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.1
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.2 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.
- 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. [↩]
- 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. [↩]
