Queerness

Indifference, if not outright hostility, have marked the relations between the disciplinary formations around the study of sexuality (including feminist, gay and lesbian, and queer theory) and engagements with Marx’s writings and Marxist thought in general. The seeming lack of fit between critiques of sexual normalization in queer theory, and materialist analyses of capitalist exploitation and domination, can be approached through juxtaposed terms such as need vs. desire (Morton 1995), recognition vs. redistribution (Fraser 1995), sexuality vs. class, domination vs. exploitation, identity vs. class (Butler 1998) etc. I do not mean to imply there is no intrinsic relation between the terms. However, within the disciplinary domains of Marxist materialist approaches and queer critiques of sexuality (and gender), these terms have formed points of organization around which sometimes strident articulations of fundamental opposition are constructed.