{"id":688,"date":"2010-05-18T00:00:17","date_gmt":"2010-05-18T05:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=688"},"modified":"2021-11-18T13:58:36","modified_gmt":"2021-11-18T18:58:36","slug":"sexuality-and-gender-in-capital","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=688","title":{"rendered":"Sexuality and gender in capital"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Juliet Mitchell, “Women: The Longest Revolution” (1966)<\/h2>\n

Chris Cutrone<\/h2>\n

Presented at the University of Chicago, May 18, 2010.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In my presentation, I will be drawing from but not citing a variety of readings we do in Platypus, including Georg Luk\u00e1cs’s book History and Class Consciousness<\/em> (1923), Theodor W. Adorno’s essay “Sexual Taboos and the Law Today<\/a>” (1963) and John D’Emilio’s essay “Capitalism and Gay Identity<\/a>” (1983), as well as University of Chicago Professor Moishe Postone’s interpretation of Marx’s critique of capital (in Time, Labor, and Social Domination<\/em>, 1993).<\/p>\n

I want to start with a quotation from Juliet Mitchell\u2019s groundbreaking essay \u201cWomen: The Longest Revolution<\/a>,\u201d published in the New Left Review<\/em> in 1966, that will establish some categories I wish to explore in considering a Marxist approach to problems of sexuality and gender in capital:<\/p>\n

Socialism will be a process of change, of becoming. \u00a0A fixed image of the future is in the worst sense ahistorical. .\u00a0.\u00a0. \u00a0As Marx wrote (in Precapitalist Economic Formations<\/em>): \u201cWhat is progress if not the absolute elaboration of humanity\u2019s creative dispositions .\u00a0.\u00a0. unmeasured by any previously established <\/em>yardstick[,] an end in itself .\u00a0.\u00a0. the absolute movement of becoming?\u201d .\u00a0.\u00a0. \u00a0The liberation of women under socialism will [be] .\u00a0.\u00a0. a human achievement, in the long passage from Nature to Culture which is the definition of history and society. (37)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here, Mitchell concludes her essay with an emphasis on the issue of \u201cbecoming,\u201d or the open-ended transformation of gender and sexuality that capital makes possible but constrains.<\/p>\n

To illustrate the problem regarding the history of the Left, including Marxism, on issues of gender and sexuality, it should suffice to address a poorly registered shift that occurred in the 20th century in the social imagination and ideology of discontents with capital between two crucial periods, the early 20th century \u201cOld Left\u201d of the 1930s and \u201940s, and the \u201cNew Left\u201d of the 1960s and \u201970s.\u00a0 In the earlier period, of the \u201cOld\u201d Left, the predominant form of discontent and grievance regarding capitalism, which had some continuity with similar forms of the 19th century workers\u2019 movement, was how capitalism undermined the working class family and sexual life, breaking up the \u201chearth and home,\u201d and denying the benefits of the bourgeois family to the workers, in exploiting not only men but also women and children.\u00a0 In the late 20th century \u201cNew Left,\u201d by contrast, there was a reversal of the discontent and grievance with capitalism, in that it made women and children (and men) prisoners of the \u201cbourgeois\u201d family. \u00a0Where once capitalism was seen as barring the family life of the workers, now capitalism was seen as depending upon and thus keeping workers constrained in the conventional family.\u00a0 Where once the demand was to have the freedom to have a family, there arose the demand to abolish the family along with capitalism.\u00a0 Where once, in supposed \u201cMarxism-Leninism,\u201d that is, Stalinist, Maoist, and Guevarist, etc., Communism, the family was regarded as the \u201cfighting unit of socialism,\u201d for \u201cNew Left\u201d Marxists, the family was seen as a bulwark of capitalism.\u00a0 Similarly, where once, in such supposed \u201cMarxism,\u201d homosexuality and other \u201cdeviance\u201d was seen as the result of \u201cbourgeois decadence,\u201d for the \u201cNew Left,\u201d sexual liberation found pride of place.\u00a0 What accounts for this shift?<\/p>\n

As shown by the fact that today, paradoxically, a central concern of politics around homosexuality is the demand for equal rights to marital and “family” status, it is not a simple matter of \u201cprogress,\u201d in which at one time Marxists had been unaware of the depth of issues of gender and sexual oppression, and then came to be aware, trying to incorporate issues of gender and sexuality into their critiques of capital.\u00a0 For, as Mitchell points out, not only Marx and Engels themselves, but also later Marxists, such as the German Social-Democratic Party leader August Bebel, as well as younger Marxist political activists, such as Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and Trotsky, were very much aware of how gender and sexual liberation were central concerns for overcoming capital.\u00a0 For instance, in the late 19th century, August Bebel was the first modern parliamentarian to call for the decriminalization of homosexuality.\u00a0 When Bebel\u2019s party later inherited power in the Weimar Republic after the German Revolution of 1918 at the end of the First World War, it became the first modern democratic state to decriminalize homosexuality, but only after the Bolsheviks had already done so in the Russian Revolution of 1917.\u00a0 It was the demise of the Weimar Republic with the 1933 Nazi seizure of power that recriminalized homosexuality (and, incidentally, this was one of very few laws implemented by the Nazis that was not repealed with their defeat at the end of World War II).\u00a0 In the Soviet Union, it was only in the process of conservatization that occurred through Stalinism, the degeneration of the Russian Revolution, that homosexuality was recriminalized, and the conventional heterosexual family was reinforced (for instance through the recriminalization of abortion and the restoration of legal obstacles to divorce) around the same time, in the 1930s. \u00a0As a result, subsequent \u201cMarxists\u201d took as axiomatic the celebration of heterosexuality and the family, and the pathologization of homosexuality, neither of which had been the case for earlier Marxist radicals.<\/p>\n

Thus, conventional but false \u201cMarxist\u201d accounts that came later have posed the issue of \u201cgender vs. class,\u201d or, in \u201csocialist feminist\u201d versions, have tried to demonstrate the \u201cinterconnectedness\u201d of \u201cgender, sexuality and class,\u201d where what needed to be addressed was how gender or sexuality could, equally as well as socioeconomic \u201cclass\u201d accounts could do, describe the problem of capital, in terms of the problem of emancipatory transformation. \u00a0To do so it would be necessary to show how gender and sexuality are in themselves issues of class, or, perhaps more importantly, how class is an issue of sexuality and gender. For gender and sexuality are<\/em> capital. That is, they comprise its conditions of reproduction, as much as socioeconomic classes do. And, like modern classes, gender and sexuality have themselves been formed by the history of capital.<\/p>\n

One way to disentangle the problems that have usually beset and confounded purported \u201cMarxist\u201d anticapitalist approaches to gender and sexual liberation is to recognize that a Marxian account of capital is concerned with conditions of possibility and not causal-deterministic explanations for oppression. \u00a0So, the question would not be how capitalism causes<\/em> sexual and gender oppression, which could indeed be shown, but, rather, how capital could be grasped as the historically specific social condition of possibility<\/em> for forms of sexual and gender constraint and oppression. \u00a0This is especially important with regard to how, in the modern era, sexuality and gender roles have taken a variety of forms, but all nonetheless remained problematical and ultimately constraining of social possibilities for developing greater human potential.<\/p>\n

The modern era of capital, beginning in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, has demonstrated a great deal of potential, in a variety of different forms, for sexual life and gender relations.\u00a0 Such potential has been inherent in the overcoming of traditional ways of life in capital.\u00a0 Conservatives have responded to such changes as the dangerous break-down of traditional values, but, from the beginning, Marxists, among other bohemian socialists of the 19th and early 20th centuries, had been interested in how to push such potential further, in an open-ended way.\u00a0 They regarded capital as a constraint, an obstacle to this.\u00a0 At the same time, however, they regarded capital as the inevitable condition of possibility for emancipatory transformation.\u00a0 As regards changes already underway, Marxists found them expressing potential capital already embodied.\u00a0 Marxists thus distinguished themselves sharply from conservative responses to capital\u2019s dynamic of change.\u00a0 Capital undermined traditional ways of life, but not nearly enough, according to Marxism, because modern capitalist society allowed for the reproduction of (new forms of) gender and sexual oppression.\u00a0 Capital not only undermined, but allowed the recrudescence of the worst forms of supposed \u201ctraditional\u201d ways of life.<\/p>\n

An example I\u2019d like to raise is the phenomenon of the return of the traditional sexual prostitution of boys in Afghanistan after the U.S.-led NATO coalition ousted the Taliban.\u00a0 This has been chronicled in a recent PBS Frontline documentary<\/a>.\u00a0 Whereas the former Soviet client regime and the Taliban radical Islamic fundamentalists, each in their own ways and for their own reasons, had suppressed the practice of the \u201cdancing boys\u201d in Afghanistan, the post-U.S. invasion and occupation regime, while formally outlawing it, has largely tolerated its return.\u00a0 This is because the Mujahideen fighters (for instance of the Russian- and Indian- and then U.S.-backed Northern Alliance) that had fought the Soviet-backed regime and then had been ousted in turn by the Taliban, but now form pillars of the new, post-NATO intervention regime, had cultivated the practice of \u201cdancing boy\u201d prostitution among themselves over the course of the past 30 years.\u00a0 Indeed, their opposition to Afghanistan\u2019s pro-Soviet regime in the 1970s and \u201980s could be attributed almost as much to their adherence to this \u201ctraditional\u201d sexual practice as to their opposition to the unveiling, education, public life and rights of women.\u00a0 As one adherent put it in the Frontline documentary, \u201cWomen are for children, but boys are for pleasure.\u201d\u00a0 In Afghanistan, as elsewhere, the nexus of pressure of a money economy with conditions of wretched, abject poverty, massive social dislocation, including conditions of far-ranging migrant labor markets, and some dubious \u201ctraditional\u201d cultural values, results in the worst of both modern and traditional forms of social life.\u00a0 How would a Marxist approach address a phenomenon like the Afghan \u201cdancing boys?\u201d<\/p>\n

While there is no simple, straightforward answer, it is clear that \u201cdancing boy\u201d prostitution in Afghanistan today bears only superficial resemblance to anything that was practiced traditionally in a prior historical era, itself nothing to celebrate.\u00a0 So the practice can and should be condemned, as in the liberal sensibility of the Frontline documentary, directed at scandalizing a Western audience towards opposing present U.S. and NATO\/European policy in Afghanistan that tolerates such abuses by the regime they have fostered there.\u00a0 But opposing the prostitution of the \u201cdancing boys\u201d on the basis of some \u201chetero-normative\u201d (and hence homophobic) assumption of conventional sexual and gender life elsewhere, such as found in America and Europe, is problematic, to say the least, however much it may appear to be a possible improvement, as advocates in Afghanistan seeking to put an end to the \u201cdancing boys\u201d may imagine.<\/p>\n

Such supposed \u201ctraditional\u201d practices of male inter-generational, pederastic homosexuality that finds grotesque expression today in Afghanistan can obviously in no way be found to express the full potential of male homosexuality \u2014 or of child sexuality, for that matter.\u00a0 So, the solution is not to try to get Afghan men to adopt a more \u201cnormal\u201d sexual orientation towards relations with (adult) women and the modern (Western) marriage based on love and (heterosexual) intimacy, which is highly unlikely under present social conditions in a place like Afghanistan, anyway.\u00a0 And, as anyone concerned with sexual and gender emancipation in places like America and Europe would point out, not only the conventional forms of intimate life and family practices that take place hegemonically \u201chere,\u201d but also those found in the gay\/lesbian\/bisexual\/transgender subcultures, are hardly the final word in terms of sexual and gender emancipation.\u00a0 And, just as importantly, as can be observed in the society of \u201claw and order\u201d such as practiced in places like the U.S., criminalization of sexual practices of any kind offers no solution.<\/p>\n

Another example I\u2019d raise is female genital mutilation, as \u201ctraditionally\u201d practiced in parts of Africa and the Middle East and also among immigrant communities from such places in North America and Europe.\u00a0 While socio-biologists have desperately tried to find a biological-evolutionary \u201creason\u201d for female orgasm, it turns out to be entirely extraneous from survival imperatives of natural selection.\u00a0 As one writer put it, female orgasm, unlike the male orgasm, seems to exist naturally just \u201cfor fun.\u201d\u00a0 Biology is a condition<\/em>, and not a \u201cdestiny.\u201d\u00a0 There is nothing simply \u201cnatural\u201d about human biological conditions.\u00a0 But these can indeed play out in a variety of different ways, depending on society<\/em>.\u00a0 It can also, for instance, allow whole cultures to practice the sexual mutilation of \u2014 the excising of sexual pleasure from \u2014 female children, as occurs routinely for millions of girls around the world each year. \u00a0It is a \u201cvoluntary\u201d practice, by and among women.\u00a0 But this is only an extreme example of how \u201cculture\u201d shapes \u201cnature,\u201d or, how society forms \u201csexuality,\u201d through gender roles, among other practices, all of which, to one degree or another, could be understood as forms of \u201cmutilation,\u201d including psychologically, when seen from the standpoint of potential emancipation<\/em>.\u00a0 How would Marxists respond? \u2014 Especially, as regards female genital mutilation, when what is at stake concerns marital eligibility, and, hence, a whole host of life-chances for women, if the \u201ctraditional\u201d practice is abrogated.\u00a0 We could broaden this concern in addressing the phenomenon of \u201chonor killings\u201d of women for sexual infractions, including involuntary ones such as being raped, in the Arab world and elsewhere.\u00a0 Even more broadly, sex work, especially as a global phenomenon, for instance among millions of migrant workers, points to problems of life chances, for the men who are clients no less than for the women who are prostituted. \u00a0It is not merely a matter of gender oppression, although gender oppression as a condition certainly plays a key role. \u00a0Clearly, as in the case of the Afghan \u201cdancing boys,\u201d what is required is some kind of increased scope for both individual and collective possibilities.\u00a0 The task is to grasp capital<\/em>, the social-historical moment of the present in a process of becoming<\/em>, as a matter of economics, politics and culture, including gender and sexuality, as embodying both potential and constraint for such possibilities.\u00a0 How could a less destructive way for humanity be opened?<\/p>\n

Addressing capital as the fundamental and global context for such phenomena is a challenging but necessary requirement for even beginning to approach the question and problem of what it would take to open possibilities for gender and sexual practices for the vast majority, if not simply the totality of humanity in our modern epoch.\u00a0 In the forms of purportedly \u201cinhuman\u201d practices as can be found in the phenomena of gender and sexuality with which the present world is rife, can be seen, in however distorted form, potential possibilities for becoming human<\/em>, in ways that can only be barely imagined today.\u00a0 As Mitchell warned in her essay more than 40 years ago, we need to attend to the problem of our present discontents taking static, hypostatized forms, and beware of the normative principles we may be tempted to offer against manifest destructive practices we face and want to overcome.\u00a0 For what is necessary is to grasp the \u201cmovement of becoming\u201d in capital that must be transformed, from the break-down of tradition, as well as the specious re-positing of \u201ctradition\u201d in the face of the onslaught of modernity, into a truly \u201chuman achievement\u201d of emancipation.\u00a0|\u00a0\u00a7<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Juliet Mitchell, “Women: The Longest Revolution” (1966) Chris Cutrone Presented at the University of Chicago, May 18, 2010. In my presentation, I will be drawing from but not citing a variety of readings we do in Platypus, including Georg Luk\u00e1cs’s book History and Class Consciousness (1923), Theodor W. Adorno’s essay “Sexual Taboos and the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[10,7,16],"class_list":["post-688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-presentations","tag-10","tag-lectures","tag-marxism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=688"}],"version-history":[{"count":61,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/688\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3227,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/688\/revisions\/3227"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}