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.
- Jacqueline Best, “The Limits of Financial Risk Management: Or, What We Didn’t Learn from the Asian Crisis.” New Political Economy 15:1 (2010), forthcoming. [↩]
