Neferti Tadiar,
"If Not Mere Metaphor . . . Sexual Economies Reconsidered"
(page 2 of 6)
In the wake of the pivotal crisis-events that have arguably reshaped
some of the familiar contours of this New World Order and its economy
since the early 1990s—including the first Gulf War in 1991, the Asian
financial crisis in 1997, and the U.S.-led preemptive war against and
occupation of Iraq since 2003 (events that remind us of the structural
crises of globalization that local and regional wars have been the
indispensable means of resolving)—it would seem time to re-examine this
feminist conceptual and political model for the question of its
continued relevance to the current moment. Although my point of
departure for rethinking this feminist model is my own work, I do not
understand this reconsideration of "sexual economies" as one of personal
intellectual revision. Rather, it is an effort to rethink some of the
broadly shared concepts and theoretical perspectives that I and other
feminists have used to think about how gender, sexuality, and race
matter to the economy, and further, to take critical stock of both the
extant possibilities opened up by some of these theoretical perspectives
and the limits posed by our norms of thinking on these matters, norms
that also appear to operate in the world of activism and nongovernmental
practice.
There are several features in the conceptualization of "sexual
economies" that I have tried to highlight in my descriptive summary
above. The first is the importance of a different deployment of crisis
as a mode of posing the structural role that gender, race, and sexuality
play in seemingly purely economic processes. Clearly, this conceptual
deployment of crisis owes something to Marxist thought, an important
source of critical thinking about the economy that socialist and
materialist feminists in particular have tapped for valuable conceptual
tools that they have inflected with social difference, such as the
division of labor and the category of labor itself. For many feminists,
crisis as event and excess dissimulates crisis as structure and norm,
temporally containing the systemic unsustainability of the processes of
capitalist accumulation, which depend on the continual dispossession of
the very populations who serve as the productive resources of the value
accumulated. Systemic forms of social and bodily violence, and psychic
and emotional violation, are intrinsic to modern structures of
capitalist accumulation, and it is by looking at the social groups and
identities of those who disproportionately bear these violent
consequences—the bodily bearers of systemic crisis—that one can begin to
understand the role that categories of social difference play in the
political and economic systems themselves.
This is an epistemic framework that is evident in much anti-racist,
third world, postcolonial, and transnational feminist thought. It relies
on a notion of socially marked groups as the objects of mutually
imbricated processes of exploitation and hierarchical oppression. The
worker as crisis-symptom of capitalism becomes rearticulated as a social
position produced not just in contradictory relation to capital but also
through simultaneous intersecting forces or axes of hierarchical social
difference. For example, Rose Brewer writes:
Given this, uneven economic development encompasses more
than a labor/capital struggle. It is shaped by cultural processes
reflecting longstanding definitions, perceptions of what is natural and
given around hierarchies of race and gender. It is the issue of who
loses. And, increasingly, the answer is young black women and men of
American inner cities. Moreover, the concern with the changing division
of labor through economic restructuring is matched in this discussion by
a concern with racial and gender divisions of labor. Pivotal here is the
intersection of race/gender hierarchies and the way contemporary
economic restructuring is shaped by existing arrangements of race and
gender divisions.[3]
As in my account of Asia-Pacific sexual economies, "who loses" is a
question of a division of labor that is constituted through intersecting
race/gender hierarchies. Although Brewer raises the important issue of
growing inner-city slum populations (what I have elsewhere called the
urban excess, developmentalism's human refuse), which remain one of the
most undertheorized sites within thinking about the global economy, the
central focus and critical standpoint of her analysis of social and
economic injustice and inequality is black women's labor. That is to
say, the issue of "who loses" or the crisis-symptom of capitalist
accumulation can be located in a racialized and gendered category of
embodied labor.
Similarly, the intersectional social identity of disenfranchised
Filipina women as sexualized labor served both as a critical starting
point and guaranteeing evidence of my analysis of the constitutive
significance of gender, sexuality, and race to the logic and processes
of the international political economy. If the gendered, sexualized
figures of relations among the U.S., Japan, and the Philippines were not
mere metaphors, then it was necessary to show how the real
meanings—conceived as cost and consequence—of this Asia-Pacific
fantasy-production could be located in the bodily fates of poor Filipina
women workers, the embodiment of devalued, racialized, sexualized,
feminized labor.
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