Issue Interconnections
Part 4 of the journal foregrounds work by scholars who are trying to reframe how we think of specific topics commonly associated with either sex/intimacy or economics: adoption, for example, or the prison industry. These are typically placed on one side of the divide between the sexual/family/private/micro experience versus the economic/political/macro experience, despite the “subterranean counter-associations” (Janet Jakobsen) available that trouble the compartmentalization. Adoption is, as Laura Briggs explicates, very much about American foreign policy and the welfare state, and prisons are very much about enforcing normative gender and sexuality (Cammett) while they have devastating effects on families. It is in pushing such counter-associations that we can make innovative and politically valuable links between issues of sexual and economic injustice. All three essays featured here also pay particular attention to the role of race in structuring how we have come to understand certain issues as about either private family concerns or public political concerns, and in how sex is made public.
For example, Laura Briggs examines how transnational adoption—an issue often framed as about private intimate decisions and the values of individual families—is related, in her case study, to U.S. foreign and immigration policy, the U.S. domestic assault on the welfare state, and the Guatemalan state’s genocidal campaign against indigenous communities in the 1980s and 1990s. Her dual emphasis on privatization and family transformation echoes the move made by Duggan to refuse the separation between the sexual/intimate and the political/economic, or between love and labor (see also Tadiar, Wilson, Franzway and Fonow), and she insists on the need to tell the story of global economic change as one involving families as well as states and economies. In particular, like many other contributors (Ho, Tadiar, Smith, Cammett), Briggs foregrounds race and ethnicity in her transnational analysis of economic and sexual injustice, and in her explanation of how borders help produce the differential value accrued to bodies. For example, she notes the increasing reliance of U.S. middle-class households on Latin American domestic workers, and she tracks the way that the panic over fetal alcohol syndrome in the U.S. demonized Native American mothers and helped render U.S. foster children unadoptable. The value assigned to Guatemalan babies, Guatemalan immigrants working as nannies, and middle-class women in the U.S. seeking resolution of domestic labor problems is related to the racialized restructuring of the “private” sphere, whereby public services have become suspect in part because they are associated with denigrated racialized communities, while “private” solutions to structural tensions between paid and unpaid labor entrench racial hierarchies. As Briggs concludes, then, “privatization has meant the expansion of ‘the private’ for some, and its virtual evisceration for others,” particularly those immigrant women of color who labor to produce the family time enjoyed by wealthier women. In this regard, her analysis highlights again the need to reconceptualize what counts as work and who counts as valuable in our conversations about neoliberalism and the family.
Anna Marie Smith tracks the media coverage of the 2008 U.S. election campaign, linking the attention given to past and present sex scandals in the U.S. to both corporate media control and to a U.S. paradigm of apocalyptic “end times” through which the descent into immorality is a harbinger of Armageddon. In-depth coverage of economic inequality and social injustice is displaced in favor of sex scandals, covered in deeply racialized terms. Sex enters the public arena here in part via race, and sexual inappropriateness is signaled through racialized debates about respectability. By connecting media ownership trends, scandal, and race, sex and class, and by examining how sex has been mobilized in past U.S. elections, Smith offers an insightful and fresh perspective on the recent campaign that directs our attention to the intertwining of money, power, and policy. She closes by exploring the ways in which past Democratic administrations have responded to racialized sexual smear tactics, and she examines the Responsible Fatherhood agenda laid out by candidate Barack Obama as one response—one that has serious limits as a solution to poverty, to racialized attributions of irresponsibility, and to gender inequality.
Ann Cammett’s piece highlights the importance, for both advocates of economic rights and those fighting for sexual equality, of centering the experiences of low-income queer people, particularly those who have been affected by the criminal justice system. She identifies racialized economic injustice as a cornerstone to the growth of prisons in the U.S., and she insists that “no broad examination of economic justice for low-income people can proceed without confronting th(e) prison crisis and analyzing the economic foundation upon which our prison culture is built.” In a powerful critique of the limited strategies pursued by mainstream U.S. gay rights organizations, focused on marriage equality and the passage of hate crimes legislation, Cammett asks what other approaches might yield better results in terms of community-building and securing the safety of the most marginalized. In this regard, she suggests that “queer people bear the brunt of the prison system” in numerous ways: Queer youth—widely recognized to be at elevated risk of homelessness—are vulnerable to criminalization; prisoners who are gay, lesbian or transgendered, or who are perceived to be, are at higher risk for abuse in prison; and lesbians in particular suffer disproportionate sentencing for capital crimes. In suggesting alternative ways forward, Cammett highlights the need for movements to learn from each other. For example, some activists confronting domestic violence have considerable experience in working to establish safety and autonomy while questioning reliance on the police apparatus, and anti-poverty activists involved in prison reform have developed alternatives to incarceration, such as public education and alternative dispute resolution. In this regard, she notes that while the prison system marginalizes all communities lacking in political power, it can also provide grounds for intersectional organizing and collaboration within and between different communities.
Movement limitations are also central to Mandisa Mbali’s analysis of women’s role in South African HIV/AIDS activism. She examines the factors influencing women’s participation in civil society organizations tackling the epidemic and what is needed for the movement to address poor women’s concerns. She foregrounds the need to address South Africa’s economic policy, arguing both for steps to enhance women’s equality in the economic sphere and for government measures to address the feminization of poverty. Key issues here include drug pricing, which, she argues, is a feminist issue given that women are disproportionately affected by HIV and that it is mostly poor women who will bear the care burden for those made ill by lack of access to drugs. She also identifies increasing disconnects between women in civil society and women in government, and between those in positions of power within civil organizations and poor women, highlighting women’s experience of “voicelessness” within much civil society activism. Particularly important here are her comments on the dangers of volunteerism in HIV/AIDS activism, whereby organizations entrench women’s poverty by relying on their unpaid labor as caregivers. Along with Duggan, Briggs, and Tadiar, Mbali insists on the value of this caring labor, and she notes that it is recognized so differently from the labor done by men within organizations in part because of the gendered processes of (de)valuing social and affective work.
In an important link to Cammett’s analysis, Mbali also argues that violence has operated as a barrier to women taking on prominent public-activist roles; women have faced violence from strangers and from their partners as a result of their participation in HIV/AIDS activism, highlighting the gendered and sexualized risks, as well as the potentiality and pleasure, experienced by activists laboring to forge more open futures. Her charting of the difficulties involved in getting the state to respond to this violence returns us again to the security/protection conundrum, since it is clear that appeals to the state to get redress and protection for women and sexual minorities have failed so far.
We close this journal issue with two galleries—one curated by Carrie Moyer, a Brooklyn-based painter and writer, and another by Martina Pachmanová, a Prague-based curator and art historian. Moyer juxtaposes the work of six artists and one art collective, most based in New York. Pachmanová draws upon the work of two Czech artists whom she included in the “Velvet Curtain” exhibition she curated for the Katzen Center at American University in Washington, D.C., earlier this year. This broad-ranging group of artists, whose work we exhibit here, use a wide range of media, including painting, sculpture and installation, to send a not-so-subtle message about the gendered and sexual injustices they see around them. As Moyer notes in her introduction to her section of the gallery, “these artists prove once again that art can be both visually and politically compelling.” As an example, the works by Sheila Pepe offer “a twisting reflection of failures at the juncture of capitalism, American meritocracy, and feminism.” Similarly, the work of Katerina Vincourova, a Czech artist, often “examines notions of capitalist consumerism as they have taken hold in post-communist Czech society.” Contexts where “intimacy and politics create an inseparable pair” are the focus of Pachmanová’s exhibition, as can also be said for Moyer’s gallery.
The speeches, essays, “poems,” and artwork featured in this special issue do not, then, provide us with a vision of justice, but that was never their mandate. They instead suggest some core issues that will animate that vision, including the revaluing of labor (whether through revived interest in social reproduction, through life-time, or through better tracing of the social labor that goes in to building movement connections and conceptual reformulations); the vital importance of sex to crisis; the development of alternatives to the crisis/protection/criminalization nexus; and the struggle against the racial formations so central to sexual and economic injustice. Contributors also highlight some sites where innovative connections are already being made: South African AIDS activism, prison activism, new forms of labor activism that address new formulations of work, and the World Social Forum, for example. Some of these approaches to justice are reliant on the state (Mbali), some are skeptical of it (Cammett); some are transnational in scope (Wilson), some are local (Binnie); and some bring economic categories to bear on intimate work (Tadiar, Duggan), while others identify the erotic nature of the economic (Binnie). Read together, then, the pieces featured move us beyond several perceived barriers to better integration between sexual and economic justice, at the level of analysis and action. They offer us alternatives beyond the sexual/economic split, the Marxist/liberal split, the redistribution/recognition split, and the private/public split. Finally, to return to the International Studies meetings, we might say that they advocate a relationship between movements toward sexual and economic justice that rests on asking a lot of difficult questions, given that many of us have clear interests in working out that relationship over the long term. Of course, this model of interrelation will not, coming from these participants, look like marriage—it will involve a lot of sex, for a start. Neither, though, will it look much like a libertarian orgy, since that would have no space to ask about who cleans up the ick. It will look otherwise—and the possibilities are so much more expansive than the ones that the global business literature has on offer.
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