Heteronormativity structures economics and processes that undergird the production and sustenance of violent nation-states. Current radical political economics overlook the lived experiences of those in the margins that are the target of the policies that subject queerness and blackness to erasure. We must understand how sexuality shapes and transform global economic policy through queering relations

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