In the wake of the pivotal crisis-events that have arguably reshaped some of the familiar contours of this New World Order and its economy since the early 1990s—including the first Gulf War in 1991, the Asian financial crisis in 1997, and the U.S.-led preemptive war against and occupation of Iraq since 2003 (events that remind us of the structural crises of globalization that local and regional wars have been the indispensable means of resolving)—it would seem time to re-examine this feminist conceptual and political model for the question of its continued relevance to the current moment. Although my point of departure for rethinking this feminist model is my own work, I do not understand this reconsideration of “sexual economies” as one of personal intellectual revision. Rather, it is an effort to rethink some of the broadly shared concepts and theoretical perspectives that I and other feminists have used to think about how gender, sexuality, and race matter to the economy, and further, to take critical stock of both the extant possibilities opened up by some of these theoretical perspectives and the limits posed by our norms of thinking on these matters, norms that also appear to operate in the world of activism and nongovernmental practice.
There are several features in the conceptualization of “sexual economies” that I have tried to highlight in my descriptive summary above. The first is the importance of a different deployment of crisis as a mode of posing the structural role that gender, race, and sexuality play in seemingly purely economic processes. Clearly, this conceptual deployment of crisis owes something to Marxist thought, an important source of critical thinking about the economy that socialist and materialist feminists in particular have tapped for valuable conceptual tools that they have inflected with social difference, such as the division of labor and the category of labor itself. For many feminists, crisis as event and excess dissimulates crisis as structure and norm, temporally containing the systemic unsustainability of the processes of capitalist accumulation, which depend on the continual dispossession of the very populations who serve as the productive resources of the value accumulated. Systemic forms of social and bodily violence, and psychic and emotional violation, are intrinsic to modern structures of capitalist accumulation, and it is by looking at the social groups and identities of those who disproportionately bear these violent consequences—the bodily bearers of systemic crisis—that one can begin to understand the role that categories of social difference play in the political and economic systems themselves.
This is an epistemic framework that is evident in much anti-racist, third world, postcolonial, and transnational feminist thought. It relies on a notion of socially marked groups as the objects of mutually imbricated processes of exploitation and hierarchical oppression. The worker as crisis-symptom of capitalism becomes rearticulated as a social position produced not just in contradictory relation to capital but also through simultaneous intersecting forces or axes of hierarchical social difference. For example, Rose Brewer writes:
Given this, uneven economic development encompasses more than a labor/capital struggle. It is shaped by cultural processes reflecting longstanding definitions, perceptions of what is natural and given around hierarchies of race and gender. It is the issue of who loses. And, increasingly, the answer is young black women and men of American inner cities. Moreover, the concern with the changing division of labor through economic restructuring is matched in this discussion by a concern with racial and gender divisions of labor. Pivotal here is the intersection of race/gender hierarchies and the way contemporary economic restructuring is shaped by existing arrangements of race and gender divisions.1
As in my account of Asia-Pacific sexual economies, “who loses” is a question of a division of labor that is constituted through intersecting race/gender hierarchies. Although Brewer raises the important issue of growing inner-city slum populations (what I have elsewhere called the urban excess, developmentalism’s human refuse), which remain one of the most undertheorized sites within thinking about the global economy, the central focus and critical standpoint of her analysis of social and economic injustice and inequality is black women’s labor. That is to say, the issue of “who loses” or the crisis-symptom of capitalist accumulation can be located in a racialized and gendered category of embodied labor.
Similarly, the intersectional social identity of disenfranchised Filipina women as sexualized labor served both as a critical starting point and guaranteeing evidence of my analysis of the constitutive significance of gender, sexuality, and race to the logic and processes of the international political economy. If the gendered, sexualized figures of relations among the U.S., Japan, and the Philippines were not mere metaphors, then it was necessary to show how the real meanings—conceived as cost and consequence—of this Asia-Pacific fantasy-production could be located in the bodily fates of poor Filipina women workers, the embodiment of devalued, racialized, sexualized, feminized labor.
- Rose M. Brewer, “Theorizing Race, Class, and Gender: The New Scholarship of Black Feminist Intellectuals and Black Women’s Labor” in Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference, and Women’s Lives, ed. Rosemary Hennessy and Chrys Ingraham. New York: Routledge, 1997. [↩]
