Kate Bedford,
"Introduction"
(page 5 of 5)
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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Endnotes
1. Jacqueline Best, "The Limits of Financial Risk Management: Or,
What We Didn't Learn from the Asian Crisis." New Political
Economy 15:1 (2010), forthcoming.
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2. See Klein's website
www.naomiklein.org
for links to some of these
collective rebuilding projects.
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