Kate Bedford,
"Introduction"
(page 3 of 5)
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 AsiaŠPacific 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.
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