The Foundations: Crisis and Protection
The first section of the journal includes the two speeches given by Josephine Ho and Naomi Klein at the public event held in conjunction with the colloquium. We consider these talks, and the three-page thought papers written by the other participants, to offer insights into where advocates for economic and sexual justice might meet, interconnect, and—to use Ara Wilson’s terms—co-mingle and cohabit. They constitute fragments of the foundations upon which this conversation was built.
Two themes are particularly prominent in these talks, and are central to the subsequent essays in the special issue: crisis and protection. Reading the speeches now, 18 months after they were delivered and before the full force of the economic downturn had been felt (at least in New York when we met), one sees in them a clear awareness of the unsustainability of current forms of capitalism, and the various effects that a collapse of faith in markets and the governance structures underpinning them might have on gender and sexuality. Ho’s talk centrally addresses the intertwined crises of capital and governance using the example of youth sexuality. She considers the crisis of reproduction facing East Asian capitalism, involving the collapse of middle-class parents’ faith that their children will inherit their class standing. This collapse of faith in a certain vision of heteronormative futurity (Edelman 2004) is, for Ho, also linked to a legitimation crisis associated with challenges to the state’s authority and reformulated links between state and civil society. With middle-class parents anxious over their inability to transfer class status to their children, Ho argues that parents and teachers are growing increasingly alarmed at the class implications of so-called deviance in gender and sexuality. The state intervenes in this perceived site of crisis in the name of child protection, invoking a parental imaginary that aims to infantilize public spheres and forge a new social consensus about the asexuality of young people. She also links these debates about social control and youth sexuality to new trends in governance, by charting connections between globalization and the growing influence of religious NGOs over municipal and national policy with respect to sexual politics. With the state encouraged to franchise its rule to cooperating NGOs, conservative civil society groups have successfully challenged sexual freedom in some instances, sometimes by invoking the deliberative democracy and participatory citizenship discourses central to ideas about good governance. Ho hereby intertwines analysis of capitalist crisis and governance crisis to explain the attempts being made in many countries to purify social spaces of sexuality by treating all sex work as trafficking, all Internet sexual exchanges as predation, all adult publications dealing with sexuality as pornography—and to handle them all as criminal acts. In highlighting this interconnection between economic and political crisis, criminalization, and gender and sexuality, Ho demands that movements rethink their approach to protection, examine the ways in which “the economic and sexual underclasses are relegated to criminality,” and devote more resources to nurturing sexual autonomy, particularly with regard to youth.
Drawing on her book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein’s talk also foregrounds the crucial role played by crisis, and the promises of security from it, in current economic and political processes. Counter to those who separate out the 1990s celebration of free markets and free trade from a post-9/11 agenda focused on security and the war on terror, Klein highlights how “security is the new trade. Security is the new big business . . .. And this is the cutting edge of the neoliberal project.” The economic agenda of privatization, deregulation, and cuts in government spending is now manifested in the privatization of the surveillance of our lives, the policing of borders, and the incarceration of those who are criminalized. Klein hereby charts the boom in privatized surveillance technologies and the outsourcing of the state’s security and disaster response roles as “the final neoliberal frontier,” as a morphing of the neoliberal project rather than as a break from it. She also links this ongoing, if shapeshifting, project of privatization and deregulation to increased precariousness and to a new, normalized relationship with crisis. With neoliberal policies imposed all at once, in a rapid-fire way intended to produce a disorienting shock to the economic and political system, millions of people have been thrown out of the organized economy, and there has been a rapid increase in displacement, in casual labor, and in the attempted movement of displaced people across borders. Weak infrastructure—a legacy of neoliberal restructuring—is also interacting with climate change to produce mass displacement in disaster zones, as was very clear in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. Klein’s point is that the neoliberal project profits from containing and monitoring these precariously positioned and displaced people, and sexuality, along with race and ethnicity, can be central to this process. The homeland securities boom is fueled by perceived threats from immigrants, terrorists, and stranger child predators, and these figures are used to sell privatized technologies of protection as part of a for-profit “siege mentality.” Finally, Klein turns to the movements’ resistance to this intertwined, lucrative nexus of shock and protection through criminalization, highlighting the importance of new forms of mobilizing, outside the contours of the traditional left, such as that done by people organizing on the grounds of their exclusion from or very precarious inclusion in the formal economy. Importantly, women are at the forefront of this organizing against precariousness, as the mobilization of home workers and sex workers attests. Collective rebuilding after disasters, whether the 2004 tsunami, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, or the financial meltdown in 2008, provides an important alternative to disaster capitalism, and women are particularly poised to realize the radical potential in such projects.1
The talks by Ho and Klein raised themes that were echoed by the colloquium participants in a creative exercise at the close of the event. They were asked to construct “poems” about their vision of sexual and economic justice, in groups, using words that had been prominent in the day’s discussion. The resultant assemblages interrogated themes such as security and sex, market freedom and sexuality, crisis and capital, revolution and desire. We include the results of this exercise because they give a glimpse—albeit awkward and comical—into what happens when terms usually held so far apart are put together. How do we want safety, security, and sex connected? Is sexual shame necessarily a bad thing? What is the relationship between class shame and sexual shame? How should we confront what Svati Shah called the sense of visceral “ick” that we can encounter from Left movements when they encounter sexuality? What would be characterized as market indecency? The debates held by participants as they constructed their poems gave fascinating insights into how such issues were understood; again, though, we seek forgiveness from actual poets.
- See Klein’s website www.naomiklein.org for links to some of these collective rebuilding projects. [↩]
