The Background

In a compelling paper on the global credit crunch presented at the 2009 International Studies meetings, Jacqueline Best cited a commentary in The Economist that attempted to sum up what had gone wrong.[1] Traditional relations between a bank manager and a person wanting a mortgage were, the commentary remarked, like a marriage, where both parties had an interest in working out the relationship over the long term. The advent of new financial products had inaugurated a relationship more akin to an orgy, where it was in everyone's interest to ask as few questions as possible. Amid the chuckles, I wondered whether the audience—mostly non-feminist political scientists gathered for a panel on the international regulatory dimensions of the economic crisis—was longing nostalgically for the marriage mode. Or would they defend an orgy, on the libertarian grounds that everyone knows what to expect and no one is forced to take part? I had a little daydream: Maybe they knew already how commonly financial disorder is mapped onto sexual unruliness and excess (De Goede 2005; Tadiar 1998), and maybe they would interrogate the comparison. Perhaps they would retort with queer indignation that properly conducted orgies require good communication, or perhaps they would smile wryly at the fact that the highly unequal relations between indebted people and their bankers are so easily mapped onto traditional marriage. But the panel ended with no further debate on the commentary. The critical business of interrogating the global political-economic order may have been temporarily disrupted by a joke about sex, but the spheres of sexuality and money, of economic injustice and sexual injustice, were not to be brought seriously together that day.

This special issue of The Scholar and Feminist is, among other things, a step towards generating better conversations about sexuality and money. It is written by people who are trying to figure out better choices for shelter, debt management, and erotic life than those on offer in The Economist. Twenty-five of these individuals came to New York in the autumn of 2007 to participate in a public lecture and colloquium entitled "Toward a Vision of Sexual and Economic Justice," generously funded by the Ford Foundation and the Overbrook Foundation. The colloquium aimed to bring together people working on issues conventionally understood to be about economic justice, such as poverty, structural adjustment, welfare reform, trade agreements and so on, with those working on reproductive and sexual justice, sex workers' rights, combating HIV/AIDS, and gay, lesbian and transgender politics.

The lecture and colloquium were also animated by multiple desires, including, perhaps most prominently, a wish to move beyond perceived divisions about how issues of economic justice and sexual justice have been named and conceived, and to help develop new visions of how people and movements might come together. These divisions have been understood and named in various ways: as between social politics versus cultural politics; the politics of recognition versus the politics of redistribution; "real" politics—war and the economy, for example—versus the frivolous, unreal concerns of gender and sexuality. As Janet Jakobsen put it at the opening event:

These divisions are getting harder to sustain . . .. For example, anti-poverty activists have come to focus on the spread of HIV/AIDS as a major stumbling block to ending extreme poverty, while HIV/AIDS activists have increasingly focused on the need for global economic health care reform. But even if we take the mutual constitution of sexual and economic justice to be proven, we still need to develop new visions of how the terms relate to each other. Of what sexual justice and economic justice, or sexual-nomic justice, ecosexualness, sex-econ—we'll get a word yet!—might be. And most importantly, how it can be secured in all our lives.

To this end, each participant wrote a three-page thought paper on their understandings of sexual and economic justice; they are available here. Key questions framing their work included: How do we conceive of the connections between the often separated arenas of sexual and economic justice? How do we understand recent changes in (inter)national political economy in relation to sexuality? What possibilities—if any—do contemporary formulations of global capitalism open up for alternative sexual politics, and conversely, what new norms and regulations are being forged in the neoliberal world order? How might sexuality help to constitute what we think of as economic relations, and vice versa? What can we learn from those who work at the intersection of these struggles for justice and how, fundamentally, can we facilitate their efforts?

The conversation generated at the colloquium was wide-ranging and illuminating. Participants did not agree upon a single description of how sexual and economic justice are linked. Nor did they advocate a unitary vision of how to move forward. However, they did agree on some valuable next steps, including the need to reframe our understandings of both economic and sexual justice so that the interconnections and tensions between movement demands might be easier to understand. The final report of the meeting, aiming to summarize the conversation and draw together the diverse thoughts expressed, is available at here (PDF). Free print copies of the report are also available and can be obtained by contacting the Barnard Center for Research on Women at bcrw@barnard.edu.

What we aim to do in this special issue is take those conversations further, and to give more space to some of the work that stemmed from the colloquium. This work exists at the intersection of sexual and economic justice, and aims to push debates in new directions. The scholars, activists, and artists featured here approach the task of linking sexual and economic justice very divergently; they are from a range of countries, movements, and disciplines, and they address issues ranging from prison abolition to HIV/AIDS, from urban gentrification to Internet monitoring, from the World Social Forum to union organizing. They do, however, share a common interest in thinking hard about what interlinked approaches to justice might entail.

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.

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.

Movements

In Part 3 we turn to movement interventions, looking at what can be learned from existing projects that seek to put sexual and economic justice into practice. To use Ara Wilson's framing, this section understands political events and movements as sites of social relations, involving social as well as conceptual workÑconcrete ties to others, work to create space, and "the labor of sustaining ties that make up an interpretive community crucial for political praxis." The pieces featured here foreground that labor in a variety of sites. In so doing, they take forward two of the debates highlighted earlier. First, they mark the work of social cooperation explicitly, and identify the differential value placed upon it as a result of hierarchies of gender and race. Second, they examine both movements that appear outside of formal sites of labor exploitation while also dealing with mobilization in workplaces and other zones of life marked as economic. This means that the pieces are well positioned to consider the interrelation between the contested inside/outside of movements dealing with sexual or economic injustice. For example, Wilson's quip that the new formulations of activism evident in the World Social Forum "[are] not your grandfather's left" segues nicely into Franzway and Fonow's analysis of the "old left" union movement and its reinvigoration by feminist and queer activism, while Svati P. Shah and Mandisa Mbali consider the potential that activism around economic concerns may hold for those seeking greater sexual justice.

Ara Wilson looks at the World Social Forum, launched as a protest against capitalist globalization in 2001 and a site where sexual and economic justice already coexist as political projects. She examines how sex and economics have concretely, but unevenly and incompletely, "co-mingled" at the forum, asking what work sexuality does and what its inclusion suggests about where sexual justice meets economic justice. How is sexuality relevant to radical economic projects? How does work for sexual justice attend to global economic inequalities? She argues that inclusion of sexuality, as diversity, helps symbolically differentiate the World Social Forum not only from the hierarchies and exclusions associated with neoliberalism, but also from previous left movements, in that it signals an emphasis on open space, participatory democracy, difference, and inclusion. However, "sexuality becomes scarce" when the forum is seen as a platform for organizing global action.

Like Jon Binnie, Wilson foregrounds questions of scale in her analysis, arguing that sexual rights advocates have largely approached the transnational scale as a tactic to change national level policies and domestic climates, rather than devising a specific political agenda regarding transnationality and sexuality. The World Social Forum offers the potential for something else—for having sexuality be more central to a platform for organizing global action toward achieving alternative futures. But the encounter it stages between sexual and economic movements is influenced by the specific histories and geographies of each, particularly by the fact that sexual rights movements have been participating for decades in a professionalized rights-based U.N.-NGO arena that economic justice advocates often regard with suspicion. Hence she notes the concern that liberal formulations of sexual autonomy and reproductive rights may limit the ability of sexual rights advocacy to address broader social justice issues, especially those involving a critique of global capital. However, Wilson also explores "how the liberal political epistemology of sexual rights is conditioned by political geography and social practices." Rather than focus on the conceptual logic underpinning these movements, then, she insists on the value of tracing the connections or failures of articulation among sexual and economic movements to specific political histories and institutional contexts (which in turn influence the conceptual logics utilized by advocates).

The possibilities for inter-movement learning and collaboration are also central to "Queer Activism, Feminism, and the Transnational Labor Movement," wherein Suzanne Franzway and Mary Margaret Fonow examine unions as key sites of transnational activism for some sexuality activists. Drawing on their past work examining the constraints and opportunities that globalization presents to union feminists who are building new political alliances between women's movements and organized labor, Franzway and Fonow explore how LGBT activists are using the resources, networks, and discourses of the transnational labor movement to mobilize for rights, and how, in the process, they are helping to revitalize unions at the national and transnational level. They chart the importance of self-organizing spaces for queer union activism, but they also highlight the value of alliances with other movements, both within the labor movement (such as with union feminism) and outside it (such as in union support for Sydney's annual Mardi Gras festival), both with national actors and through international solidarities. In this regard, and echoing a theme that was central to the Barnard Center for Research on Women colloquium more generally, the authors emphasize the important role played by the discursive framing of issues. In order that unions are seen as potential mobilizing structures for achieving economic justice for LGBT members, queer labor activists are struggling to frame concerns in ways that resonate across a range of domains, such as work, family, intimate spheres, sexuality, self-care, and so on. In particular, Franzway and Fonow critically interrogate the trope of "working families" used by some organizations in an attempt to tap in to concerns about gender equality and intimacy, suggesting that it is ultimately a limited frame for queer or feminist union activism. They argue that critique of heteronormative social relations has more potential to revitalize the labor movement, since it promises to expand the movement's boundaries, and push unions to consider new forms of organizing, new types of workers, and different types of issues.

Svati P. Shah examines the intersections and impasses between the politics of sexuality and the politics of the left in the contemporary U.S. context. Attentive to the rich, diverse, and heterogeneous nature of both left and sexuality movements, Shah argues there are nonetheless some key commonalities in how they frame core issues which present stumbling blocks to better inter-movement organizing. Although concerns with power, domination, and uneven distribution motivate left movements when confronting what are seen to be issues of class and political economy, these movements endorse liberal positions on sexuality that often turn to the state for redress and protection. As she said at the colloquium, "When we are talking about economic justice, we are critical of the state. When we are talking about normativity or 'protecting the innocent victims of trafficking,' then we are appealing to the state, and very often it's the same people doing both of these things." Left movements have also supported work to redress discrimination against non-normative people through a liberal politics of representation and inclusion, rather than through a framework of labor and power, and they have generally failed to critically interrogate their investments in sexual normativity, their valuing of working families, or their failure to mark or recognize sexuality except in reference to gayness. Conversely, the mainstream U.S. LGBT movement has eschewed a class-centered framework, and mobilized to expand individual freedoms in a deeply stratified society. Queer critiques of the pro-marriage movement on the grounds of class and race exist, but they remain at the margins of sexuality activism. Shah notes routes forward, such as the alliance against the criminalization of sexuality forged between sex workers and queer activists at the 2004 World Social Forum in India, but she concludes that these will remain marginal without an expanded left framework for understanding sexuality.

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.

Works Cited

Alexander, M. Jacqui. 2005. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. Durham: Duke University Press.

Babb, Florence. 2007. "Queering Love and Globalization." GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13.1: 111-123.

Barriteau, Violet Eudine. 2008. "'Coming, Coming, Coming Home': Applying Anna Jónasdóttir's Theory of 'Love Power' to Theorizing Sexuality and Power in Caribbean Gender Relations." In GEXcel Work in Progress Report, Vol. 3: Proceedings from GEXcel Theme 1: Gender, Sexuality and Global Change. Ed. Lena Gunnarsson. 13-25. Institute of Thematic Gender Studies, Dept of Gender Studies, Linköping University/Centre for Feminist Social Studies, Örebro University.

Binnie, Jon. 2004. The Globalization of Sexuality. London: SAGE.

Briggs, Laura. 2003. "Familiar Territory: Prostitution, Empires, and the Question of U.S Imperialism in Puerto Rico, 1849-1916." In Families of a New World: Gender, Politics, and State Development in a Global Context. Eds. Lynne Haney and Lisa Pollard. 40-63. New York: Routledge.

Butler, Judith. 1997. "Merely Cultural." Social Text 52.3: 265-277.

Cruz-Malave, Arturo, and Martin Manalasan (eds). 2002. Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism. New York: New York University Press.

D'Emilio, John. 1983. "Capitalism and Gay Identity." In Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality. Eds. Ann Snitnow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson. 100-113. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Duggan, Lisa. 2002. "The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism." In Materializing Democracy. Eds. Dana Nelson and Russ Castronovo. 175-194. Durham: Duke University Press.

Edleman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press.

Ferguson, Ann. 2008. "Global Gender Solidarity and Feminist Paradigms of Justice." In GEXcel Work in Progress Report Vo. 3: Proceedings from GEXcel Theme 1: Gender, Sexuality and Global Change. Ed. Lena Gunnarsson. 39-51. Institute of Thematic Gender Studies, Dept of Gender Studies, Linköping University/Centre for Feminist Social Studies, Örebro University.

Hennessey, Rosemary. 2000. Profit and Pleasure. New York: Routledge.

Hirsch, Jennifer. 2007. "Love Makes a Family: Globalization, Companionate Marriage, and the Modernization of Gender Inequality." In Love and Globalization: Transformations of Intimacy in the Contemporary World. Ed. Mark Padilla, et al. 93-106. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.

Jackson, Stevi. 2008. "Materialist Feminism, the Pragmatist Self and Global Late Modernity: Some Consequences for Intimacy and Sexuality." In GEXcel Work in Progress Report Vol. 3: Proceedings from GEXcel Theme 1: Gender, Sexuality and Global Change. Ed. Lena Gunnarsson. 53-68. Institute of Thematic Gender Studies, Dept of Gender Studies, Linköping University/Centre for Feminist Social Studies, Örebro University.

León Trujillo, Irene (ed). 2005b. Mujeres en Resistencia: experiencias, visiones y propuestas. Quito: ALAI, FEDAEPS-Ecuador, Marcha Mundia de las Mujers, Red latinoamericana Mujeres Transformando la Económia, Articulación de Mujeres CLOC/V’a Campesina, Dialogo Sur/Sur LGBT.

Oswin, Natalie. 2006. "Decentering queer globalization: diffusion and the 'global gay.'" Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24: 777-790.

Padilla, Mark, et al. (eds). 2007. Love and Globalization: Transformations of Intimacy in the Contemporary World. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.

Steyn, Melissa, and Mikki van Zyl (eds). 2009. The Prize and the Price: Shaping Sexualities in South Africa. HSCR Press: South Africa.

Tadiar, Neferti Xina M. 1998. "Prostituted Filipinas and the Crisis of Philippine Culture." Millennium 27.4: 927-954.

Waring, Marilyn. 1988. If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics. San Francisco: Harper and Row.

Wilson, Ara. 2004. The Intimate Economies of Bangkok: Tomboys, Tycoons, and Avon Ladies in the Global City. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Young, Brigitte. 2003. "Financial Crises and Social Reproduction: Asia, Argentina and Brazil." In Power, Production and Social Reproduction: Human In/Security in the Global Political Economy. Eds. Isabella Bakker and Stephen Gill. 103-123. Toronto: York University.

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. [Return to text]

2. See Klein's website www.naomiklein.org for links to some of these collective rebuilding projects. [Return to text]