However, taken together, the strategies that sexuality-based and leftist social movements in the U.S. have recently been pursuing to achieve their aims raise the problem that Wendy Brown articulates between freedom and identity, keeping in mind that sexuality and identity, or identity politics, have been folded into one another since the end of the explicitly leftist gay liberation movement in the early 1970s.
“It would thus appear that it is freedom’s relationship to identity—its promise to address a social injury or marking that is itself constitutive of identity—that yields the paradox in which the first imaginings of freedom are always constrained by and potentially even require the very structure of oppression that freedom emerges to oppose . . . not only a patently Foucauldian point but is contained as well in Marx’s argument that ‘political emancipation’ within liberalism conceived formal political indifference to civil particularity as liberation because political privilege according to civil particularity appeared as the immediate nature of the domination perpetrated by feudal and Christian monarchy.”1
The effects of structuring social inequality, such as that based on sexuality, and the demands for its redress through identity, then, are profound, because:
“Western leftists have largely forsaken analyses of the liberal state and capitalism as sites of domination and have focused instead on their implication in political and economic inequalities. At the same time, progressives have implicitly assumed the relatively unproblematic instrumental value of the state and capitalism in redressing such inequalities.”2
This critique of the effects of seeking legal redress for injury from the liberal state through the rubric of equality is particularly salient for sexuality-based movements in the U.S. that have increasingly presented legal changes, such as hate crimes legislation or marriage laws, as social change. Left entities in the U.S.—such as the surviving communist political parties in the U.S., and the left press—have endorsed this approach to the politics of sexuality through their silence on the issue, or through their written support, the relatively consistent articles in the left press supporting gay marriage being a case in point. By the same token, if mainstream aspects of sexuality-based movements in the U.S. have been concerned with class and the uneven distribution of wealth, they have demonstrated this concern by reducing the Marxian concept of class consciousness to the representational ideal of including working-class people in their campaigns. In other words, in some instances sexuality-based organizations take the inclusion of working-class people as a goal rather than a means.
Leftist endorsements of strategies that emphasize redress from legal injury by advocating greater state-sponsored protections have had serious consequences for debates on sex work as well, because the majority of left organizations that have taken a position on sex work have done so by supporting feminist anti-trafficking initiatives that derive from anti-prostitution abolitionism. Because of the fundamental opposition within this framework against claiming prostitution as work, and because feminist anti-prostitution abolitionism was articulated within a Marxist feminist framework, the left has embraced a set of positions on prostitution which, by and large, have remanded it to advocating a politics of rescue and rehabilitation that largely relies on police and the prison system, rather than framing prostitution, and its abuses, within the politics of labor and political and economic power.
There are, of course, many spaces where sex work and leftist approaches to the problems of power productively and crucially intersect; my argument does not intend to disavow or disappear these complexities, but, rather, to describe a dominant set of problematics within these discourses. For example, at this writing, sex worker unions have been formed in the U.S., Germany, Argentina and India, at least, and an affiliate of the South African national trade union federation COSATU has resolved to help South African sex workers unionize.3 However, these initiatives have yet to take up the kind of discursive space that the abolitionist anti-trafficking movement has been able to muster thus far in discursively conflating trafficking and prostitution, and in gaining the support of states seeking to close off “porous” borders. In the sections that follow, I elaborate on both of these sets of examples, gay marriage and sex work, and conclude by returning to the left itself.
- 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. [↩]
- Ibid, p. 10. [↩]
- 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. [↩]
