"If the left is fundamentally about constructing a society without exploitation and oppression, I donŐt see why or how gay issues would not be part of its program for American society."
—John D'Emilio[1]

I evoke John D'Emilio at the outset of this piece with the caveat of extending his statement from "gay issues" to "sexuality" in order to discuss the strategic, political and, to a degree, theoretical effects of the somewhat fraught intersections and impasses between the contemporary politics of sexuality and the politics of "the left" in the U.S. Building on queer leftist scholarship, I argue that the left in the U.S. has opted for a representationally inclusive approach to sexuality, in that more LGBT individuals are part of American left organizations than ever before. However, because the left has maintained its analytic focus on class per se, it has left the "thinking" on sexuality and other social categories of analysis to other movements. This has meant that the left, when it does speak out on issues pertaining to sexuality, has moved away from its earlier position of openly espousing normative rules for sex and sexuality, but it has tended to show its support for progressive sexuality-based campaigns through endorsements of juridical positions held by fairly centrist sexuality rights activists. This means that when it comes to sexuality, the left has often supported positions that are ultimately at odds with left critiques of liberal states.

To mobilize this argument, I discuss the interventions of Wendy Brown and Janet Halley, as well as queer left perspectives on the mainstream left, and how all of these may be understood in relation to contemporary debates on gay marriage and sex work. Although this piece is informed by my own engagements with both Old and New Left formations in the U.S. and in India, the examples and insights I offer here are mainly derived from my engagement with movements in the United States. This essay should be read within the tradition of internal critique, in the sense that my own commitments are allied with queer and sex worker struggles, with those of the left, and especially within the intersecting, though constrained, spaces that they share.

Terms of Critique

The terms "sexuality" and "the left" both beg clarification. I use the terms "left" and "the left" in three contexts, enumerated here in order of their primacy to my critique. First, I use these terms to indicate the ethnographic category of "the left," as constructed and inhabited by (and against) "progressive" and left activists in the U.S., and as it is used in the somewhat fraught daily life of American political discourse. Second, I use these terms to signal intellectual production and a set of social movements that use, and generate, political frameworks mediated through discourses of political economy. Third, I use these terms to indicate the tradition of scholarship and critique that has both rested within and extended Marxism. Given the rich and disparate nature of the Marxist tradition, the unity indicated by the term "the left," always prepended by the definitive article and articulated in the singular, is especially ironic, considering that it describes an agglomeration in motion; as such, imbuing it with anything but the broadest descriptive characteristics, especially in this kind of schematic analysis, would be impossible. The efflorescence of leftist politics contributes to the complexity and irony of the unitary fiction that the term describes. At the same time, "politics" itself remains a fraught enterprise, in which hierarchies based on access to resources, members, and analysis remain. In a previous issue of The Scholar and Feminist Online, Lisa Lowe reminds us that politics cannot be sequestered within the state, an insight that helps to frame the problematics that emerge between sexuality and the left as well.

"[A] focus [that] defines 'politics' in terms of states . . . excludes, on the one hand, the 'politics' of popular social movements or workers' struggles beneath the level of the state or organizing transnationally, and on the other, communist or socialist nonwestern states like China or Cuba, or those newly independent nations in Africa, Asia or the Caribbean whose narratives of political development diverge from the 'modernization' model based on states in Europe or North America. A shared definition of 'politics' as the activities of states and international regimes obscures an understanding of how government, interest, and power affect the lion's share of the non-elite world."[2]

Lowe's articulation of "politics" as exceeding the parameters of states, and of state apparatuses of governance in particular, may be productively read in relation to E.P. Thompson's much earlier assertion that "the left" is, by definition, changeable and constantly changing.

"We rejected—as I still reject—any description of Communism or of Communist-governed societies which defines these in terms of their ruling ideologies and the institutions of their ruling elites, and which excludes by the very terms of its definition any appraisal of the conflicts characteristic to them, of the alternative meanings, values, traditions and potentials which they may contain."[3]

This changeability results in left movements that are quite diverse in the ways they make decisions and locate organizational power, while all turning on the question of class, and the fact of uneven economic distribution, at the heart of leftist analysis and politics. Regarding the question of uneven distribution, in the mid-1990s, Wendy Brown observed that:

"Indeed, much of the progressive political agenda in recent years has been concerned not with democratizing power but with distributing goods, and especially with pressuring the state to buttress the rights and increase the entitlements of the socially vulnerable or disadvantaged: people of color, homosexuals, women, endangered animal species, threatened wetlands, ancient forests, the sick, and the homeless."[4]

Brown's point remains relevant for the contemporary moment, when the rights of marriage, for example, are being promoted for distribution to same-sex couples, maintaining the status of both marriage and of unmarried people. With respect to terms, this use of progressive is, in my view, uniquely American. Few other places in the world use the term progressive to mean something roughly leftist, roughly liberal, and roughly radical, all at the same time. Yet the idiosyncratic history of the left in the U.S., which I discuss briefly in the sections that follow, has itself given rise to this usage of progressive. Brown makes it clear that some progressive political agendas in the U.S. have slipped, or jumped, into liberal frameworks partly because of this take on questions of distribution and rights. At the same time, liberalism is not "a political position opposite to conservatism but a political order that replaces Tudor monarchy rooted in explicit class privilege with modern democratic constitutionalism rooted in abstract individualism."[5] Liberalism has a potentially problematic relationship to the question of distribution because of "the effects of the depoliticized status of political economy in liberal orders."[6] The Marxian emphasis on the distribution of power and resources should be understood as distinct from liberalism's emphasis on social equality and the equal distribution of individuals' rights. It is the emphasis on the individual in liberalism that I highlight here as being distinct from the Marxian emphasis on classes, along with the "effects of the depoliticized status of political economy," two distinctions that are especially relevant to the discussion on sexuality because of the ways in which sexuality-based movements have been located and criticized within the terrains of "identity politics," which I also discuss in this essay. This is not to say that classes and individuals are mutually exclusive entities, but that the respective emphasis on each helps to define and maintain a distinction between Marxism and liberalism. The qualifications of this distinction continue to offer much fuel for debate, though they are beyond the scope of this essay. The tensions between Marxism and the left and liberalism are salient here because sexuality-based movements, scholarship, and politics in the U.S. live within the slippery rubric of progressivism that marks these tensions.

Throughout the paper, I stay with the terms "left" and "the left" because of the powerful histories they evoke and because of the contradictions and fissures they contain. These are the products of the politics of critique within the left as much as they are products of the history of systematic opposition that the left has faced in the U.S., where the communist left was systematically dispersed and undermined during the Cold War, while the descendants of the New Left continue to face strong state-sponsored opposition, surveillance, misinformation, and repression. As a result, anything notionally leftist has been misrepresented, mis-defined, and caricaturized within dominant American political discourses with aplomb.[7]

The entities to which we may refer as the left in the U.S., then, are extremely diverse, spanning communist political parties, trade unions (which are, of course, not necessarily leftist as such, especially in the U.S.), and New Left movements that began emerging from the crucible moments of the late 1960s onwards.[8] The transnational aspects of these movements beg recalling the strong tradition of left internationalism in which the American left participated until its demise began in the 1930s. Transnational left formations now include New Left movements as they engage in multinational forums, including international trade union solidarity formations; the World Social Forum; and liberal, rights-based international spaces produced by and through United Nations-related processes that have, thanks to sustained organizing efforts, expanded the possibilities for participation in "civil society."

Defining the term "sexuality" presents similar challenges to defining the left, in that the singularity of the term belies the vast terrains it describes. As queer activists, feminists, and scholars of sexuality and HIV/AIDS have shown, the unitary fiction of sexuality has been critical in pathologizing sexually non-normative subjects, by reducing sexuality to people who inhabit sexuality's marked categories. The vast terrains of the term contain the discursive history of the body and necessarily span a theoretical emphasis on the productive relationality of sexuality to a host of other categories of analysis, which include, but are not limited to, class, race, gender, gender identity, migration, nation, and citizenship. Scholarship has amply demonstrated that sexuality ultimately lacks inherent and absolute physical attributes—while being socially produced—and therefore requires a materialist, historicized approach for the ways in which it is framed, contextualized, understood, and interpreted.

My critique of sexuality and the left is structured here by the questions that LGBT and sex workers' rights movements have raised about leftist approaches to questions of sexuality and power. It bears mentioning that, while same-sex and queer sexual politics and the politics of sex work do overlap significantly, the reasons why these are increasingly clubbed together within the rubrics of American sexuality studies require much further thought. Taking the relationship between LGBT and sex worker politics for granted may lead to elisions and conclusions that are unfounded, e.g., the idea that both LGBT and sex worker categories necessarily fit the notion of a queered non-normativity that bears little further examination.

However, taken together, the strategies that sexuality-based and leftist social movements in the U.S. have recently been pursuing to achieve their aims raise the problem that Wendy Brown articulates between freedom and identity, keeping in mind that sexuality and identity, or identity politics, have been folded into one another since the end of the explicitly leftist gay liberation movement in the early 1970s.

"It would thus appear that it is freedom's relationship to identity—its promise to address a social injury or marking that is itself constitutive of identity—that yields the paradox in which the first imaginings of freedom are always constrained by and potentially even require the very structure of oppression that freedom emerges to oppose . . . not only a patently Foucauldian point but is contained as well in Marx's argument that 'political emancipation' within liberalism conceived formal political indifference to civil particularity as liberation because political privilege according to civil particularity appeared as the immediate nature of the domination perpetrated by feudal and Christian monarchy."[9]

The effects of structuring social inequality, such as that based on sexuality, and the demands for its redress through identity, then, are profound, because:

"Western leftists have largely forsaken analyses of the liberal state and capitalism as sites of domination and have focused instead on their implication in political and economic inequalities. At the same time, progressives have implicitly assumed the relatively unproblematic instrumental value of the state and capitalism in redressing such inequalities."[10]

This critique of the effects of seeking legal redress for injury from the liberal state through the rubric of equality is particularly salient for sexuality-based movements in the U.S. that have increasingly presented legal changes, such as hate crimes legislation or marriage laws, as social change. Left entities in the U.S.—such as the surviving communist political parties in the U.S., and the left press—have endorsed this approach to the politics of sexuality through their silence on the issue, or through their written support, the relatively consistent articles in the left press supporting gay marriage being a case in point. By the same token, if mainstream aspects of sexuality-based movements in the U.S. have been concerned with class and the uneven distribution of wealth, they have demonstrated this concern by reducing the Marxian concept of class consciousness to the representational ideal of including working-class people in their campaigns. In other words, in some instances sexuality-based organizations take the inclusion of working-class people as a goal rather than a means.

Leftist endorsements of strategies that emphasize redress from legal injury by advocating greater state-sponsored protections have had serious consequences for debates on sex work as well, because the majority of left organizations that have taken a position on sex work have done so by supporting feminist anti-trafficking initiatives that derive from anti-prostitution abolitionism. Because of the fundamental opposition within this framework against claiming prostitution as work, and because feminist anti-prostitution abolitionism was articulated within a Marxist feminist framework, the left has embraced a set of positions on prostitution which, by and large, have remanded it to advocating a politics of rescue and rehabilitation that largely relies on police and the prison system, rather than framing prostitution, and its abuses, within the politics of labor and political and economic power.

There are, of course, many spaces where sex work and leftist approaches to the problems of power productively and crucially intersect; my argument does not intend to disavow or disappear these complexities, but, rather, to describe a dominant set of problematics within these discourses. For example, at this writing, sex worker unions have been formed in the U.S., Germany, Argentina and India, at least, and an affiliate of the South African national trade union federation COSATU has resolved to help South African sex workers unionize.[11] However, these initiatives have yet to take up the kind of discursive space that the abolitionist anti-trafficking movement has been able to muster thus far in discursively conflating trafficking and prostitution, and in gaining the support of states seeking to close off "porous" borders. In the sections that follow, I elaborate on both of these sets of examples, gay marriage and sex work, and conclude by returning to the left itself.

The Politics of Sex Work and the Left

"Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists. On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among proletarians, and in public prostitution. The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital. Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty."[12]

The Communist Manifesto references sexuality in two ways in this passage, through the thread of the family and the thread of prostitution, which are present throughout Marx's writings. Theorized as part of the lumpenproletariat, prostitutes are social beings who by definition live outside of society, classified neither as workers nor as bourgeoisie, but always as Other. However, there is an oft-noted and marked difference between the early Marx, who theorized that prostitution is a commodification of the prostitute's body itself, and the later Marx, in which he separates prostitute-ness from prostitution, and uses the language of services provided by women who sell sex rather than women "selling their bodies."[13]

In his earlier writings, those that were taken up by the prostitution abolitionists of his day and by contemporary "Marxist feminists," Marx shows himself to be in accordance with abolitionism, though for different reasons than those of the abolitionists, who sought to abolish prostitution on moral grounds. While many Marxists and first-wave feminists debated the selling of sex around the turn of the twentieth century, there seemed to be an uneasy consensus between them that prostitution could not be understood within the framework of livelihood, and should ultimately be eradicated. Even Emma Goldman, in articulating a prescient critique of the discourse of "white slavery" as primarily productive of a more vast governmental apparatus that penalizes laboring migrants, emphasizes the early Marxian claim that prostitution is equivalent to the commodification of women's bodies, and will only end with the demise of capitalism itself.[14]

Catherine MacKinnon is iconic among contemporary Marxist feminists who took up this position. Her 1982 essay in Signs, "Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: An Agenda for Theory," begins with her famous assertion that "Sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism: that which is most one's own, yet most taken away."[15] MacKinnon's framing of sexuality as desire "directed" in the service of male domination precluded everything but a circular framing of sexuality and power, in which women are always subordinated and dispossessed because of their sexuality, which is unitary and structures femaleness, which is subordinate.

"For MacKinnon, if sex is to gender what work is to class—only more so, because the sexiness of sex eroticizes gender inequality and does not simply coercively or ideologically enforce it—then every feminist issue, every injustice and injury suffered by women, devolves upon sexuality . . . sexual harassment, rape, and prostitution are all modes of sexual subordination; women's lack of authoritative speech is women's always already sexually violated condition."[16]

For Brown, whose analysis here evokes Gayle Rubin's earlier theory of the "fallacy of misplaced scale,"[17] MacKinnon's formulation also indicates a perpetual cycle of injury and redress. The closed circuit of women's subordination, which rotates on the axis of hetero sex, provided the analytic raft that anti-pornography activists used throughout their attempts to legally ban pornography. With the many positions, twists, and turns of the legendary feminist "porn wars" notwithstanding, for the purposes of this argument it bears remembering that anti-pornography activists used the rationale that because pornography is violence against women, because it causes men to rape women, and because it creates a culture of violence against all women, it should be legally banned, regardless of any evidence or arguments that may disrupt or complicate this causal chain. This appeal to the state to protect women through the censorship of materials it deemed obscene, in consultation with anti-pornography feminists presumably, was a classic instantiation of the reification of injured identity in an effort of redress. It is well known that this campaign to ban pornography failed, and that counter-feminist positions argued against government censorship of printed material defined (by whom?) as "obscene."

Although the battle to ban porn was lost, the infrastructure, intellectual capital, organizations, and alliances with right-wing social conservatives forged by anti-pornography activists stayed in place, and moved from working against pornography to becoming a modern anti-prostitution movement that proceeded to conflate prostitution and human trafficking.[18] Both the historical anti-pornography movement and contemporary abolitionist anti-trafficking initiatives seek to expand the power of states, and specifically of law enforcement. The effects of this on sex workers throughout the world have been significant, with brothel raids and arrests of individual sex workers standing as the intervention of choice, whether or not they were trafficked into prostitution.[19]

The raids, rescues and arrests that have formed the core strategies of the anti-prostitution movement stand in stark contrast to efforts to organize sex workers through a left framework that counters labor exploitation with unionization and collective bargaining, one that also questions the politics of a police-centered response to prostitution. By refusing a worker-centered response to prostitution, anti-prostitution advocates deploy a Marxian analysis of commodification in the service of a strategy that does not undermine class-based oppression, but rather gives weight to the liberal state by seeking redress for prostitution-as-injury. Some sex worker groups have responded to this analysis with the assertion that sex work is pleasurable and liberatory, drawing from the history of sexual liberation in the U.S. to do so. While the claim of prostitution as liberation is by no means new, and can in no way be classified as purely reactionary, it is a response to the current debate within its own terms, and therefore itself serves to reify liberal individual subjectivity within the debate on prostitution, though with markedly different aims than that of abolitionism. A left argument for sex work, such as those that are beginning to be deployed more widely in the global south, would include more skepticism of the protective power of the state, and would therefore generate a wider discussion on the possibilities for understanding sex work within the frame of livelihood instead of maintaining the debate within the constrained juridical polarities of legalization and criminalization.[20]

A left argument for sex work would also allow for alliances with other groups of people who face structurally mediated oppression on the basis of sexuality. The alliance between sex workers and queer activists at the 2004 World Social Forum in India is a case in point. This alliance was articulated through the politics of decriminalization and made a strong argument against the criminalization of sexuality, writ large. This kind of alliance is forming in the U.S. as well, through the rubric of liberation, and through the notion that many sex workers and LGBT people have overlapping identities and livelihood experiences. While these alliances will doubtless have a productive impact on the debates in which they are engaged, their effects remain to be discerned.

LGBT Politics, the Left, and Gay Marriage

The relatively short-lived (1969-1971) Gay Liberation Front[21] that emerged with the New Left movements in the late 1960s is known for having coalesced against police harassment and criminalization, perhaps most famously at the watershed moment of the Stonewall rebellion. The politics of "gay liberation" that are now seen as quaint, if they are remembered at all, were also necessarily formed in relation to the discourse of social justice promoted by the left, and espoused an abiding class consciousness that clearly articulated itself against class-based hierarchy. After its brief existence, gay liberation gave way to the liberal, ethnicized formations of the rights-based sexuality movements that followed.

The ethnicized, rights-based movement for LGBT equality is now engaged in one of its defining moments with its campaign to legalize same-sex marriage. Although there are multiple perspectives on the question of gay marriage that do not easily fit a dichotomy between heterosexual/homophobic anti-marriage "conservatives" and gay/pro-gay pro-marriage "liberals," this is the schematic through which the American media has been parsing the debate. The dissent on this issue has come through the queer left, which has argued that the same-sex marriage campaign reifies marriage itself and the class-based society that this entails. Beyond reducing the array of relationship forms that people enjoy and denying the history of queer people living outside of hetero norms, the queer left argues that marriage essentially creates two classes of citizens—married people with the full citizenship rights afforded by this legal status, and unmarried people without them.[22] Instead of legalized gay marriage, dissenters have called for an abolition of marriage, or at least a re-visioning of the access to the material benefits currently provided by marriage.

The dominance of the polarized schematic of the debate—between "liberal" and "conservative"—erases any other option for conceiving of a way to distribute the legal protections and privileges afforded by marriage. Furthermore, the dominance of marriage itself obscures any other social formation in which adults can and do engage that provides comparable intimacy and support. The endorsement of the left, for instance through the left press, for gay marriage seems to be devoid of any influence from queer left critiques. This means that the left is endorsing an initiative that potentially exacerbates class-based inequality by maintaining an legal system in which certain economic and civil rights are only afforded to married couples. While supporting any initiative that exacerbates class-based inequality is clearly counter to the aims and critiques of Marxism, it is also notable that one of the deepest forms of engagement with Marxism is that of critique itself. To participate in a debate as polarized between two positions when there are clearly many more seems to turn away from the complexity of the terrain while endorsing the normativity of marriage. Rather than producing a left analysis of marriage, based in the history of Marxian critiques of marriage and the family, or endorsing the critiques of the queer left, it seems that the mainstream left in the U.S. has chosen to endorse the so-called "liberal" position on gay marriage. While it is clear that, given the option between supporting and opposing gay marriage, the only salient choice is the former, it is also clear that a left critique of marriage is a crucial component of this debate.

"Identity Politics and the Left"[23]: Eric Hobsbawm Revisited

The persistence of sexual normativity as a structuring paradigm for the left bears examination as a way into an analysis of the mainstream left's historical disengagement with sexuality-based movements. While a complete explication of the meanings of normativity on the left is well beyond the scope of this piece, I offer a reading of Eric Hobsbawm's 1996 essay "Identity Politics and the Left" to in order to address a fairly iconic leftist rationale for marginalizing political movements that cohere around non-normative and marginalized sexuality and sexual performance. In this piece, Hobsbawm positions non-class based movements, including sexuality-based movements, as "identitarian" and therefore not worthy of inclusion by "universalist" left movements. He writes:

"Identity groups were certainly not central to the Left. Basically, the mass social and political movements of the Left, that is, those inspired by the American and French revolutions and socialism, were indeed coalitions or group alliances, but held together not by aims that were specific to the group, but by great, universal causes through which each group believed its particular aims could be realized . . .."

"Identity groups," then, including racialized and ethnicized minorities, women, and LGBT groups, have particularized concerns, rather than those of the "great, universal causes." He goes to make plain his meaning:

"So what does identity politics have to do with the Left? Let me state firmly what should not need restating. The political project of the Left is universalist: it is for all human beings. However we interpret the words, it isn't liberty for shareholders or blacks, but for everybody. It isn't equality for all members of the Garrick Club or the handicapped, but for everybody. It is not fraternity only for old Etonians or gays, but for everybody. And identity politics is essentially not for everybody but for the members of a specific group only. This is perfectly evident in the case of ethnic or nationalist movements. Zionist Jewish nationalism, whether we sympathize with it or not, is exclusively about Jews, and hang—or rather bomb—the rest. All nationalisms are. The nationalist claim that they are for everyone's right to self-determination is bogus . . .. Since the 1970s there has been a tendency—an increasing tendency—to see the Left essentially as a coalition of minority groups and interests: of race, gender, sexual or other cultural preferences and lifestyles . . .. [L]et me repeat: identity groups are about themselves, for themselves, and nobody else. A coalition of such groups that is not held together by a single common set of aims or values has only an ad hoc unity, rather like states temporarily allied in war against a common enemy." [emphases added]

Hobsbawm articulates a basic tension between Marxian movements and all other social movements, and of "identitarian" ones especially—that of the relationship between universalism and particularity. Identitarianism is merged with liberal nationalisms in his formulation. However, the italicized sentences betray more than this basic tension, because they indicate the formulation of sexuality and race that informs its inclusion in Hobsbawm's argument. First, regarding sexuality, Hobsbawm's offhanded comparison between "old Etonians and gays" is designed to suggest hyper-particularized absurdity, as it clearly does not indicate an actual group of gay people who attended Eton. Second, his location of identitarianism as a recent phenomenon, emerging, according to his introduction, in the "middle 1960s," is written in the mode of criticism, rather than critique. The longue durée of the left's universalisms emerges as the vastly more substantial and valued entity compared with formations that in 1996 were, for Hobsbawm, only a few decades old. That he mobilizes his argument by dehistoricizing identitarianism in social movements is reflected in the broad descriptive statements afforded "identity politics," while "the Left" is afforded history. This is important, given the historical ruptures between mainstream left movements and the feminist, LGBT, caste-based, race-based, and ethnicity-based movements that inform both identitarianism and the development of social movements in relation to, or by virtue of their exclusion from, mainstream left movements. Third, the statement which prefaces Hobsbawm's charge of an almost megalomaniacal narcissism driving identitarian movements defines sexuality as an "interest," a "cultural preference," and a "lifestyle." The linguistic clues marking queer sexualities without naming them in this phrasing are unmistakable, indicating, at least, that non-normative sexuality is subject to preferences verging on whims, rather than constituting a substantial pursuit of history and politics.

In his essay in New Politics, Martin Duberman addresses Hobsbawm and his contemporaries by discussing:

". . . a mounting attack by straight, white, and 'liberal' male public intellectuals on an identity politics that emphasized issues relating to race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation. Among the more prominent of these intellectuals were Eric Hobsbawm, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Ralph Nader, Richard Rorty, Jack Newfield, and Todd Gitlin. Collectively—and curiously—they chose to focus on us, rather than on corporate America (which of course they did denounce for its greed and corruption), as the chief villain in the decline of interest in the transcendent issues of class division and economic inequity. We had abandoned the working class. We had destroyed the Left."[24]

To be clear, I am not arguing, nor do I mean to imply, that Hobsbawm's assessment can simply be explained away as "homophobia," which is also why I include Duberman's critique here. While homophobia may play a part in the ability to club race, gender, and sexuality together as a less worthy set of concerns than a "real" issue like class, I include this reading of Hobsbawm to suggest that his argument is representative of the analytic dismissal of sexuality, and that this is a critical social context and construct within the mainstream left. In this approach, sexuality is, perhaps, embedded within, but not constituted by, material conditions. Hobsbawm demonstrates this by reducing sexuality to gayness. He also conveys that gayness is not subject to history, by virtue of its relatively recent emergence, and that it, like so many other "identitarian" concerns, is a distraction from the task at hand. Although homophobia may be salient in formulating this argument, the question of history is the rationale on which the argument turns.

The effects of the "identitarianization" of sexuality includes the ways in which sexuality has been embedded in left critiques of "identity politics," a term which refers to the theoretical organization of race, gender and sexuality, for example, as individual, identity-based constructs that have political valence. In the U.S., this mode of understanding race, gender, and sexuality was particularly salient during the 1990s, when Hobsbawm published this essay. (Although Marxists also speak of "class identity," class politics were generally not part of the dominant discourse on "identity politics" in the U.S.)

In discussing Hobsbawm's essay here, I do not mean to imply that the same rubrics are relevant today as in 1996. I do mean to draw a link between the ways in which sexuality remains embedded in left critiques of identity politics, and the impoverished critique of sexuality from the mainstream left that has resulted, alongside the ways in which queer left analysis has a wider audience within the institutions of sexuality-based struggles than the institutions of the left. There remains a need to analytically draw out each category of analysis—class, sexuality, race, gender—from the rubrics of "identity politics," rather than aggregating together all categories of analysis that are seen to have less historicity than class. The reasons for the need to draw out sexuality are manifold, including the degrees to which the discussion on identity politics has shifted since it was the center of discourses on gender, race, and sexuality in the 1980s and 1990s. That sexuality is now being framed as an ethnicized concern in the U.S., for instance via the growing, politically produced "common sense" that queer sexualities and transgenders are the result of innate biological characteristics, has had profound impacts for political discourse, including the discourses on gay marriage and sex work described above. An aggregated view of sexuality cannot afford the textured critique of power, normativity, and the state that are needed in this political moment.

Conclusion

In this essay, I have discussed the ways in which the impasses between sexuality-based and "left" movements in the U.S. are constituted. I have argued that, over time, the American left has shifted its positions on sexuality, and particularly its positions on homosexuality, from hostility to tolerance. However, in the current moment, the left has prioritized the politics of representation over the politics of critique with respect to homosexuality, a situation that has resulted in left endorsements of laws and policies that in some way contradict left critiques of the regulatory power that states should have. I have also argued that, whereas the shift in perspectives on sex work has been relatively smaller, the left's positions on sex work are more aligned with those of abolitionists seeking to criminalize sexual commerce than of scholars and activists who argue that sex work is properly understood within the rubric of labor. My argument has drawn from feminist critiques of left appeals to the liberal state. In their introductory essay to Left Legalism/Left Critique, Brown and Halley outline the terrain for this discussion.

"Traditionally, leftists have focused most of their critical and political attention on the effects of the depoliticized status of political economy in liberal orders. More recently, influenced by a range of poststructural thinkers, many leftists have added the problem of norms and regulation to their analysis. Here, powers of subordination and inequality are no longer seen as simply achieved through the structure of class society, or through the state-society relationship that secures the interests of capital and class dominance, but as located in norms regulating a great variety of social relations, including but not limited to class, gender, sexuality, and race. From this angle, law and the state are seen neither as neutral nor as merely prohibitive, but as importantly productive of identity and subjectivity. Identity, in turn, is conceived as a crucial site of regulation and not simply (as it is for many "liberals") a basis of equality or emancipation claims or (as it is for many "conservatives") at best a largely personal or subjective matter irrelevant to justice claims. Whereas liberalism tends to cast identity as arising from a source other than norms, institutions, and social powers, these are the wellsprings and regulatory sites of identity for this strand of left thinking."[25]

The power and role of the state in producing identity and subjectivity is obscured by the historical reliance on sexual normativity evinced by the mainstream left. The left builds its case on stable notions of morality as tied to sexuality, evidenced, for example, in left rhetoric on labor laws designed to protect "working families and communities." The consequences of this reliance on maintaining the status quo of sexual normativity has led to left institutions either making contradictory appeals to the state, or supporting these appeals on behalf of identity-based groups. An expanded left framework for understanding sexuality would not only counter this trend. It would expand the political and intellectual spaces for discerning power, states, and utopias in ways that remain unimagined. Ultimately, this essay is a call for discerning the meaningful connections between sexuality and political economy in order to reinvigorate the thinking between sexuality and the left.

Endnotes

1. John D'Emilio. "Can the Left Ignore Gay Liberation?" New Politics 12.1 (Summer 2008): 45. newpolitics.mayfirst.org/fromthearchives?nid=103. [Return to text]

2. Lisa Lowe. "The Gender of Sovereignty" in "Borders on Belonging: Gender and Immigration." The Scholar and Feminist Online 6.3 (Summer 2008). 11 November 2008. www.barnard.edu/sfonline/immigration/lowe_01.htm. [Return to text]

3. E.P. Thompson. "An Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski, 1973." 3-4. 10 May 2009. thesocialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/view/5351. [Return to text]

4. Wendy Brown. "Introduction: Freedom and the Plastic Cage." States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. 13-29: p. 5. [Return to text]

5. Wendy Brown and Janet Halley. Introduction. Left Legalism / Left Critique. Ed. Brown and Halley. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002. 1-37: p. 5. [Return to text]

6. Ibid, p. 7. [Return to text]

7. For example, note the Republican National Committee's resolution that Democrats are "dedicated to restructuring American society along socialist ideals." Paul Krugman. "State of Paralysis." New York Times. May 24, 2009. 24 May 2009. www.nytimes.com/2009/05/25/opinion/25krugman.html. [Return to text]

8. This is the beginning of an extremely summarized history of a vastly complex time. Of the numerous sources one could name for this statement and history, I refer here to Issues 45 and 46 of New Politics and to the series of articles under the title "Symposium on Gays and the Left," Parts 1 and 2. 6 Aug 2009. newpolitics.mayfirst.org/fromthearchives?nid=109. [Return to text]

9. Wendy Brown. "Introduction: Freedom and the Plastic Cage." States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. 3-29: p. 7. [Return to text]

10. Ibid, p. 10. [Return to text]

11. A set of meetings organized by the Karnataka Sex Workers' Union in Bangalore, India, and the New York-based International Commission for Labor Rights were held at the 2009 World Social Forum in Belem, Brazil. These meetings included representatives of the efforts to unionize sex workers in these countries, and from Bolivia and Brazil. [Return to text]

12. The Communist Manifesto. www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html. [Return to text]

13. Marjolein Van Der Veen. "Rethinking Commodification and Prostitution: An Effort at Peacemaking in the Battles over Prostitution." Rethinking Marxism 13.2 (Summer 2001): 30-51. [Return to text]

14. Emma Goldman. "The Traffic in Women." 1910. 10 May 2009. trotsky.org. [Return to text]

15. Catherine MacKinnon. "Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: An Agenda for Theory." Signs 7.3 (1982): 515-544: p. 515. [Return to text]

16. Wendy Brown. "The Mirror of Pornography." States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. 77-95: p. 81. [Return to text]

17. Gayle Rubin. "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality." In Carole Vance, ed., Pleasure and Danger, New York: Routledge, 1984. In this essay, Rubin defines the "fallacy of misplaced scale" as one of the defining ideological features of the ways in which sexuality is conceived in American discourse, and defines it as the overestimation of the importance, burden, and significance of sexuality and sex acts in any given context. Sexuality needing only be contextualized by itself in order to take on monumental fear, threat, love, etc., is the "fallacy of misplaced scale." [Return to text]

18. Ronald Weitzer. "The Social Construction of Sex Trafficking: Ideology and Institutionalization of a Moral Crusade." Politics and Society 35.3 (2007): 447-475. [Return to text]

19. Open Society Institute. "Rights, Not Rescue: A Report on Female, Trans, and Male Sex Workers' Human Rights in Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa." 6 Aug 2009. www.soros.org (PDF). While "brothel raids" are less common in the U.S., because brothels are less common, there is a demonstrated relationship between anti-prostitution rhetoric in U.S. government and the policies on prostitution that it supports abroad, raids and rescue being one of these. [Return to text]

20. Examples of books that deploy this argument are Kamala Kempadoo and Jo Doezema, eds. Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance, and Redefinition. New York and London: Routledge, 1998. See also Elizabeth Bernstein, Temporarily Yours: Sexual Commerce in Post-Industrial Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Numerous activist initiatives are also approaching the question from this perspective. In the U.S., these include sex workers' organizations such as the Desiree Alliance, the Sex Workers' Outreach Project (SWOP), and non-governmental organizations such as the Sex Workers' Project. International organizations working from this perspective include the Network for Sex Work Projects and the Paulo Longo Research Initiative. [Return to text]

21. John D'Emilio. "Can the Left Ignore Gay Liberation?" New Politics 12.1 (Summer 2008: 45. 6 Aug 2009. newpolitics.mayfirst.org/fromthearchives?nid=103. [Return to text]

22. This is a summary of some of the major points of left arguments against gay marriage. A few of the scholars who have contributed to building these critiques include Michael Warner, Lisa Duggan, Richard Kim, and Yasmin Nair. [Return to text]

23. Eric Hobsbawm. "Identity Politics and the Left." New Left Review I.217 (May-June 1996). 25 May 2009. www.newleftreview.org/?view=1852. [Return to text]

24. Martin Duberman. "Gay Leftie Seeks Straight Friends." New Politics 12.1 (Summer 2008): 45. 6 Aug 2009. newpolitics.mayfirst.org/fromthearchives?nid=104. [Return to text]

25. Wendy Brown and Janet Halley. Introduction. Left Legalism / Left Critique. Ed. Brown and Halley. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002. 1-37: p 7. [Return to text]