Neferti Tadiar,
"If Not Mere Metaphor . . . Sexual Economies Reconsidered"
(page 3 of 6)
Their Bodies, Our Subjects
It is worth noting, as a second feature, that this epistemic model
was enabled by a theoretical attention to the discursivity of material
processes such as economic phenomena, a theoretical attention that was a
hallmark of academic thinking in a moment arguably shaped not only by
French poststructuralism but also by the increasing financialization of
capital.[4]
Beyond ideology critiques, scholars like Arturo Escobar, for
example, theorized the Western economy as composed of a system of
signification as well as a system of production and power, highlighting
the role of discursive processes in the constitution of the dominant
actors and scripts of action in the world project of development that
emerged after the Second World War, including the very object of global
economic action, the third world.[5]
It is the attention to the role of
signification in the constitution of material realities that undergirded
a whole host of denaturalizing feminist interventions, not only with
respect to the economy but also with respect to the sexed body, as
paradigmatically defined by Judith Butler's theory of performativity. In
J.K. Gibson-Graham's feminist intervention, The End of Capitalism (As
We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy (1996),
"capitalism" itself could be grasped in terms of what Butler called a
set of "regulatory fictions" that script the economic agencies of
capital, on the one hand, and workers and consumers, on the other, in
the heteronormative sexual identities of, respectively, the heroic male
subject of power and violence and the passive female victim or object of
that power and violence.[6]
Drawing on poststructuralist feminist and
queer writings on the body, gender, and sexuality, Gibson-Graham propose
to "query" the rape script of globalization, and more generally, to
queer the normative bodily identities and subject-positions of
capitalism, thereby opening up alternative scripts and other
possibilities of economic being and practice.
I will return to this proposal to queer the naturalized economy, and
to the specific strategy Gibson-Graham develop in their recent book,
A Postcapitalist Politics, of "undoing" the seemingly fixed and
monolithic identity of capitalism through a new language of economic
diversity.[7]
For now, I want to remark on how this feminist reading of
the signifying role of categories of gendered and sexual differences in
constituting the economic order necessarily entails an invocation of its
material effects, often in identifiable social groups of embodied labor.
That is to say, the abstract dimensions of the economic system through
which feminists are able to read gender, race, and sexuality as
intrinsic to its processes demands the location of its effects in the
collectively gendered, racialized, and sexualized individual bodies of
workers (or, in Gibson-Graham's work, the other embodied economic
subject, consumers).[8]
Hence, in numerous feminist critiques of
globalization, immigrant female domestic and/or sex workers, as well as
women workers in other global industries, come to embody the material
consequences of the gendered, racialized, and sexualized aspects of the
normative logics of the capitalist economy. In such anthologies as
Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy,
edited by Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, and Women
and Globalization, edited by Delia Aquilar and Anne Lacsamana, poor
women workers from the global south are the paradigmatic figures and
representative bearers of the economic processes known as the
feminization of labor and the globalization of reproductive labor, or
"women's work."[9]
I want to be very clear that I consider these feminist interventions
extremely important, even indispensable, to political struggles against
the violence and injustice of the ruling global economic order, and do
not contest the terrible facts of women's exploitation and oppression
that they present. I do, however, want to probe the conditions and
limits of these feminist epistemic frameworks and in particular the
political fallout of the norms they inadvertently institute. In this
vein, the first point I want to make is that these feminist accounts are
predominantly predicated upon a theory and politics of subjects, whose
contradistinction with objects rests on or at least resides in enabling
proximity with other extant Western philosophical distinctions, such as
distinctions between human and non-human, animate and inanimate, and
life and death.[10]
Despite a great range of theoretical perspectives in
these accounts, the subject remains the model and unit for recognizing
and thinking about economic as well as sexual activity, identity, and
agency. It serves as the axiomatic form of human equivalence that
undergirds many feminist critiques of globalization and their respective
ethico-political claims. The subject is the protagonist of
political-moral tales of agency versus script or structure, freedom
versus constraint, suffering versus resistance, which is implicit if not
fully evident in these accounts. Grace Chang's analysis of globalization
in Women and Globalization argues, for example, that "women of
color throughout the world are those who suffer first and worst under
globalization," but they are also "the primary leaders in fighting back,
in resisting this 'new world order.'" In Chang's analytical principle,
"women of color do not merely suffer under, but struggle, survive
and forge resistance over globalization," which is echoed in
Delia Aguilar's introductory remark that while "economic globalization
weighs most heavily upon women and extracts from them the greatest
suffering, they have been rendered neither immobile nor quiescent," we
glimpse the basic narrative outline of many feminist accounts.
My concern here is not principally about the homogenizing and
Eurocentric universalizing ways in which third world women are produced
as "subjects outside of social relations," or about the equation of
agency with resistance, as the exemplary works of Chandra Mohanty and
Saba Mahmood have argued, despite the relevance that such criticism
holds in this context.[11]
Rather, it is that the subject remains the
primary analytical and political locus for feminist accounts of the
intersection between economics and categories of social difference.
However concretely situated and specified, whether subverting norms or
inhabiting them, the subject is the privileged form of political agency.
Undoubtedly, the discursive construction of economic subjects continues
to be an important site of feminist critical intervention. As I show in
"Sexual Economies," the metaphorical construction of nation-states as
gendered subjects exerts constitutive force through processes of
socialization that regulate the proper actors in, and representatives
of, institutions of state and capital and the kinds of power they are
authorized to exercise; economic policies that protect and valorize the
"productive" activities of capitalist industries over the
"non-productive" activities associated with women's subsistence; and
social as well as state practices of labor conscription, marketing, and
regulation that aid in the so-called feminization of labor.
Subjective ideals in the fantasy of nation-states certainly bear
important and often incalculably and irreversibly punitive consequences
for people who do not embody these ideals. Moral-political projects of
citizenship making as well as state building, which are indispensable to
national economic strategies of accumulation, provide the compass for
the policing of sexual behaviors in the production of licit subjects and
social relations. In the U.S. context, for example, Mary Pat Brady shows
how the dovetailing of anti-gay rights and anti-immigrant sentiments in
the 1990s (expressed in the channeling of energies from California's
long-contested gay rights bill, AB101, to Proposition 187, which denied
public benefits to illegal aliens) into the New Nativist nationalism of
the 2000s rested on a deep public investment in, and anxiety about, the
regulation and promotion of a heteropatriarchal white family structure
as the proper site of consumption and reproduction.[12]
Itself shaped by the economic assaults on the single-wage "nuclear family" as a result of
the financialization and globalization of the U.S. economy, this anxiety
was marshaled into new programs of welfare reform, the militarization of
the U.S.-Mexico border, and widespread social and state practices of
criminalizing immigrants. In the Taiwanese context, Josephine Ho has
talked about a similar national anxiety caused by globalization's
assault on the middle class, which has been deflected toward renewed
forms of parental social and sexual control over an infantilized
citizenry, and the criminalization of migrant labor and sexual
minorities.[13]
In the current moment, if the U.S. financial crisis is cast in terms
of an ailing male body, "analogous to a muscle strain in a champion
athlete which could be healed with some rest and physiotherapy—as
opposed to a heart attack in a 60-a-day smoker whose cure would require
surgery and major changes in lifestyle," these metaphorical
constructions certainly delimit sanctioned forms of economic agency and
practice while rendering other forms of economic agency and practice
either irrelevant or unintelligible with respect to this crisis, and
therefore outside of economic rationality.[14]
Take the representation of
credit card companies' curtailing their credit card offers and extension
of credit lines, in the face of borrowers defaulting on payments, as
efforts to "stanch the bleeding."[15]
The construction of credit card
companies as the proper economic subject of loss undoubtedly renders
invisible the bleeding objects of economic exploitation, i.e., consumers
of credit, and the "losses" (in Marxist terms, the theft) of their
future labor, with which they are expected to pay for such credit. But a
feminist critique along the lines I've outlined would likely cast
working-class consumers of credit (and, if one were to go beyond a
U.S.-focused account, the feminized labor in the global south which
produces the goods and services that U.S. consumers buy with their
credit, and the militarist masculinities across the world ensuring
"political stability" by making the world safe for capitalism), as
economic subjects whose identities and attendant agencies are inflected
by axes of gendered, racial, and sexualized difference. As valuable as
such interpretative approaches might be, their focus on the subject as a
model for making agency intelligible necessarily confines what we can
understand as "economic" activity and agency to given roles and
positions in the realm of capitalist exchange. Indeed, it is important
to highlight the fact that insofar as the subject is philosophically
conceived out of historical relations of equivalence mediated by
exchange-value, it restricts our understanding of gender, race, and
sexuality to a specific cultural logic, reifying them as empirical forms
of identity and difference on the level of exchange.[16]
It comes as no surprise that many feminist critiques of the economy
enact some drama of subjects and objects as a version of the dialectical
struggle between capital and labor, which is itself constitutively
shaped by gendered, racial, and sexual
conceptions.[17] Whether as
producers/workers, consumers, states, or various kinds of capital,
economic subjects are defined against the objectified state of
commodities. Hence, female laborers, in the form of sex workers,
nannies, nurses and maids, are converted from their global
commodity-form, i.e. as objects of exploitation and sexist and racist
oppression, on whom the "impacts" of globalization are registered (as
bodily sites of this economic order's material effects), into subjects
of feminist ethico-political claims. What I am suggesting, however, is
that there is a specific political ontology that underlies these
feminist interventions, one that reflects and institutes what Sylvia
Wynter calls "the bioeconomic conception of the
human."[18] I would go so
far as to say that it is this bioeconomic conception of the human that
also delimits dominant feminist ways of articulating connections between
the body, sexual desire, and economic practices.
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