Svati P. Shah,
"Sexuality and 'The Left': Thoughts on Intersections and Visceral Others"
(page 2 of 7)
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.
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