The Conceptual Reworking
What the poems document is an effort to open up new frameworks of conceptualization, to breathe new life into openings between movements. Part 2 of the issue takes up this project in more conventional academic language. It aims to upturn, dig through, and poke around in some of the major concepts through which we understand sexual and economic justice: labor, social reproduction, and space. As Lisa Duggan argues, “Bringing economic and sexual justice together as theoretical concepts, while engaging the associated movements for social change, requires that we put our conceptions of ‘economy’ and ‘sexuality’ under pressure.” The essays featured in this section exert such pressure, and in so doing extend the conversation launched above in new directions.
Neferti Tadiar’s piece explicitly addresses the global economic crisis in a variety of ways. She notes the gendered, racialized and sexualized discourses used to describe the current crisis, and she revisits feminist work that insists on the importance of gender, race, and sexuality to understanding how the social and human costs of economic globalization are unevenly distributed. Taking as a case study her own past work on sexual economies in the AsiaÐPacific region, she reconsiders the ways in which gender, race, and sexuality were linked with international politics and national and regional regimes of capitalism. Having argued that “the gendered and sexual language of politics and economics—evidenced in representations of the relations between developing and developed nations in terms of desire, security, interest, involvement, and penetration—can be seen to ‘translate’ into the real, material conditions lived and embodied by disenfranchised women,” Tadiar appraises this way of approaching how gender, race, and sexuality matter to the economy, and she considers the limits that this type of analysis places on our politics. In locating the crisis-symptom of capitalist accumulation in a racialized and gendered category of embodied labor, “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’—and they are the protagonists of tales of agency, too.” These accounts are predicated upon a narrow understanding of “economic” activity and agency, and they reproduce, she fears, a limited theory and politics of subjects. Tadiar suggests the value of alternative feminist approaches to concepts such as labor, able “to recognize the diverse forms of social, communicative, sexual, and affective capacities and cultural practice that people engage in, in the process of producing the relations and identities of the capitalist economy.” Her notion of life-time is a key example, since it illuminates far better than a narrow idea of labor time what is appropriated from workers who are seen to exist to service, maintain, and enhance the lives of privileged others. Such workers are deprived not just of the subset of activities recognized as work by capital, but also of their generative capacities, their time of social cooperation, and so on. For Tadiar, part of the value of reconfiguring the concept of labor to include such work rests in the fact that different forms of productive activity and political agency become visible, and can be revalued and reclaimed by social movements. Feminists need, she suggests, to reclaim as productive the devalued time of experience and subjectivity, of restoration and recovery, and “to foreground the creative living labor of emergent, disenfranchised peoples in the making of the contemporary world, and their unrecognized potentials for forging more open futures.”
This forward-looking, innovative approach to revisiting core concepts in our debates about sexual and economic justice in order to move our analysis and our politics in new directions is also evident in Lisa Duggan’s piece, which focuses on the need to connect feminist work on the cultural and political economy more explicitly to sexuality. Specifically, she argues for a resurrection and reworking of the concept of social reproduction, identifying in it considerable potential for linking a range of practices, institutions, and industries across economic, political, social, and cultural domains. Duggan traces the diverse ways in which social reproduction has been used to challenge conventional understandings in both liberal feminism and left political economy, and she highlights the way that the concept allows feminists to foreground a series of connections that might otherwise be occluded: between macroeconomic privatization policies and shifts in household formation; between changing production relations and changing experiences of childhood; between homonormative marriage politics and the demands of the neoliberal state and economy. As both Duggan and Tadiar make clear, figuring out concepts that can help us make these links is an important political project, since it can enable us to intervene in the powerful connections between economic and sexual injustice. Moreover, both pieces return us to the key groundwork laid by feminists regarding the importance of care work, housework, and sexual, emotional, and affective toil in our reconceptualizations of labor (a groundwork also used by Naomi Klein, Laura Briggs, Suzanne Franzway and Mary Margaret Fonow, and Mandisa Mbali). For many participants, then, comprehensive accounts of sexual and economic justice will owe a significant debt to feminist political economy.
In “Envisioning Economic and Sexual Justice Spatially,” Jon Binnie takes up two interrelated points: the intertwining of class and sexuality, and the intertwining of sexuality with questions of scale. Critiquing myths of gay and lesbian affluence and the relative paucity of work on queer poverty in much of sexuality studies, Binnie raises concerns that, in a context of recession, problematic representations of niche pink markets and free-spending queers may have particularly harmful consequences. Not only do they feed objections that gays and lesbians are a privileged minority in need of no legal protection against discrimination in employment, housing, and so on, they also facilitate a broader moralistic critique of lifestyle consumption practices associated with aspiration and class mobility—these are, as he notes, “now denigrated as vulgar, unsophisticated, and unethical.” Binnie’s work highlights the need to consider how class and sexuality discourses intertwine in this regard, and it poses the challenge of how to articulate complex intersections between sexual and economic justice wherein queer poverty is made visible and class struggles are taken up centrally by sexuality movements—themes which are also taken forward by several other contributors (Franzway and Fonow, Ann Cammett, Svati Shah).
In the second part of his contribution, Binnie takes up the significance of the spatial dimension in the relationship between economic and sexual justice, again in a way that resonates with several other contributors (Wilson, Shah, Tadiar, Briggs). In foregrounding space as a core concept in our debates about sexual and economic justice, he notes that research on transnational sexual politics has tended to privilege certain scales (e.g. the global) over others (e.g. the national). In looking at how sexual and economic justice have been considered at the urban scale, in contrast, Binnie is able to critically interrogate business-friendly city-regeneration discourses that position sexual minorities as key ingredients of entrepreneurial innovation. Likewise, he is able to examine how international gay and lesbian tourist narratives about cities can lead to a loss of ownership and a “de-gaying” of the space, particularly in terms of how sex itself is positioned. Ironically, designation of an area of a city as “gay” may lead to reduced possibilities for certain types of public sexual presence and increasing crackdowns on sexualities that are understood to be illegitimate. Binnie’s multilayered, conceptually rich account asks us to recognize the significant part played by the erotic and the spatial in the distinctions being made between respectable and illegitimate sexualities, and to consider in turn how those distinctions limit our ability to struggle against economic and sexual injustice in an interconnected fashion.
