Introduction
The Background
In a compelling paper on the global credit crunch presented at the
2009 International Studies meetings, Jacqueline Best cited a commentary
in The Economist that attempted to sum up what had gone
wrong.[1]
Traditional relations between a bank manager and a person wanting a
mortgage were, the commentary remarked, like a marriage, where both
parties had an interest in working out the relationship over the long
term. The advent of new financial products had inaugurated a
relationship more akin to an orgy, where it was in everyone's interest
to ask as few questions as possible. Amid the chuckles, I wondered
whether the audience—mostly non-feminist political scientists gathered
for a panel on the international regulatory dimensions of the economic
crisis—was longing nostalgically for the marriage mode. Or would they
defend an orgy, on the libertarian grounds that everyone knows what to
expect and no one is forced to take part? I had a little daydream: Maybe
they knew already how commonly financial disorder is mapped onto sexual
unruliness and excess (De Goede 2005; Tadiar 1998), and maybe they would
interrogate the comparison. Perhaps they would retort with queer
indignation that properly conducted orgies require good communication,
or perhaps they would smile wryly at the fact that the highly unequal
relations between indebted people and their bankers are so easily mapped
onto traditional marriage. But the panel ended with no further debate on
the commentary. The critical business of interrogating the global
political-economic order may have been temporarily disrupted by a joke
about sex, but the spheres of sexuality and money, of economic injustice
and sexual injustice, were not to be brought seriously together that
day.
This special issue of The Scholar and Feminist is, among other
things, a step towards generating better conversations about sexuality
and money. It is written by people who are trying to figure out better
choices for shelter, debt management, and erotic life than those on
offer in The Economist. Twenty-five of these individuals came to
New York in the autumn of 2007 to participate in a public lecture and
colloquium entitled "Toward a Vision of Sexual and Economic Justice,"
generously funded by the Ford Foundation and the Overbrook Foundation.
The colloquium aimed to bring together people working on issues
conventionally understood to be about economic justice, such as poverty,
structural adjustment, welfare reform, trade agreements and so on, with
those working on reproductive and sexual justice, sex workers' rights,
combating HIV/AIDS, and gay, lesbian and transgender politics.
The lecture and colloquium were also animated by multiple desires,
including, perhaps most prominently, a wish to move beyond perceived
divisions about how issues of economic justice and sexual justice have
been named and conceived, and to help develop new visions of how people
and movements might come together. These divisions have been understood
and named in various ways: as between social politics versus cultural
politics; the politics of recognition versus the politics of
redistribution; "real" politics—war and the economy, for example—versus
the frivolous, unreal concerns of gender and sexuality. As Janet
Jakobsen put it at the opening event:
These divisions are getting harder to sustain . . .. For
example, anti-poverty activists have come to focus on the spread of
HIV/AIDS as a major stumbling block to ending extreme poverty, while
HIV/AIDS activists have increasingly focused on the need for global
economic health care reform. But even if we take the mutual constitution
of sexual and economic justice to be proven, we still need to develop
new visions of how the terms relate to each other. Of what sexual
justice and economic justice, or sexual-nomic justice, ecosexualness,
sex-econ—we'll get a word yet!—might be. And most importantly, how it
can be secured in all our lives.
To this end, each participant wrote a three-page thought paper on
their understandings of sexual and economic justice; they are available
here.
Key questions framing their work included: How do we conceive of the connections
between the often separated arenas of sexual and economic justice? How
do we understand recent changes in (inter)national political economy in
relation to sexuality? What possibilities—if any—do contemporary
formulations of global capitalism open up for alternative sexual
politics, and conversely, what new norms and regulations are being
forged in the neoliberal world order? How might sexuality help to
constitute what we think of as economic relations, and vice versa? What
can we learn from those who work at the intersection of these struggles
for justice and how, fundamentally, can we facilitate their efforts?
The conversation generated at the colloquium was wide-ranging and
illuminating. Participants did not agree upon a single description of
how sexual and economic justice are linked. Nor did they advocate a
unitary vision of how to move forward. However, they did agree on some
valuable next steps, including the need to reframe our understandings of
both economic and sexual justice so that the interconnections and
tensions between movement demands might be easier to understand. The
final report of the meeting, aiming to summarize the conversation and
draw together the diverse thoughts expressed, is available at here (PDF). Free print copies of the report are
also available and can be obtained by contacting the Barnard Center for
Research on Women at bcrw@barnard.edu.
What we aim to do in this special issue is take those conversations
further, and to give more space to some of the work that stemmed from
the colloquium. This work exists at the intersection of sexual and
economic justice, and aims to push debates in new directions. The
scholars, activists, and artists featured here approach the task of
linking sexual and economic justice very divergently; they are from a
range of countries, movements, and disciplines, and they address issues
ranging from prison abolition to HIV/AIDS, from urban gentrification to
Internet monitoring, from the World Social Forum to union organizing.
They do, however, share a common interest in thinking hard about what
interlinked approaches to justice might entail.
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