The Politics of Everybody

Feminism, Queer Theory, and Marxism at the Intersection: A Revised Edition

Holly Lewis

• Editorial: Zed Books
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781913441111
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Ciencias sociales
• Categoría: Feminismo y teoría feminista

The Politics of Everybody examines the production and maintenance of the terms 'man', 'woman', and 'other' within the current political moment; the contradictions of these categories; and the prospects of a Marxist approach to praxis for queer bodies. Few thinkers have attempted to reconcile queer and Marxist analysis. Those who have propose the key contested site to be that of desire/sexual expression. This emphasis on desire, Lewis argues, is symptomatic of the neoliberal project and has led to a continued fascination with the politics of identity. By arguing that Marxist analysis is in fact most beneficial to gender politics within the arena of body production, categorization and exclusion, Lewis develops a theory of gender and the sexed body that is wedded to the realities of a capitalist political economy. Boldly calling for a new, materialist queer theory, Lewis defines a politics of liberation that is both intersectional, transnational, and grounded in lived experience. With a new preface, Lewis discusses the argument for an explicitly Marxist understanding of trans rights - an understanding grounded in solidarity and materialist/scientific queer analysis. She also discusses the new wave of Marxist Social Reproduction Theory that has emerged since the first edition, family abolition, and the complexities of building an internationalist Marxist movement that is in solidarity with queer and trans struggles, attentive to women's realities, and one that refrains from imposing Western definitions (particularly American/Anglo definitions) onto global movements for liberation.

CHAPTER 1

Terms of the debate

This book has the difficult task of speaking to multiple audiences: third-wave feminists and queer theorists who have commitments to gender and sexual liberation but who have little familiarity with Marxian economics; Marxists who want to go beyond facile dismissals of ‘identity politics’ to better understand the relationship between the objective realities of material existence and the experience of that material existence; and those working to clarify their political and philosophical orientation towards gender. Each readership comes with a distinct set of languages, political histories, and conceptual tools.

Chapter 1 serves as an overview of the concepts fundamental to each political approach. This conceptual outline also foreshadows the overall argument of this book: that to live up to its own inclusive values, Marxist politics must understand gender politics; and that any gender politics of merit will contain an anti-capitalist critique that goes beyond moral posturing.

I. Debates in Western gender politics

Epistemology and identity politics

Within Marxists and various third-wave feminist camps, the term ‘identity politics’ is more slur than genuine political critique. For Marxists, the slur refers to politics that substitute systemic historical and economic analyses with inquiries into intrapersonal aggression. Marxist political activity does not require a proletarian identity politics because Marxist analysis involves impersonal, macropolitical investigations. However, the majority of current Marxist thought¹ takes anti-oppression seriously and is committed to tackling sexism, imperialism, colonialism, racism, homophobia, and transphobia. So Marxists do understand that identities exist and that being stuck with a particular label has political consequences; there is no denial that capitalism sorts human material according to market criteria and that this creates immense suffering within certain groups. Identity politics is irreconcilable with Marxism only if the former is understood to entail a world where communication and solidarity are possible only among those who share specific experiences. Such a requirement would necessarily divide the working classes into insurmountable, static antagonisms. Since capitalism already divides workers – giving some carrots and others sticks – further divisions among the stick-beaten and the carrot-rewarded cannot resolve injustice: for Marxists, only ending capitalism will be equal to the task because the conditions of justice are historical and class specific.²

Feminist, queer, and trans critiques of identity politics differ from the Marxist critique. Both the second and third waves of feminist thought criticize the concept of objectivity, and instead champion epistemologies based on situated knowledge. Within feminism, ‘identity politics’ is a political error that occurs when an individual or group overemphasizes the impact of or naturalizes a given standpoint – for example, reducing a person to the assumed experience of the group with which they are identified, or automatically treating any individual within a group as if they are representative of that group. As a poststructuralist enterprise, queer theory has a very different take. Queer theory asserts that identity, as a conceptual category, serves as a disciplinary apparatus that pigeonholes the fluidity of the self into a politically docile normativity. This places the queer subject in a privileged epistemological position: those who experience no gender dissonance vis-à-vis the system are ignorant of its force and its contours.³ Queer subjects are diverse, but share a collective understanding of gender discipline that forms a basis for political cohesion. For queer theory, the term ‘identity politics’ is derogatory because it assumes that identities – clear-cut groupings with clear definitions – are desirable. When political thinkers dismiss queer theory as mere identity politics, this is fundamentally incorrect. Queer theory is an anti-identity identity politics. The Marxist critique of many (non-Marxist) feminisms and queer theory is that if you want to analyze inequality as systemic, it is necessary to transcend the individual mind. If knowledge is contained within a standpoint, rather than capable of being inflected by a standpoint, then systemic knowledge is not possible and, as a consequence, inequality cannot be fought systematically.

Each of the frameworks above also takes a different object for its epistemology: the feminist meaning of ‘system’ is patriarchy, while queer theory understands ‘systemicity’ to be discursive structures willfully kept in place by those who benefit from the system. The object of Marxist epistemology, on the other hand, is the material organization of society (Henning 2014). As a consequence of these different understandings of what is meant by the term system, Marxists, queer activists, and feminists (particularly second-wave feminists whose feminism is not wedded to queer politics) tend to talk past one another in their critiques of identity politics. This is not to say that political practitioners of these viewpoints are completely consistent in their epistemological commitments. For example, the Marxist legacy of independent journalism rests on the notion that there are no unbiased witnesses to history. The difference, however, between Marxian approaches to journalism (or, if we divorce the concept from institutions and professions, speaking from the event) and poststructuralist approaches is that, for Marxists, the positioned witness is considered able to surpass their own personal, phenomenological experience of events. The Marxist witness can deduce general information from their particular position.⁴ The Marxist witness, like the socially disciplined queer subject, is also given an epistemological advantage in that their position allows them to witness the appearance of cracks on the surface of capitalist ideology. But the queer political subject experiences the system as an overwhelming and inscrutable alienating spiritual force, while the Marxist subject’s political goals require her to translate her standpoint into an outlook that is objectively valuable.

While Marxists do not entirely negate the value of situated knowledge, queer theorists are often ambivalent or unclear about objectivity. In poststructuralist queer thought, to theorize about the system is itself to ‘systematize’ knowledge of injustice, thereby eliminating the interpersonal; however, at the same time, queer theory is predicated on what it calls ‘dismantling discursive disciplinary apparatuses’ – that is, pointing out how systems of ideas shape people. It is hard to point out how systems of ideas shape people without first conceptualizing how the system works – so systematic thought makes you think systematically! The queer theoretical solution for dismantling the system is not a new identity politics or even an opposition to identity politics, but rather a conscious demand for ideological change in the abstract. Change is not imagined as a struggle over material social relations; it is a struggle for discursive changes, for collective shifts in language. These changes come at the level of individual speech acts and symbolic ruptures. Political change is understood as the outcome of an aggregate of individual acts. Yet, paradoxically, discursive politics leads to, indeed requires, significant policing of language. Because systemic violence is entirely ideological, choosing appropriate terminology becomes a political act. The reverse of this is that using the wrong terminology becomes an act of ideological violence. This creates a significant barrier to political agency because discursive politics demands that people be trained in the correct phraseology (in fact, self-trained in the correct phraseology, because collective training would subject others to the violence of normativized discourse). It is difficult to image an internationalist model of discursive politics. If ‘system’ means ‘ideology’, and if disrupting ideology is a linguistic act, then the terrain of political struggle would reside within distinct language groups and cultures, cultures that then have no real reason to communicate with one another beyond multicultural pleasantries. Cultural incommensurability becomes absolute. We find ourselves under the authority of ‘the dictatorship of the fragments’ (Best 1989: 361).

Nor is third-wave feminism immune from epistemological inconsistency. For example, third-wave feminists maintain that racism, sexism, and homophobia are systemic, not a mere matter of individual micro-aggressions; yet they assert rather than explain how the system produces gender injustice and how gender injustice comes to be a feature of the social system. When the term ‘system’ is conceived as an interpersonal network in which certain groups are socially empowered, the political solution to systemic injustice becomes the replacing of anti-feminist policymakers with feminist policymakers. Such an approach conceives of system change as a matter of getting the right individuals into the right positions, and social identity cannot help but determine who is the right individual. Even if this conception of politics concedes the limits of identity (Sarah Palin and Imelda Marcos come to mind), the election of the right individuals to the right political posts is highly valued in this model.

In other words, even though feminists and queer activists embrace the idea of fighting at a systemic level, the meaning of the term ‘system’ is not always clear, and nor is the political role played by individuals operating within the system. Marxists are, in comparison, quite clear on what constitutes the system: the system is the laws and norms brought about by current material social relations born from earlier material social relations, and the system is also the material social relations themselves. The system can be named: feudalist, capitalist, socialist, and so on. Nuances and shifts within systems – monopoly capitalism, neoliberalism, Keynesianism, and state capitalism – are topics that Marxists outline and debate. A materialist conception of politics does not mean that gender relations are reducible to economic conditions (for example, factory occupation is not a panacea for ending sexual assault). Conditions are not reducible to material social relations; however, they are generated from the matrix of material social relations.

If system change does not come through challenges to language and imagery (as poststructuralism and queer theory argue) or by dismantling hierarchical relationships within institutions (as feminism argues), the question for Marxists becomes: ‘What can be done in the here and now?’ Criticizing language and institutional hierarchies seems doable, but transforming the whole of material social relations? What could be done short of revolution? Marxist responses to this question have ranged from defeatism to desperate moral calls for immediate revolution, to revolutionaries indiscriminately throwing themselves onto the machine in the hope of slowing the gears, to the social democratic argument that socialism will evolve on its own through reforms (Bernstein 1961), to a strategy of militant urban occupations that envision capitalism’s imminent destruction, one building at a time.⁵

Many Marxists – myself included – have found Rosa Luxemburg’s dialectical approach to the problem to be productive (see Luxemburg 2007). For Luxemburg, revolution is not the polar opposite of reform; nor is Luxemburg worried that political subjects will become complacent if reforms are won. When people fight and win reforms, they are not less likely to continue fighting; they are more likely to continue fighting. Fighting for reforms is a way to build political muscle. In the process of struggling for reforms, solidarities are forged and revolutionary forces develop the political clarity to take on more complicated challenges. This approach also requires that subjects develop the capacity to integrate situated and objective knowledge. If one disdains situated knowledge within a field of struggle, one quickly becomes a caricature of the variety of Leninist revolutionary who rushes into battle to bestow her higher wisdom upon the struggling masses.⁶ Trust is earned by paying attention to the situation at hand, not by presenting abstract theories. Moreover, pushing abstract, prefabricated revolutionary platforms obscures the concrete historical and material politics that comprise Marxist practice. Reforming immediate conditions is a component of revolutionary activity. Reconciling ongoing situated knowledge with a deeper understanding of objective material conditions, along with a commitment to changing those conditions, is revolutionary praxis.

While queer thinkers are quick to point out that the liberation of labor does not spontaneously solve all homophobia and transphobia, they have been remiss in pointing out that the radical reframing of discourse does not liberate labor. Disrupting linguistic phenomena is not sufficient to remedy systemic injustice because it cannot substantially disrupt material conditions. Likewise, feminists have correctly pointed out that Marx failed to fully consider social reproductive labor outside the factory, but the feminist move away from Marx and towards a concern with hierarchy and hetero-patriarchy merely denounced capitalism and focused on developing strategies for surviving it: denouncing and enduring do not disrupt a system, let alone end it. While feminist opinion about reform is highly dependent on the particular mode of feminist thought (radical, Black feminist, materialist, etc.), for queer theory, reform is almost impossible by definition, because an entire way of thought must be overhauled. The fact that queer political theory is skeptical of reform is a manifestation of its faith that political transformation is another name for conceptual transformation. In other words, it is a classic example of philosophical idealism.

The critique of political economy cannot be sacrificed in favor of intuitive or situated knowledge, but situated knowledge is necessary for concrete strategy. Genuine antiracist and anti-sexist training happens in the streets, not in the safe space of the university classroom. This is because, in the streets, bonds of solidarity are developed at the level of shared political goals, be those goals immediate reform or revolution. In the classroom, training is a matter of comparing theoretical precepts. (The caveat here is that when the classroom is a site of broad struggle, it becomes a part of ‘the streets’.) This means that revolutionary political practice involves both considering and transcending experiential knowledge. If third-wave feminist and trans/ queer praxis wishes to be politically (not just sentimentally) anti-capitalist, then it has to start talking about capitalist production. Likewise, if Marxists want to go beyond intellectualized solidarity, Marxist political practice requires an exchange of working-class perspectives. Learning about the language and debates inside queer, trans, and feminist political movements is not useless identity politics but the concrete practice of solidarity. This goes beyond the truism that revolutionary forces must contain a diverse cross-section of the population. The relationship between the composition of a political movement and identity is complex. Without actors immanent to the situation at hand, interventions in movements will be perceived as intrusive; however, Marxist groups are in a double bind here: if a collective sends its members into political situations where the member’s identity allows access, not only is identity politics reinforced (i.e. Caribbean Marxists are the ones who should know about Caribbean politics, queer Marxists are the ones who should know about gender politics, and so on), but the member is still seen as an emissary from a group, not a subject contributing from the heart. The challenge for any Marxist, then, is at once to be knowledgeable about the world, about themself, and about the group they operate within and to be able to articulate political suggestions that embody these areas of knowledge: a challenging ethos if ever there was one.

Queer (anti-)identity

The integration of queer and trans people into ‘the everybody’ – or the refusal to integrate queer and trans people – is a critical political choice. Queer theory, with its philosophical roots in the Foucauldian search for marginalized shadow populations, is committed to inclusivity; however, it is also indebted to Heideggerian phenomenology, which confines being-in-the-world to local language networks, which, in turn, stymies the possibility of international analysis. To further complicate the matter, contemporary queer politics developed within Western political conditions, particularly American political conditions. Internationalizing the queer, if done by Americans in the spirit of liberal pluralism, will undoubtedly be an imperialist queer politics that reduces concrete politics and histories to parallels with American history and culture. Yet gender non-conformity and homosexuality are not an American or European invention (see Drucker 2015).⁷ Same-sex activity and gender non-conforming identities exist around the world and have done so throughout history. Examples of challenges to the myth of universal heterosexual gender dimorphism are numerous: from kathoey in Thailand to hijra in India and Pakistan, muxes in Mexico and sworn virgins in Albania.⁸ ...

Índice

• Cover
• About the author
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Terms of the debate
• 2. Marxism and gender
• 3. From queer nationalism to queer Marxism
• 4. Conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• eCopyright