Sexuality and "The Left": Thoughts on Intersections and Visceral Others
"If the left is fundamentally about constructing a
society without exploitation and oppression, I donŐt see why or how gay
issues would not be part of its program for American
society."
—John D'Emilio[1]
I evoke John D'Emilio at the outset of this piece with the caveat of
extending his statement from "gay issues" to "sexuality" in order to
discuss the strategic, political and, to a degree, theoretical effects
of the somewhat fraught intersections and impasses between the
contemporary politics of sexuality and the politics of "the left" in the
U.S. Building on queer leftist scholarship, I argue that the left in the
U.S. has opted for a representationally inclusive approach to sexuality,
in that more LGBT individuals are part of American left organizations
than ever before. However, because the left has maintained its analytic
focus on class per se, it has left the "thinking" on sexuality and other
social categories of analysis to other movements. This has meant that
the left, when it does speak out on issues pertaining to sexuality, has
moved away from its earlier position of openly espousing normative rules
for sex and sexuality, but it has tended to show its support for
progressive sexuality-based campaigns through endorsements of juridical
positions held by fairly centrist sexuality rights activists. This means
that when it comes to sexuality, the left has often supported positions
that are ultimately at odds with left critiques of liberal states.
To mobilize this argument, I discuss the interventions of Wendy Brown
and Janet Halley, as well as queer left perspectives on the mainstream
left, and how all of these may be understood in relation to contemporary
debates on gay marriage and sex work. Although this piece is informed by
my own engagements with both Old and New Left formations in the U.S. and
in India, the examples and insights I offer here are mainly derived from
my engagement with movements in the United States. This essay should be
read within the tradition of internal critique, in the sense that my own
commitments are allied with queer and sex worker struggles, with those
of the left, and especially within the intersecting, though constrained,
spaces that they share.
Terms of Critique
The terms "sexuality" and "the left"
both beg clarification. I use the terms "left" and "the left" in three
contexts, enumerated here in order of their primacy to my critique.
First, I use these terms to indicate the ethnographic category of "the
left," as constructed and inhabited by (and against) "progressive" and
left activists in the U.S., and as it is used in the somewhat fraught
daily life of American political discourse. Second, I use these terms to
signal intellectual production and a set of social movements that use,
and generate, political frameworks mediated through discourses of
political economy. Third, I use these terms to indicate the tradition of
scholarship and critique that has both rested within and extended
Marxism. Given the rich and disparate nature of the Marxist tradition,
the unity indicated by the term "the left," always prepended by the
definitive article and articulated in the singular, is especially
ironic, considering that it describes an agglomeration in motion; as
such, imbuing it with anything but the broadest descriptive
characteristics, especially in this kind of schematic analysis, would be
impossible. The efflorescence of leftist politics contributes to the
complexity and irony of the unitary fiction that the term describes. At
the same time, "politics" itself remains a fraught enterprise, in which
hierarchies based on access to resources, members, and analysis remain.
In a previous issue of
The Scholar and
Feminist Online, Lisa Lowe
reminds us that politics cannot be sequestered within the state, an
insight that helps to frame the problematics that emerge between
sexuality and the left as well.
"[A] focus [that] defines 'politics' in terms of
states . . . excludes, on the one hand, the 'politics' of popular social movements or
workers' struggles beneath the level of the state or organizing
transnationally, and on the other, communist or socialist nonwestern
states like China or Cuba, or those newly independent nations in Africa,
Asia or the Caribbean whose narratives of political development diverge
from the 'modernization' model based on states in Europe or North
America. A shared definition of 'politics' as the activities of states
and international regimes obscures an understanding of how government,
interest, and power affect the lion's share of the non-elite
world."[2]
Lowe's articulation of "politics" as exceeding the parameters of
states, and of state apparatuses of governance in particular, may be
productively read in relation to E.P. Thompson's much earlier assertion
that "the left" is, by definition, changeable and constantly
changing.
"We rejected—as I still reject—any description of
Communism or of Communist-governed societies which defines these in
terms of their ruling ideologies and the institutions of their ruling
elites, and which excludes by the very terms of its definition any
appraisal of the conflicts characteristic to them, of the alternative
meanings, values, traditions and potentials which they may
contain."[3]
This changeability results in left movements that are quite diverse
in the ways they make decisions and locate organizational power, while
all turning on the question of class, and the fact of uneven economic
distribution, at the heart of leftist analysis and politics. Regarding
the question of uneven distribution, in the mid-1990s, Wendy Brown
observed that:
"Indeed, much of the progressive political agenda in
recent years has been concerned not with democratizing power but with
distributing goods, and especially with pressuring the state to buttress
the rights and increase the entitlements of the socially vulnerable or
disadvantaged: people of color, homosexuals, women, endangered animal
species, threatened wetlands, ancient forests, the sick, and the
homeless."[4]
Brown's point remains relevant for the contemporary moment, when the
rights of marriage, for example, are being promoted for distribution to
same-sex couples, maintaining the status of both marriage and of
unmarried people. With respect to terms, this use of progressive is, in
my view, uniquely American. Few other places in the world use the term
progressive to mean something roughly leftist, roughly liberal, and
roughly radical, all at the same time. Yet the idiosyncratic history of
the left in the U.S., which I discuss briefly in the sections that
follow, has itself given rise to this usage of progressive. Brown makes
it clear that some progressive political agendas in the U.S. have
slipped, or jumped, into liberal frameworks partly because of this take
on questions of distribution and rights. At the same time, liberalism is
not "a political position opposite to conservatism but a political order
that replaces Tudor monarchy rooted in explicit class privilege with
modern democratic constitutionalism rooted in abstract
individualism."[5]
Liberalism has a potentially problematic relationship to the question of
distribution because of "the effects of the depoliticized status of
political economy in liberal orders."[6]
The Marxian emphasis on the
distribution of power and resources should be understood as distinct
from liberalism's emphasis on social equality and the equal distribution
of individuals' rights. It is the emphasis on the individual in
liberalism that I highlight here as being distinct from the Marxian
emphasis on classes, along with the "effects of the depoliticized status
of political economy," two distinctions that are especially relevant to
the discussion on sexuality because of the ways in which sexuality-based
movements have been located and criticized within the terrains of
"identity politics," which I also discuss in this essay. This is not to
say that classes and individuals are mutually exclusive entities, but
that the respective emphasis on each helps to define and maintain a
distinction between Marxism and liberalism. The qualifications of this
distinction continue to offer much fuel for debate, though they are
beyond the scope of this essay. The tensions between Marxism and the
left and liberalism are salient here because sexuality-based movements,
scholarship, and politics in the U.S. live within the slippery rubric of
progressivism that marks these tensions.
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