminist political economy approach. As such, it is threaded throughout this paper’s theoretical discussion, framework, and analysis. Furthermore, I address the importance of understanding intersecting or, more specifically, co-constituting social relations—race, class, gender, sexuality—within the global economy in detail in my discussion of dimension 5. The state-centric literature has moved forward understandings of queer sexuality and capitalism in a number of valuable ways, notably by: incorporating the queer analytic of heteronormativity into political economy analyses; illuminating the key regulatory and coercive powers of the state vis-à-vis intimate and family relations; and interrogating how heteronormativity links to the cultural, legal, and the economic. However, rarely has this literature extended beyond analysis of the (re)production of heterosexist family and gender norms and models—typically construed as heterosexual couples living in male-breadwinner households with children—to connect these structures and dynamics to the actual lived experience of queer individuals in different settings. In other words, it frequently notes who is excluded—queer, transgender, and gender non-conforming individuals and couples, other queer configurations of love, desire, family, corporeality etc—but does not provide empirical insight into the lives of these excluded populations themselves (or into the forms of resistance they take up). As such, there is a way in which existing approaches to the study of queer sexuality in/and the state risk reproducing some of the same occlusions and oversights they seek to disrupt. This suggests a fourth key dimension in my theoretical framework: (4) a concern for the everyday political economies of queer lives and resistance. I am informed here by the turn to the everyday in feminist IPE (Elias and Roberts 2016, Elias and Rethel 2018), as well as longstanding feminist work that documents the gendered character of global economic processes and their implications for women’s everyday productive and reproductive lives. The point here is not simply that the ‘global’ affects the ‘local’, the ‘macro’ affects the ‘micro’, but that non-elite and, importantly, non-Western actors’ engagements with, and articulations of, everyday political economic processes may both reproduce and resist broader patterns of global economic transformation. Given the resonance of concepts of resistance within queer studies (Warner 1991:16), this seems an apt formulation for a political economy approach to queer struggle. Thus, while heteronormativity remains critical as an organising analytic for studying queer sexualities within political economy, this should be conceptualised to include more quotidian microlevel practices, formations, and relations (i.e. in addition to the state and supra-state levels), as well as the acts and modalities of resistance that challenge them (i.e. in addition to mainstream social movements).

Gali 23 – Ali Murat JD, Queer, non-binary, organizer, “Crawling Out of Fear and the Ruins of an Empire: Queer, Black, and Native Intimacies, Laws of Creation and Futures of Care”, 2023 Yale J.L. & Feminism – tishu

Queerness is a generative desiring; it is an evoking of the playful, unpredictable, capacious possibilities of being in bodies, expressing selves, and exploring intimacies.1 In a society of definitive meanings, where identities signify specific and predictable positions, queerness insists on the incompleteness of any one structure of organizing individuals and relationships.2 While the social order is diluted by narratives instructing how relationships form, evolve, and get hierarchized, queer relationalities reject the simplicity of common-sense assumptions; in their place creating a playground of love, care, and dependencies. Against the fantasy of the monogamous couples and their biological families, for example, queer peoples have developed hand-made relational configurations. They intermingle friendships, families, lovers, and partners; they render these categories flexible and allow the individuals to give them meanings based on their unique patterns of connection, communication, and communion.3 Queer peoples have metamorphosed sensuality, from a private act of coupled [*178] intimacy, into what can pervade across social relations and positions.4 Intimacies take shape between individuals who may not know each other s names, and in public spaces where privacy is carved out; sensuality becomes a part of body language between those who may not engage in sexual acts it structures one s disposition and gendered presentation. Intimacies turn into enactments of losing and gaining control, which stretch the definitions and functions of bodies.5 As an invitation to creation, queerness places a fundamental contradiction within the law, which seeks to provide[] the context for ending the story successfully. 6 Whereas the legal order is built upon the premise that a truth is necessary for ordering society, and functions through centralizing that truth, queerness refuses to organize [ ] desire[ ] . . . [even] refusing to speak in a single voice. 7 The tension between the fluid and constructive tendencies of queer worldmaking, against the stabilizing and regulatory matrix of the legal order, offers a beginning point for this article.8 From within this incommensurability, I will pull forth a conversation on the meaning and ideal of equality, particularly as it shapes the relational order of the society implicating how individuals perceive themselves and one another. [*179] The law enshrines and entrenches a unified narrative, a singularized network of meanings, as shared principles of the society. This is an ideal of american citizenship,9 a socialized identity based upon overarching value structures and ethical principles, anticipated to override all particularities.10 Specifically in the context of rights and liberties, the law relies upon the centralized narrative of citizenship.11 To make a claim for equality, a minoritarian group must create an image of themselves employing these normalized conditions of the society. In other words, the group seeking equality must bring themselves in a continuous formation with the dominant narrative of american citizenship what cannot be captured in this linguistic simplification is buried under a political silence; it can only be an excess but it will not be operational in the structuring of reality.12 The construction of identity-based claims with a reliance on the shared values of citizenry represent a fantasy of equality as sameness pretending that [differences] [*180] can be translated with no damage to the structure of meaning underlying the disputes. 13 Under this hegemonic approach to equality, there is a singular truth, the truth of the dominant civil society, and all variances are narrative modifications that can expand, but never undo this truth.14 Even as the introductory remarks show, an understanding of equality that relies upon a singularized narrative cannot sustain the possibilities of existence generated among queer collectivities. Instead, in a queer world order, equality would require allowing difference to produce its own meanings. This is not denouncing the impacts of the social and collective; on the contrary, creation always begins from the vocabulary, grammar, networks, and ideas that populate the social imaginary.15 Yet, rather than taking the particular ordering of these facets as immutable or essentially desirable, queerness recognizes their historical specificity and malleability. In turn, individuals shift away from being passive observers or reproducers of the social order, and take the stance of being willful subjects, those who can claim an agency to shift the forms and concurrently the names given to their bodies, relationships, and the purpose of their lives.16 Queer worldmaking is an act of survival embedded in creation.17 Where the dominant order has shunned away, if not actively violated, the existence of queer peoples,18 finding new names for bodies, coming together in dependent [*181] relationships, and visioning other orders through playing with sensualities is an insistence upon remaining alive, declaring one s worth, and retaining hope for futures of freedom.19 With the centrality of survival to queerness in mind, the unified narrative of the law comes across as inherently violent to those whose being and loving stray away from its demands.20 While liberties may be extended to those priorly denied their rights, the existences which lose their essence when translated into the central narrative will remain at the fringes and continue to be dehumanized.21 Approaching this persistence of inequality is not an unavoidable reality of living in a constitutional polity, but a choice we make in how we think about and organize the law, this article seeks to create a critical inquisition into the centralized relational order, including its forms and specifically its guiding values. In subsequent parts, the article will attempt to tear away the layered, historicized, and cultural assumptions that persist the societal narrative through its tensions with queer desires and dreams, and by unearthing its violent implications on Black communities, and its entrenched roots in colonial dispossession of Native communities. Racialized violence persists across the everyday of the american citizenry.22 Racialized inequality is never separate from the constructions of deviance and abnormality, which most directly bring to mind gendered, sexualized, hence relational variations.23 For [*182] a constructive critique, this paper will tie racialized violence to the encounters and values guiding the nations formation and persistence, in which race has functioned as the baseline historical sign of injury and its reparation, which structures the condition of possibility for modern identities and rights.24 In addition to the analytic and political convergences of queer, Black, and Native histories, just as queer peoples, Black and Native peoples insist on their existence against a social that do not wish for them to survive. They have possessed and have continued to grow their own cultures, their own ways of existing together, which as I will come to argue, transgress the unified fiction upheld by the law. To this end, they offer knowledge, wisdom, and hope to reach beyond the stifling constitutional polity.25 Starting these conversations from a point of relationships is nurturing, because they are personal, as much as always political. We rely upon relationships for sustaining ourselves, building our lives, and reaching towards our dreams. How we come together in intimate relationships and passing connections is the backbone of the society. And where the law can be taken as the story the nation tells of itself, organization of relationships in light of these stories implicate where we think we stand and who we think we can become.26 There is thus a deep intimacy between the values guiding the legal order and those guiding our lives, and a central work of this article is to explore these values as means of understanding how their . In my analysis I will touch upon three layers of the relational order as responsive constructs: (i) forms, that is how we name our relationships and hierarchize them in a particular manner, (ii) values, that is the ethical and moral principles that reason the organization of relationships, and (iii) feelings, that [*183] is the emotional underpinnings that stabilize certain value structures as necessary or desirable for the continuity of the society. Seeing these layers will require bringing disjointed archives and scholarship together, and drawing connections that I will not claim to be the truth, but rather a possible reinvestigation of what we have learned to take for granted.27 My overarching aim is to reflect upon how a law that conditions equality upon sameness structures and is in turn sustained by the relational order. Through foregrounding relationships of queer, Black, and Native peoples, this paper will simultaneously explore the possibilities of queering the law. In particular, I would like to invite us to think whether changing feelings, values, and forms of relationships can foster the possibility of laws that encourage branching and multiplying the ordering principles of collective togetherness. With these ambitious and introductory goals, this paper will trail off as follows. Part I will unpack Lawrence and Obergefell to reveal the romanticized narratives that organize connection and intimacy in the broader society. I will focus on the private/public divide, as a fiction that is insistently deployed to establish the idealized relationships of marriage and family. Part II will carry the conversation into the layer of values, specifically thinking about privatization of dependencies as a national value that defines not only the american family, but also creates alienated publics. I will build these claims and explore their effects through centering the families and publics nurtured by Black peoples, which the dominant sociopolitical narratives mark as failures based on their difference from the national norm. To ground these assertions in a historical continuum, Part III will investigate the colonial moment and display how the settlers have deployed the forms of romanticized relationships as well as their accompanying value structures to justify destruction of Native cultures. This Part will further elaborate on the contemporary echoes of this colonial paradigm, ultimately asserting that the centralized relational order persists white supremacy. Collecting the tendrils of these conversations and focusing on how the regulatory force of the law has been justified across time and place, Part IV will elaborate on fear as a [*184] public feeling that urges preservation of the relational order and equality based upon sameness. Thinking together with the teachings of Black queer feminists and Native peoples, this Part will end with reflections to move away from fear and towards alternative configurations of laws, which do not homogenize into a singularized ideal, but instead encourage collective living, and make possible accountability and justice. At the heart of this work lies a desire to produce and promote hope. Particularly within a legal structure that insists upon the repetition of the same, this paper urges a remembering of our own power and creative capacities. To originate laws from our bodies, rather than a nation, is to be guided by these capacities that are already manifested in our loves, dependencies, and intimacies; foreshadowing societies structured not through exploitation, but trust and care