Marxism needs queer analysis

The cleaving of Marxism from queer studies — indeed, the atomization of sexuality, race, and class as antagonistic and incompatible identities separated by distinct politics and platforms — returns in an especially lethal form with the contemporary rise of right-wing nationalisms and call-out cultures across the political spectrum. These movements pit white, black, brown, and yellow as well as straight, gay, and trans against one another, undoing long histories of political coalition building, trenchant critical analyses of racial capitalism, and influential theories of intersectionality and assemblage that have emerged from fields as diverse as Black feminisms and decolonial theory. Insofar as poststructuralist Marxisms also have critiques of identity and identity politics that exceed the primacy of the classed subject, the impasse between queer studies and Marxism is less about which identities matter and more about the divergent ways in which the fields interrogate relations of social structuration. In his opening contribution to this special issue, “Queer Theory and the Specter of Materialism,” Petrus Liu turns a fresh eye to this problem. He insists that the sexual subject of queer studies and the class subject of Marxism are not distinct entities. Both must relinquish their proprietary relationship over these categories. Instead, Liu conceives both queer theory and Marxism as materialist theories foregrounding the constitutive sociality of the self. Liu’s approach to subjectless critique as one grounded in processes of social structuration that cut across the two fields allows him to bring together Judith Butler’s “view of gender as the constitutive sociality of the self” and Marx’s “labor theory of value as the ethical imbrication of self and Other.” Refusing to reduce queer theory to the primacy of sexuality and Marxism to the primacy of the economic and the material, Liu observes that the ascription of positivistic content, political priority, or moral urgency to the laboring subject in the latter field is predicated on forgetting the fact that “Marx is interested not in the stand - point of the immediate producer but in the fact that under capitalism labor becomes both a commodity (that one can sell) and a social relation.” Both Marxism and queer studies underscore the fact that the subject is necessarily opaque to itself and eminently imbricated in a web of social relations and responsibilities, a self with primary ties to unknown and unknowable others. As such, Marxism and queer theory are better approached not as oppositional but as dialectical. In effect, disavowals of Marxist analyses as hostile toward sexuality, and repudiations of sexuality as “merely cultural” from a Marxian point of view prevent us from understanding the production and reproduction of subjects precisely as recognizable identities. Indeed, Liu’s turn to “queer Marxism” as a common ground for examining materialist predications of the subject focuses our attention away from the reproduction of the means of production and toward the reproduction of the relations of production, to borrow a critical concept from Louis Althusser.12 This move allows us to index multiple approaches to materialism in global Marxisms and connect them to the predication, history, and relations of the subject in ways that pose significant geopolitical implications for what’s “left of queer.” For example, the evolution of LGBTQ+ in US identity politics finds its global corollary today in a discourse of international human rights in which sexuality becomes a privileged metric to assess “civilized” and “barbaric” cultures. The “woman question” (how illiberal nations and peoples in the Third World treat their women) in prior decades has now evolved into the “homosexual question” (how illiberal nations and peoples in the global South treat their LGBTQ communities). This developmentalist narrative presumes a universal subject and history, not only of queerness but also and notably of capitalism, as scholars such as Rosemary Hennessy, Miranda Joseph, and Kevin Floyd underscore.13 Through the maintenance of a reductive opposition between global North and global South, the developmentalist use of queer as identity thus becomes an important foil for the globalization of capital in its imperial travels, fostering the production as well as erasure of particular queer subjects and subjectivities. In the age of neoliberalism and human rights, the colonial dynamic of white men saving brown women from brown men has been reconditioned as white folks (straight and gay) saving brown homosexuals from brown heterosexuals.14 As sexuality becomes a primary language—perhaps the primary language—of modern citizenship, a model of queer rights and representation in the West assumes an ever-expanding ambit in a global politics of recognition. Focusing on the predication of the queer subject of geopolitics exposes a problematic and antagonistic relationship between sexuality and class that denies histories of coevalness. This relationship underwrites particular parochialisms as universal discourses of neoliberal development on both the individual and the structural level. In sum, returning subjectless critique to the geopolitical field allows us to apprehend both US queer studies and area studies as particular forms of specialized, regional knowledge, with specific histories of social production beyond the subject of the Western gay consumer-tourist or the queer native informant. It allows us to apprehend the emergence of both a universal queer subject of rights and recognition and a particular queer native informant consigned to the waiting room of history as two sides of the same representational coin. The Western queer and the post - colonial queer — including the “transnational activist” that sutures them together — are neither developmental nor oppositional categories. Rather, they must be approached as dialectic counterparts created through the same social relations of production that expose the capitalist (economic), nationalist (political), and liberal individualist (cultural) assumptions foreclosing other histories of materiality and other social relations and relationalities. Therefore, to reframe these debates, we must expand our queer archives and attend to the complexity and porosity of what is signaled by materiality in the first instance.