Kate Bedford,
"Introduction"
(page 2 of 5)
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.[2]
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.
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