Sexuality and “The Left”: Thoughts on Intersections and Visceral Others

The raids, rescues and arrests that have formed the core strategies of the anti-prostitution movement stand in stark contrast to efforts to organize sex workers through a left framework that counters labor exploitation with unionization and collective bargaining, one that also questions the politics of a police-centered response to prostitution. By refusing a worker-centered response to prostitution, anti-prostitution advocates deploy a Marxian analysis of commodification in the service of a strategy that does not undermine class-based oppression, but rather gives weight to the liberal state by seeking redress for prostitution-as-injury. Some sex worker groups have responded to this analysis with the assertion that sex work is pleasurable and liberatory, drawing from the history of sexual liberation in the U.S. to do so. While the claim of prostitution as liberation is by no means new, and can in no way be classified as purely reactionary, it is a response to the current debate within its own terms, and therefore itself serves to reify liberal individual subjectivity within the debate on prostitution, though with markedly different aims than that of abolitionism. A left argument for sex work, such as those that are beginning to be deployed more widely in the global south, would include more skepticism of the protective power of the state, and would therefore generate a wider discussion on the possibilities for understanding sex work within the frame of livelihood instead of maintaining the debate within the constrained juridical polarities of legalization and criminalization.¹

A left argument for sex work would also allow for alliances with other groups of people who face structurally mediated oppression on the basis of sexuality. The alliance between sex workers and queer activists at the 2004 World Social Forum in India is a case in point. This alliance was articulated through the politics of decriminalization and made a strong argument against the criminalization of sexuality, writ large. This kind of alliance is forming in the U.S. as well, through the rubric of liberation, and through the notion that many sex workers and LGBT people have overlapping identities and livelihood experiences. While these alliances will doubtless have a productive impact on the debates in which they are engaged, their effects remain to be discerned.

LGBT Politics, the Left, and Gay Marriage

The relatively short-lived (1969-1971) Gay Liberation Front² that emerged with the New Left movements in the late 1960s is known for having coalesced against police harassment and criminalization, perhaps most famously at the watershed moment of the Stonewall rebellion. The politics of “gay liberation” that are now seen as quaint, if they are remembered at all, were also necessarily formed in relation to the discourse of social justice promoted by the left, and espoused an abiding class consciousness that clearly articulated itself against class-based hierarchy. After its brief existence, gay liberation gave way to the liberal, ethnicized formations of the rights-based sexuality movements that followed.

The ethnicized, rights-based movement for LGBT equality is now engaged in one of its defining moments with its campaign to legalize same-sex marriage. Although there are multiple perspectives on the question of gay marriage that do not easily fit a dichotomy between heterosexual/homophobic anti-marriage “conservatives” and gay/pro-gay pro-marriage “liberals,” this is the schematic through which the American media has been parsing the debate. The dissent on this issue has come through the queer left, which has argued that the same-sex marriage campaign reifies marriage itself and the class-based society that this entails. Beyond reducing the array of relationship forms that people enjoy and denying the history of queer people living outside of hetero norms, the queer left argues that marriage essentially creates two classes of citizens—married people with the full citizenship rights afforded by this legal status, and unmarried people without them.³ Instead of legalized gay marriage, dissenters have called for an abolition of marriage, or at least a re-visioning of the access to the material benefits currently provided by marriage.

The dominance of the polarized schematic of the debate—between “liberal” and “conservative”—erases any other option for conceiving of a way to distribute the legal protections and privileges afforded by marriage. Furthermore, the dominance of marriage itself obscures any other social formation in which adults can and do engage that provides comparable intimacy and support. The endorsement of the left, for instance through the left press, for gay marriage seems to be devoid of any influence from queer left critiques. This means that the left is endorsing an initiative that potentially exacerbates class-based inequality by maintaining an legal system in which certain economic and civil rights are only afforded to married couples. While supporting any initiative that exacerbates class-based inequality is clearly counter to the aims and critiques of Marxism, it is also notable that one of the deepest forms of engagement with Marxism is that of critique itself. To participate in a debate as polarized between two positions when there are clearly many more seems to turn away from the complexity of the terrain while endorsing the normativity of marriage. Rather than producing a left analysis of marriage, based in the history of Marxian critiques of marriage and the family, or endorsing the critiques of the queer left, it seems that the mainstream left in the U.S. has chosen to endorse the so-called “liberal” position on gay marriage. While it is clear that, given the option between supporting and opposing gay marriage, the only salient choice is the former, it is also clear that a left critique of marriage is a crucial component of this debate.

1. 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. [↩]
2. 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. [↩]
3. 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. [↩]