Sexual politics

Just three days before the U.S. Supreme Court announced its decision to legalize same sex marriage, president Obama ordered that an undocumented transgender woman be escorted out of the White House Pride celebration because she interrupted the President to raise her voice against the state-sanctioned torture and deportation of LGBT people.

I arrived in the United States prepared to talk about why and how queers need to fight Islamophobia: the fear and hatred of Islam and of Muslims. But [on November 13] the day after my plane landed, Paris was hit by a wave of terrorist attacks. So I can’t give quite the same talk that I prepared.

Forty-six years ago patrons at the Stonewall Inn, a popular New York City gay bar, fought back against abusive police, and in doing so launched the modern lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender movement.

It is not an easy task to reconstruct succinctly the main problematics that have traversed Marxist feminism in the last 40 years, without risking simplifications or serious omissions, or without producing a mere summary that avoids critically engaging with the subjects that it raises. And yet, I believe Arruzza’s text “Remarks on Gender” accomplishes the task very well: her reconstruction of the key theses on the relationship between patriarchy and capitalism proposed by different currents within socialist and Marxist feminism from the 1970s onwards is not only lucid and informative, but also extremely clear and accessible. Furthermore, her partisan critique of the different positions on the table, alongside an indication of the most promising questions for debate, give us – as feminists who locate ourselves in the Marxist tradition(s) – a great opportunity to begin and/or deepen a much needed discussion and exchange. A new generation of Marxist feminists has emerged in the last years; it begins to question, re-articulate, expand and criticise the theorizations and disputes it has inherited from previous generations.

This text raises the question of a unified theory of social relations. Cinzia Arruzza’s essay “Remarks on Gender” reminds us of the debates, left dormant for decades, around creating a unified theory of capital. However, Arruzza’s path toward that unification is one that abdicates the possibility of locating gender and race as part of the abstract, logical, or “essential mechanisms” of capitalism, opting instead to incorporate these pervasive relations as aspects of capitalism’s historical and concrete unfolding.

The social organization of humanity before the advent of agriculture tells us a lot about the context in which our species evolved over tens of thousands of years. It is in fact distinguished from that of primates by a more intense collaboration between individuals, which allows the development of a "cumulative culture." Researchers have just shown why gender equality may explain this propensity to associate a higher number of individuals coming from different groups (M. Dyble et al., "Sex equality can explain the unique social structure of hunter-gatherer bands ", Science, 15 May 2015).

The current debate about sex work among feminists generates more heat than light. Accusations of bad faith fly back and forth across the two sides, research findings are mobilized to undercut the other side even when the research itself is limited by its methods and scope, different sex worker voices are authorized by each side as either genuine or manipulated, depending on whose position those voices seem to support.

Revolutionary struggles against capitalism have raised, time and again, the issue of sexual liberation. Right at the start of capitalism, the English revolution of the 1640s and 1650s involved what historian Christopher Hill has called a “sexual revolution” against the old order. The more radical forces included “ranters” such as Lawrence Clarkson, who argued that “What act soever is done by thee in light and love is light and lovely, though it be that act called adultery.” [1]1 The “utopian socialists” of the early nineteenth century also challenged accepted ideas about sexuality.

The 21st century has witnessed the rapid growth of the LGBT movement in mainland China. A bigger and more diversified LGBT community has emerged along with a more tolerant attitude from both government and society. This article aims to delineate this complicated development.

It is standard to find references to “patriarchy” and “patriarchal relations” in feminist texts, tracts, or documents. Patriarchy is often used to show how gender oppression and inequality are not sporadic or exceptional occurrences. On the contrary, these are issues which traverse all of society, and are fundamentally reproduced through mechanisms that cannot be explained at the individual level.