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

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]

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