Svati P. Shah,
"Sexuality and 'The Left': Thoughts on Intersections and Visceral Others"
(page 5 of 7)
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.
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