If Not Mere Metaphor . . . Sexual Economies Reconsidered

Their Bodies, Our Subjects

It is worth noting, as a second feature, that this epistemic model was enabled by a theoretical attention to the discursivity of material processes such as economic phenomena, a theoretical attention that was a hallmark of academic thinking in a moment arguably shaped not only by French poststructuralism but also by the increasing financialization of capital. ¹ Beyond ideology critiques, scholars like Arturo Escobar, for example, theorized the Western economy as composed of a system of signification as well as a system of production and power, highlighting the role of discursive processes in the constitution of the dominant actors and scripts of action in the world project of development that emerged after the Second World War, including the very object of global economic action, the third world. ² It is the attention to the role of signification in the constitution of material realities that undergirded a whole host of denaturalizing feminist interventions, not only with respect to the economy but also with respect to the sexed body, as paradigmatically defined by Judith Butler’s theory of performativity. In J.K. Gibson-Graham’s feminist intervention, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy (1996), “capitalism” itself could be grasped in terms of what Butler called a set of “regulatory fictions” that script the economic agencies of capital, on the one hand, and workers and consumers, on the other, in the heteronormative sexual identities of, respectively, the heroic male subject of power and violence and the passive female victim or object of that power and violence. ³ Drawing on poststructuralist feminist and queer writings on the body, gender, and sexuality, Gibson-Graham propose to “query” the rape script of globalization, and more generally, to queer the normative bodily identities and subject-positions of capitalism, thereby opening up alternative scripts and other possibilities of economic being and practice.

I will return to this proposal to queer the naturalized economy, and to the specific strategy Gibson-Graham develop in their recent book, A Postcapitalist Politics, of “undoing” the seemingly fixed and monolithic identity of capitalism through a new language of economic diversity. ⁴ For now, I want to remark on how this feminist reading of the signifying role of categories of gendered and sexual differences in constituting the economic order necessarily entails an invocation of its material effects, often in identifiable social groups of embodied labor. That is to say, the abstract dimensions of the economic system through which feminists are able to read gender, race, and sexuality as intrinsic to its processes demands the location of its effects in the collectively gendered, racialized, and sexualized individual bodies of workers (or, in Gibson-Graham’s work, the other embodied economic subject, consumers). ⁵ Hence, in numerous feminist critiques of globalization, immigrant female domestic and/or sex workers, as well as women workers in other global industries, come to embody the material consequences of the gendered, racialized, and sexualized aspects of the normative logics of the capitalist economy. In such anthologies as Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy, edited by Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, and Women and Globalization, edited by Delia Aquilar and Anne Lacsamana, poor women workers from the global south are the paradigmatic figures and representative bearers of the economic processes known as the feminization of labor and the globalization of reproductive labor, or “women’s work.” ⁶

I want to be very clear that I consider these feminist interventions extremely important, even indispensable, to political struggles against the violence and injustice of the ruling global economic order, and do not contest the terrible facts of women’s exploitation and oppression that they present. I do, however, want to probe the conditions and limits of these feminist epistemic frameworks and in particular the political fallout of the norms they inadvertently institute. In this vein, the first point I want to make is that these feminist accounts are predominantly predicated upon a theory and politics of subjects, whose contradistinction with objects rests on or at least resides in enabling proximity with other extant Western philosophical distinctions, such as distinctions between human and non-human, animate and inanimate, and life and death. ⁷ Despite a great range of theoretical perspectives in these accounts, the subject remains the model and unit for recognizing and thinking about economic as well as sexual activity, identity, and agency. It serves as the axiomatic form of human equivalence that undergirds many feminist critiques of globalization and their respective ethico-political claims. The subject is the protagonist of political-moral tales of agency versus script or structure, freedom versus constraint, suffering versus resistance, which is implicit if not fully evident in these accounts. Grace Chang’s analysis of globalization in Women and Globalization argues, for example, that “women of color throughout the world are those who suffer first and worst under globalization,” but they are also “the primary leaders in fighting back, in resisting this ‘new world order.'” In Chang’s analytical principle, “women of color do not merely suffer under, but struggle, survive and forge resistance over globalization,” which is echoed in Delia Aguilar’s introductory remark that while “economic globalization weighs most heavily upon women and extracts from them the greatest suffering, they have been rendered neither immobile nor quiescent,” we glimpse the basic narrative outline of many feminist accounts.

My concern here is not principally about the homogenizing and Eurocentric universalizing ways in which third world women are produced as “subjects outside of social relations,” or about the equation of agency with resistance, as the exemplary works of Chandra Mohanty and Saba Mahmood have argued, despite the relevance that such criticism holds in this context. ⁸ Rather, it is that the subject remains the primary analytical and political locus for feminist accounts of the intersection between economics and categories of social difference. However concretely situated and specified, whether subverting norms or inhabiting them, the subject is the privileged form of political agency. Undoubtedly, the discursive construction of economic subjects continues to be an important site of feminist critical intervention. As I show in “Sexual Economies,” the metaphorical construction of nation-states as gendered subjects exerts constitutive force through processes of socialization that regulate the proper actors in, and representatives of, institutions of state and capital and the kinds of power they are authorized to exercise; economic policies that protect and valorize the “productive” activities of capitalist industries over the “non-productive” activities associated with women’s subsistence; and social as well as state practices of labor conscription, marketing, and regulation that aid in the so-called feminization of labor.

Subjective ideals in the fantasy of nation-states certainly bear important and often incalculably and irreversibly punitive consequences for people who do not embody these ideals. Moral-political projects of citizenship making as well as state building, which are indispensable to national economic strategies of accumulation, provide the compass for the policing of sexual behaviors in the production of licit subjects and social relations. In the U.S. context, for example, Mary Pat Brady shows how the dovetailing of anti-gay rights and anti-immigrant sentiments in the 1990s (expressed in the channeling of energies from California’s long-contested gay rights bill, AB101, to Proposition 187, which denied public benefits to illegal aliens) into the New Nativist nationalism of the 2000s rested on a deep public investment in, and anxiety about, the regulation and promotion of a heteropatriarchal white family structure as the proper site of consumption and reproduction. ⁹ Itself shaped by the economic assaults on the single-wage “nuclear family” as a result of the financialization and globalization of the U.S. economy, this anxiety was marshaled into new programs of welfare reform, the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, and widespread social and state practices of criminalizing immigrants. In the Taiwanese context, Josephine Ho has talked about a similar national anxiety caused by globalization’s assault on the middle class, which has been deflected toward renewed forms of parental social and sexual control over an infantilized citizenry, and the criminalization of migrant labor and sexual minorities. ¹⁰

In the current moment, if the U.S. financial crisis is cast in terms of an ailing male body, “analogous to a muscle strain in a champion athlete which could be healed with some rest and physiotherapy—as opposed to a heart attack in a 60-a-day smoker whose cure would require surgery and major changes in lifestyle,” these metaphorical constructions certainly delimit sanctioned forms of economic agency and practice while rendering other forms of economic agency and practice either irrelevant or unintelligible with respect to this crisis, and therefore outside of economic rationality. ¹¹ Take the representation of credit card companies’ curtailing their credit card offers and extension of credit lines, in the face of borrowers defaulting on payments, as efforts to “stanch the bleeding.” ¹² The construction of credit card companies as the proper economic subject of loss undoubtedly renders invisible the bleeding objects of economic exploitation, i.e., consumers of credit, and the “losses” (in Marxist terms, the theft) of their future labor, with which they are expected to pay for such credit. But a feminist critique along the lines I’ve outlined would likely cast working-class consumers of credit (and, if one were to go beyond a U.S.-focused account, the feminized labor in the global south which produces the goods and services that U.S. consumers buy with their credit, and the militarist masculinities across the world ensuring “political stability” by making the world safe for capitalism), as economic subjects whose identities and attendant agencies are inflected by axes of gendered, racial, and sexualized difference. As valuable as such interpretative approaches might be, their focus on the subject as a model for making agency intelligible necessarily confines what we can understand as “economic” activity and agency to given roles and positions in the realm of capitalist exchange. Indeed, it is important to highlight the fact that insofar as the subject is philosophically conceived out of historical relations of equivalence mediated by exchange-value, it restricts our understanding of gender, race, and sexuality to a specific cultural logic, reifying them as empirical forms of identity and difference on the level of exchange. ¹³

It comes as no surprise that many feminist critiques of the economy enact some drama of subjects and objects as a version of the dialectical struggle between capital and labor, which is itself constitutively shaped by gendered, racial, and sexual conceptions. ¹⁴ Whether as producers/workers, consumers, states, or various kinds of capital, economic subjects are defined against the objectified state of commodities. Hence, female laborers, in the form of sex workers, nannies, nurses and maids, are converted from their global commodity-form, i.e. as objects of exploitation and sexist and racist oppression, on whom the “impacts” of globalization are registered (as bodily sites of this economic order’s material effects), into subjects of feminist ethico-political claims. What I am suggesting, however, is that there is a specific political ontology that underlies these feminist interventions, one that reflects and institutes what Sylvia Wynter calls “the bioeconomic conception of the human.” ¹⁵ I would go so far as to say that it is this bioeconomic conception of the human that also delimits dominant feminist ways of articulating connections between the body, sexual desire, and economic practices.

1.  I am suggesting that this new discursive appearance or word-like quality of things might be located within the sociohistorical moment periodized by Fredric Jameson as postmodernity, and related to what he analyses as the operation of the new logic of financial capital in cultural production. Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998. London: Verso, 1998.[↑]
2. Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.[↑]
3. J.K. Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. First published in 1996.[↑]
4. J. K. Gibson-Graham, A Postcapitalist Politics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.[↑]
5. In postpositivist, poststructuralist feminist economics, an interpretive approach would acknowledge “the ways in which the underlying processes of the economy are discursively constituted” and view gender, race, class, sexuality, and nationality as conceptual, not merely empirical, categories. Drucilla K. Barker, “Beyond Women and Economics: Rereading ‘Women’s Work’,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 30. 4 (2005): 2189-2209, p. 2191. Although Barker notes the discrepancy between “sex” and feminized labor, the effects of these conceptual categories on the social organization of labor are exemplified by figures such as “ethnic minority women in the West,” and “poor Black, Latin, or Filipina women.”[↑]
6. Delia D. Aguilar and Anne E. Lacsamana, eds. Women and Globalization. New York: Humanity Books, 2004. Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2002.[↑]
7. I do not have the space here to open up these other distinctions. I discuss the politics of a permeable barrier between life and death in the contexts of overseas domestic labor and armed revolution in my book Things Fall Away.[↑]
8. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003. Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.[↑]
9. Mary Pat Brady, “The Homoerotics of Immigration Control,” The Scholar and the Feminist Online, Issue 6.3 (Summer 2008).[↑]
10. Josephine Ho, Talk, “Toward Economic and Social Justice,” Barnard College, 29 November 2007.[↑]
11. Wade, “Financial Regime Change,” 7.[↑]
12. Eric Dash, “Consumers Feel the Next Crisis: It’s Credit Cards,” The New York Times (Oct. 28, 2008).[↑]
13. Discussing the work of Adorno, Jameson argues that exchange-value or capitalist exchange constitutes “the abstract value form in which identity is primordially conceived.” Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic. London and New York: Verso, 1999.[↑]
14. For a discussion of the gendered and sexualized constitution of the Marxist concept of labor in relation to capital, see my “Prostituted Filipinas and the Crisis of Philippine Culture,” Millennium Journal of International Studies 27. 4 (1998): 927-954. Reprinted in Gendering the International, ed. Louiza Odysseos and Hakan Seckinelgin (Hampshire, U.K.: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002).[↑]
15. Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3.3 (2003): 257-337.[↑]