Abstract
Recent scholarship within queer international political economy (IPE) has highlighted the intimate links between sexuality and capitalism, as well as the insights offered by queer approaches to the study of the global economy. This article critically advances this literature by examining the political economic foundations and facets of trans oppression. Against the backdrop of an (anti-) ‘trans culture war’ in the United Kingdom, gender-critical and other transexclusionary feminist discourse has sought to cleave trans people from class struggle and to portray trans activism as separate from, and in conflict with, the goals of the feminist movement. This discourse, I contend, is indicative of a broader lack of understanding about the ways in which trans oppression links to other forms of gender oppression under capitalism. The article argues that feminist IPE, and specifically social reproduction approaches, offer a powerful toolbox with which to illuminate the material bases of gendered, racialised and sexualised inequalities within the global economy, including those experienced by trans people, and to uncover their co-constitutive character. However, theorising trans oppression in/through feminist IPE will require scholars to engage more deeply with queer and trans theorising, specifically accounts of heteronormativity and the body, and to relinquish the cis-normative attachments that shape some accounts of gender, capitalism and social reproduction, notably within the Marxist feminist tradition.
Introduction
According to mainstream media, the United Kingdom is currently in the midst of a ‘trans culture war’. 1 While pushback against trans rights is far from new, the latest polarisation is linked to plans to reform the Gender Recognition Act (GRA), which were announced by the Conservative government in 2017 and opened to public consultation the following year (Pearce et al. 2020). 2 The proposed reforms were met by concerted opposition from trans-exclusionary feminist activists, groups and organisations, a heterogeneous alliance that has continued to garner public attention through news and other social media platforms. Contemporary trans-exclusionary feminist discourse comprises various strands, including ‘gender-critical feminism’. 3 One unifying trope across this discourse is the positioning of trans activism as antagonistic towards and/or in conflict with the aims of the feminist movement (Pearce et al. 2020). The GC philosopher, Kathleen Stock, for example, expresses concern that trans women are ‘coming to dominate political landscapes in the UK formerly reserved for women’ and questions whether trans women ‘can properly represent Women-who-are-Not-Transwomen’s experiences and concerns’ (Stock 2018: n.p.). Similar views are expressed by Julie Bindel (2021: n.p.) in her recent book, Feminism for Women, in which she cautions against the ‘increasingly dominant presence’ of trans women in online feminist spaces. Elsewhere, the prominent GC journalist, Julie Burchill, has sought to cleave trans women – and trans women activists in particular – from class struggle. Thus, as Shon Faye (2021: 120) notes, she portrays trans women as part of a ‘PhD-swinging’ middle class that is ‘divorced from the bodily and economic realities of working-class womanhood’.
The arguments set out by trans-exclusionary feminists like Stock, Bindel and Burchill have been roundly criticised for, inter alia, misrepresenting existing and proposed legal rights and protections for trans people in the United Kingdom, refusing to engage with the material realities of trans inequality, and advocating a form of biological essentialism long challenged by feminist and queer theorists (Faye 2021; Hines 2020; Mackay 2021; Pearce et al. 2020). From a political economy perspective, this discourse is indicative of a troubling lack of understanding about exactly how trans oppression, which includes pervasive forms of anti-trans violence, link to cis women’s oppression under capitalism. Put otherwise, discursive representations of trans women as separate from class struggle are the corollary of analyses that view trans oppression as epiphenomenal to class relations and as extrinsic to the logics of gendered and racialised exploitation that animate the global capitalist economy.
Laura Sjoberg (2012) suggests that feminist International Relations (IR) scholars have not, as yet, been caught up in the explicitly trans-exclusionary currents that have swept through some feminist academic and activist spaces. Yet the blind spot on the political economy of trans oppression is not just confined to GC and other trans-exclusionary feminist discourse. To date, critical and specifically feminist international political economy (IPE) has paid scant attention to trans subjectivities and struggle, beyond more general discussions of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer or questioning (LGBTQ+) politics. One exception to this trend is the renowned Marxist feminist scholar Silvia Federici (2020), whose latest collection, Beyond the Periphery of the Skin, turns attention to trans lives as part of her long-standing efforts to historicise capitalism’s relationship with the body. Federici’s (2020) book may appear to offer a materialist analysis of trans embodiment and exploitation. However, her discussion is narrowly focused on gender reassignment surgery and fails to examine the broader political economic drivers of trans oppression, as a distinct but nonetheless gendered form of oppression. I argue that this silence is not altogether surprising, in light of lingering attachments to binary (and, to an extent, biological) constructs of sex and gender within some strands of feminist IPE and a continuing tendency to see gender as synonymous with (cis and heterosexual) women.
In this article, I explore the epistemological and ontological roots of the neglect of trans oppression within critical and feminist IPE. 4 Against this background, I set out an alternative account that highlights why trans oppression matters for understanding social reproduction and ‘the body’ under capitalism. Evidently, the project of examining the political economy of trans oppression could be far-reaching. There is already an emergent corpus of scholarship that explores how neoliberalism produces and perpetuates racialised hierarchies of trans life (Snorton & Haritaworn 2013; Spade 2011; Stryker 2014), which has been largely overlooked within critical IPE. While IPE can benefit from better integrating trans oppression into the analysis of global capitalism, this scholarship, I argue, can also be advanced through closer engagement with some of the key epistemological and ontological debates that animate critical and feminist IPE.
To do this, the article seeks to illuminate some of the key material bases for trans oppression and show how they are inherently connected to other forms of gender oppression under capitalism. 5 The article thus breaks new ground in critical and feminist IPE and offers fresh insights into the political economy of gender oppression and the materiality of ‘the body’ more broadly. 6 It also advances the small corpus of studies that analyse trans oppression from a materialist perspective, notably recent work on ‘transgender Marxism’ (Gleeson & O’Rourke 2021; see also Lewis & Irving 2017; Irving 2008). Finally, taking inspiration from Leslie Feinberg (1992: 6), who argues that ‘solidarity is built on understanding how and why oppression exists and who profits from it’, the arguments presented here have an important political dimension: they demonstrate how political economy analyses of gender and social reproduction can be mobilised to advance rather than undermine trans struggle.
The article begins by examining the blind spot on the political economy of trans oppression within critical and specifically feminist IPE. 7 It then asks: how can political economy accounts of gender oppression and social reproduction better address trans struggle? And what does trans oppression tell us about the political economic roots, drivers and facets of gender oppression under capitalism more broadly? The article argues that feminist IPE has powerful tools with which to make the links between different racialised, gendered and sexualised inequalities in the global economy, including those experienced by trans people, and to uncover their co-constitutive character. However, theorising trans oppression in/through feminist IPE will require scholars to engage more deeply with queer and trans theorising – and specifically to adopt a queer account of heteronormativity and the body – and to relinquish the cis-normative attachments that shape some conceptualisations of capitalism, gender and social reproduction, notably within the Marxist feminist tradition.
The first section of the article locates the topic of trans oppression and embodiment within feminist and queer scholarship on political economy. I examine the critical insights provided by the literature(s) on sexuality, capitalism and the body and highlight what they do and do not tell us about the political economy of trans oppression. Based on this analysis, I respond directly to Federici’s (2020) argument in Beyond the Periphery of the Skin. I use this as a departure point to explore the underlying ontological assumptions that confound understandings of trans oppression from a political economy perspective. I further demonstrate why the concept of heteronormativity and queer and trans accounts of the body are necessary for understanding gender oppression, parse out some of the political economic roots of sex- and gender-making, and illustrate these relations in the context of state laws and practices, using the historical case of Sir Ewan Forbes-Sempill and primogeniture in the United Kingdom. To conclude, I argue that trans oppression matters ontologically, theoretically and empirically for critical IPE, since it is intrinsically related to, and constitutive of, the social relations of (re)production and other forms of gendered, sexualised and racialised oppression in the global economy.
Locating trans oppression within feminist and queer political economy
Over the past two decades, scholars of sexuality and capitalism have established a heterogeneous body of literature examining the relationship between non-normative sexuality and gender and the capitalist mode of production (Chitty 2020; D’Emilio 1993; Drucker 2015; Duggan 2003; Floyd 2009; Hennessy 2000; Smith 2020). One key area of interest within this scholarship pertains to the role of the state and supra-state modes of governance in regulating and disciplining sexuality (Bergeron & Puri 2012; Duggan 1994; Lind 2009, 2012; Peterson 2014; Puri 2016). Scholars have thus uncovered the heteronormative foundations of global development policy and practice (Bedford 2009; Bergeron 2009; Cornwall et al. 2008; Lind 2009) and critiqued the take-up of LGBT rights agendas within international financial institutions such as the World Bank (Rao 2015, 2020); This corpus of scholarship further overlaps with work in International Relations that looks at the queer sexual politics of statecraft and sovereignty, and specifically the role of hetero- and homonormativity in sustaining and shaping configurations of international and inter-state power (Agathangelou 2013; Peterson, 2014, 2017; Picq and Thiel, 2015; Weber 2016).
Heteronormativity is, according to Berlant and Warner’s (1998: 548) oft-quoted definition, ‘the institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations that make heterosexuality seem not only coherent – that is, organized as a sexuality – but also privileged’. In this sense, heteronormativity refers to the vast web of institutional, legal, social and economic norms that delimit what forms sex and gender can take, render these forms coherent and cohesive, and work to regulate them through key capitalist institutions such as the state, the market and the family. Put otherwise, heteronormativity works across micro, meso and macro scales, through the site of the (patriarchal) family/household, state practices and laws, structures of global governance and ‘sexualised orders of international relation’ (Weber, 2016: 6). Importantly, however, formations of heteronormativity are also shifting and contingent, with dominant family-forms and models of intimacy and kinship transforming over time. This reveals how shifts in the social relations of production and reproduction essentially shape and re-shape the limits and (im)possibilities of sexual freedom and repression (Sears 2017; see also Valocchi 2017). In this context, as Lisa Duggan argues, neoliberalism has given rise to a ‘new homonormativity’, in which certain queer subjects – married, procreative, monogamous – have been assimilated into the contemporary nation-state. This assimilationist politics has been adopted by mainstream gay and lesbian organisations and works to create queer populations that are de-mobilised and de-politicised, ‘anchored in consumption and domesticity’ (Duggan, 2003: 50). 8
V Spike Peterson’s work has long encouraged scholars of IPE/IR to take up insights from queer approaches to examine the interrelationship of the cultural and the economic and to challenge the tendency to ringfence queer sexuality and gender from the global economy. Drawing on Butler, Peterson (2014: 390) documents how the gender binary was produced and reified through early state-making practices: ‘making states makes sex’, as she puts it (p. 390). Peterson thus explains the codification and institutionalisation of binary sex and gender (i.e. male–female sex and masculine–feminine gender identities) in relation to laws concerning marriage, tax, inheritance and property and through the constitution of differently gendered socio-economic spheres. Peterson’s queering the state approach illuminates not only why it is important to uncouple gender – ‘the cultural meanings that the sexed body assumes’ (Butler, 1990: 9) – from sex, but binary sex – female–male sexed bodies – from biology. In other words, understanding the sexual politics of state-making requires a constructivist understanding of both gender identities and biological sex.
Recent work on the history of sex work in Britain further articulates the value of queer theory to feminist IPE (Smith 2020). According to Nicola Smith (2020), where feminist IPE has shed light into the inseparability of economic production and social reproduction, queer approaches can illuminate the production and repression of sexuality within these same circuits. Significantly, this account centres individuals and groups who are excluded from or marginalised within capitalism’s profit- and life-making circuits, that is, those who are considered ‘economically unproductive and/or socially unreproductive’, and highlights the key role that normative regimes of gender and sexuality (and the construction and disciplining of the non-normative) play in grounding and upholding the system as a whole (Smith, 2020: 23). The co-constitutive logic of capitalist sexual politics is similarly evoked by M.E. O’Brien, who notes how ‘family, on one hand, and sexual deviancy, sexual minority identities, sexual rebellion, on the other, are necessary counterparts to each other in the history of capitalist society’ (O’Brien et al, 2022: 66).
Finally, beyond the boundaries of IPE, Roderick Ferguson’s (2004) ‘queer of colour critique’ usefully clarifies the character and functioning of heteronormativity vis-à-vis race within processes of capital accumulation. For Ferguson, the production of racialised and gendered transgression, that is, the nonheteronormative, is part and parcel of the production of the idealised and the normative (white, middle-class, heterosexual). This is not incidental, but intrinsically linked to capital’s need to divide and accumulate, in Ferguson’s account through the exploitation of African American labour. This analysis identifies racialised formations of heteronormativity – which both include and extend well beyond constructions of biological difference – as a key foundation of the (social) oppression and (economic) exploitation of African Americans. Thus, Ferguson (2004: 11) argues, ‘we can only take up historical materialism by integrating the critique of normative regimes with the analysis of political economy’.
In parallel to the scholarship on heteronormativity, queer politics, and political economy, feminist scholars have sought to ‘write the body into’ IPE, notably through studies of commercial sex (Pettman, 1996, 1997, 2000; Agathangelou 2006). This work has been key to re-positioning questions of embodiment within the boundaries of the economy – on the ‘inside’ of globalisation and capitalism (Smith 2012) – and to unsettling the ‘displacement’ of bodies onto women (Pettman 1997), as part of the broader ways in which masculinity and femininity are coded (Hooper 2000). While there are varying conceptualisations of the body advanced within this literature, there is a common emphasis on (1) uncovering how axes of oppression and relations of power such as class, race, gender and sexuality come to be inscribed upon (labouring) bodies (Pettman 1997; Smith & Lee 2015); (2) documenting the ways in which bodies both produce and are produced by political economic processes and structures (Smith 2012) and (3) combining an interest in the materiality of the body with an understanding of the effects of discourse (Youngs, 2000: 21; see also Agathangelou 2013). In this way, feminist scholars have sought to demonstrate why corporeal politics matter for IPE and to challenge the tendency to dis-embody the study of IPE and international politics more broadly (Youngs 2000).
This diverse literature has offered important correctives to the body-blindness of mainstream IPE and to the long-standing neglect of (queer) sexuality within analyses of global capitalism. Nonetheless, critical IPE, including feminist IPE, has largely overlooked matters of trans embodiment and oppression. With the exception of Smith’s work, there has also been little overlap between the feminist scholarship on corporeal politics and the queer-inflected scholarship on sexuality and capitalism (or indeed between the feminist scholarship on the household and social reproduction and the queer Marxist literature). It is almost 20 years since Peterson (2006: 499) encouraged feminist scholars of IPE to move beyond binary approaches to the study of men and women in the global economy – what she termed ‘empirical gender’ – to focus on ‘how masculinity and femininity . . . produce, and are produced by, political economy’. Yet, from an empirical and theoretical perspective, feminist IPE continues to focus overwhelmingly on women and, when it comes to corporeal politics, on women’s bodies. This preoccupation with women’s bodies has produced its own exclusions and omissions, with ‘male and transgender bodies consequently erased from the analysis’ (Smith, 2012: 590). Moreover, even within the feminist IPE literature on non-normative gender and sexuality, rarely do minoritised sexual and gendered lives represent the core focus of enquiry (Gore, 2022). Rather, they are typically recognised as heteronormativity’s ‘Other’ – that is, as people who are invisibilised within or excluded from macrolevel economic policies and processes – and/or as groups who are differentially impacted by political economic phenomena, such as poverty or austerity. In practice, this means that some of the key insights of queer theory – namely, that the Othering of the non-normative serves as an essential means to naturalise and shore up hegemonic sex/gender norms and power relations (and thus has both a social and economic purpose) – have been occluded or only partially acknowledged. 9
Undoubtedly, there has been an urgency to feminist IPE’s work on women, given the ways in which gender operates as a structural relation of inequality, the sheer extent of social and economic disparities between (cis) men and women in the global economy, and not least because both orthodox and critical IPE has historically neglected the study of women’s lives and labours (Waylen 2006). However, this does suggest that the implicit feminist subject in IPE remains women and, where this does extend to the analysis of gender as a meaning system, gendered subjectivities are conceived as cis-masculinities and cis-femininities. Put otherwise, one potential reason why trans subjectivities and oppression are confounding for feminist IPE is that, unlike other ‘identities’ contained within the LGBTQ + umbrella, they are essentially about gender, not sexuality. Trans modes of difference therefore challenge, stretch and, I argue, reveal the limitations of existing theorisations of gender and social reproduction in the field and, relatedly, existing understandings of how gender operates as a structural relation of power within the global economy.
The relative neglect of trans lives within feminist IPE is all the more notable when we consider that trans people, and trans people of colour in particular, have been disproportionately impacted by the post-recession retrenchment of neoliberalism: austerity, precarity, cuts to welfare services and the privatisation of social provisioning in key areas such as housing, employment, social care and mental health (Raha 2021). Globally, evidence also suggests that trans people are more likely to experience intimate partner violence than cis people, including cis women (Peitzmeier et al. 2020). Contemporary trans lives are thus shaped by a combination of state-sanctioned and extra-legal forms of discrimination, violence and targeted neglect, with Black, Indigenous and trans people of colour, and sex working trans people, especially those living in the Global South, at disproportionate risk of violence and premature death (Snorton 2017; Spade 2009). As the trans-exclusionary radical feminist ‘TERF wars’ discussed in the introduction illustrate, trans rights have also become a key site of political contestation and struggle in the United Kingdom and beyond, which includes attempts to roll back already existing rights for trans people. Against this background, this article argues that feminist IPE can and should engage with matters of trans oppression, as part of a broader research agenda focused on gendered forms of structural violence, social reproduction and everyday life under capitalism (Elias & Rai 2019). However, it is first worth addressing some of the misgivings and, I argue, misconceptions over the value of queer theory and the relationship between cis women’s and trans oppression as highlighted in Federici’s latest work. In so doing, I consider the writing in/out of the cis/trans body within Marxist feminist scholarship on gender and social reproduction more broadly.
On Federici and trans embodiment
Beyond the Periphery of the Skin (Federici 2020) is a collection of essays (originally delivered as lectures) centred on two interlinked research questions: first, it considers whether the category ‘woman’ is still useful for feminist analysis and what risks the deconstruction of this category poses for political identities and organising; second, it questions the meaning of new reproductive technologies and their role within capital accumulation. Specifically, Federici (2020: 2) asks, ‘Do these technologies enhance our control over our bodies or do they turn our bodies into objects of experimentation and profit-making?’ To explore these questions in relation to trans embodiment, Federici focuses on gender reassignment surgery, which she classifies as a novel form of ‘body remake’, along with other examples such as plastic surgery, gene-editing, and surrogacy. Federici (2020: 4) dubs these practices a ‘new body-remake movement’, which encompasses ‘low-tech’ activities such as working out and tattooing, to more ‘high-tech’ ones, such as gene editing. These ‘remakes’, she argues, commoditise the body in the service of the medical industry and broader processes of capital accumulation. Put otherwise, the medically/surgically transitioned trans body, for Federici, is primarily understood as a source of profit for the medical-industrial complex. Insofar as the ‘desires’ of the trans body are aligned with the (profit-making) desires of capitalism, they are also something to be treated with caution, if not suspicion: ‘the politics of body remakes is in several ways problematic’ (Federici, 2020: 55), she writes.
With this categorical sleight of hand, Federici collapses together a heterogeneous and complex range of reproductive, embodied, and surgical technologies and practices: none of which are given any in-depth individual analysis in her essays. Thus, although Federici (2020: 4) acknowledges that these body remakes ‘widely differ’ in character, little attention is paid to their specificities. Instead, she concludes that: what looms large in each case is the power and prestige that medical experts have gained because of the life changes they promise. Such dependence on an institution that has a long history of cooperation with capital and the state should be a concern for us. (Federici, 2020: 4)
Cautioning trans people – who have been medicalised and pathologised throughout the 20th century (Gill-Peterson 2018) – of the power of the medical industry seems at best rather insensitive. It also reveals a worrying lack of engagement with the historical and contemporary realities of trans lives and activism and the wealth of trans scholarship on healthcare (Davy 2011; Lowik 2018; Pearce 2018; Occhino and Skewes 2020). In countries like the United Kingdom, trans people still require a formal diagnosis of gender dysphoria (previously known as gender identity disorder) to change the sex on their birth certificate. Relatedly, key diagnostic manuals such as the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders continue to classify gender dysphoria as a psychiatric illness. 10 Furthermore, according to a systematic review of legislation conducted in 2020, 13 out of the 41 countries in Europe and Central Asia that had a system for legal gender recognition required trans people to undergo mandatory sterilisation before changing their gender marker, including Czech Republic, Latvia and Romania (Transgender Europe 2021). 11 This is despite various international rulings and declarations seeking to ban mandatory sterilisation by actors such as the United Nations, the Council of Europe and the European Court of Human Rights (who ruled in 2017 that forced sterilisation is a violation of the right to private and family life).
However, as the Transgender Europe (2021: n.p) report highlights, in reality ‘many states continue to require sterility as a pre-condition for legal gender recognition. Legal texts can explicitly or implicitly request forced sterilisation by requiring proof of medical transition or insisting on a medical opinion that is typically provided only after gender-affirming surgery’. This indicates that although the landscape of trans rights in Europe is contested and evolving – and the implementation of existing laws may vary within and across jurisdictions – the medical and the legal remain intimately intertwined. It is therefore important to recognise continuity as well as change in the legal governance of trans subjectivities, not least because laws requiring mandatory sterilisation reproduce the eugenicist logics that informed medico-scientific discourse on race, sex, and gender in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Gill-Peterson 2018). Put more simply, these types of legal requirement – whether based on medical certification/diagnosis, treatment, or sterilisation – reflect the ongoing ‘pathologisation of gender variance’ across the fields of government, law, and medicine (Lowik, 2018: 430). 12
Over the past 40 years, neoliberal attacks on state-provisioned healthcare, combined with the growing power of private insurance companies, have further exacerbated the barriers that trans people face in accessing safe, non-discriminatory and affordable healthcare across many parts of the world (Belinksy, 2021). This is why healthcare remains a major site of political organising among trans activists (a struggle which is essentially social reproductive in character). At the same time, trans activists and scholars have contested the rigid and medicalised pathways prescribed by doctors and psychiatrists to transition, as well as the ways in which medical professionals act as ‘gate-keepers’ to key types of trans healthcare (Lowik, 2018: 430). In this sense, it is structurally embedded forms of inequality and discrimination, patterns of neoliberal privatisation, and a lack of state provisioning for trans healthcare that creates the trans medical-industrial complex, not trans embodiment and transitioning processes in themselves. This wider political economic context is conspicuously missing from Federici’s account.
The cis/trans body in Marxist feminist political economy
Before developing this analysis further, it seems prudent to locate Federici’s latest work within the broader context of her scholarship, not least because theorisations of gender, violence and the body in IPE owe a great deal to her insights. In her path-breaking work, Caliban and the Witch, Federici (2004) traces the entanglements of patriarchy and violence against women in the eras of pre- and early capitalism. It is a rigorous, historical materialist account that reveals the key role of the subjugation and exploitation of women’s bodies in processes of primitive accumulation. This entails controlling and exploiting women through the institution of the family, which, in effect, subordinates the body to the needs of the labour market, as ‘work-machines’ (Federici, 2018: 48). Among other things, Federici’s account indicates that women’s oppression comes to be located within the body in a historically contingent fashion, as it is bound up with particular embodied processes and practices required to organise and divide labour and reproduce the working class. In this way, her work attributes an ontological centrality to the body in the transition to capitalism (Bakker, 2007: 544).
This intervention connects to long-standing Marxist feminist debates over the role of biology, the body and social reproduction in the oppression of women. Reflecting on Lise Vogel’s scholarship, for example, Sue Ferguson and David McNally conclude that: It is not biology per se that dictates women’s oppression; but rather, capital’s dependence upon biological processes specific to women – pregnancy, childbirth, lactation – to secure the reproduction of the working-class. It is this that induces capital and its state to control and regulate female reproduction and which impels them to reinforce a male-dominant gender-order. And this social fact, connected to biological difference, comprises the foundation upon which women’s oppression is organized in capitalist society. (Ferguson & McNally 2013, p. xxix, italics mine)
In this excerpt, Ferguson and McNally note that women’s oppression is determined by the social (and, to an extent, biological) circumstances of their existence; the ‘male-dominant social order’ is not an inevitable consequence of biological differences in reproductive capacity, but it is a product of ‘social facts’ (arising from capitalist economic imperatives) being grounded in ‘biological’ ones. Here, they invoke their interlocuter, Lise Vogel (2013: 147), who argues that biological difference represents a ‘material precondition for the social construction of gender-differences, as well as a direct material factor in the differential position of the sexes in a society’. Although biology both precedes and grounds women’s inequality according to Vogel, she clarifies that sex-differences cannot be abstracted from the capitalist social system that gives them meaning. According to Ferguson (2008: 50), this line of reasoning represents ‘the dominant working assumption within the SRF tradition’, that is, that fundamental or ‘elementary’ biophysical differences determine key aspects of social reproduction, namely, childbirth. As a result, ‘biology matters’ because it underwrites ‘the experience of gender in a capitalist world’ (Ferguson, 2008: 50).
As these excerpts suggest, the bio-social materiality of women’s oppression under capitalism is a key insight of Marxist feminist theories of social reproduction; it is not the household, per se, that is understood as the key source of gender oppression – although it is understood as a key site of oppression – it is women’s essential involvement in the (re)production of labour-power, that is, their (literal, embodied) role as reproducers (see Ferguson & McNally 2013). This conceptualisation of the relationship between biology – specifically reproductive capacity – and the social and economic conditions of women’s existence informs Federici’s (2020: 23) argument: as she puts it, ‘capitalism . . . has defined women as bodies – that is, as being dominated by our biology’. Elsewhere, McNally (2001: 12) reiterates and expands upon the primacy of (cis) women’s bodies and their bio-social/cultural materiality, arguing that the ‘maternal body is the starting point for our collective body, since it speaks to the shared biology and history of all of us’. He notes that this framing is not a call to idealise or essentialise women’s bodies, but is a way of recognising that bodies are gendered not generic. Similarly, although bodies are attributed a ‘relatively fixed biological constitution’ in McNally’s account, he qualifies this by emphasising that they are also ‘inherently historical’ (McNally, 2001: 7).
McNally’s book is positioned as a critique of postmodern takes on the body, which are characterised as ‘de-materializing’, that is, as an attempt ‘to banish real human bodies – the sensate, biocultural, laboring – from the sphere of language and social life’ (McNally, 2001: 1). A similar critique underpins Federici’s writing, in which she rejects what she calls ‘performance theory’, that is, the work of scholars like Foucault and Butler, for destabilising the category woman to such an extent that it risks becoming politically and analytically unviable. 13 This erosion of political identity, she suggests, will leave the feminist movement without ‘common experience of suffering and injustice’ (Federici, 2020: 2). Thus, for Federici, the material bases of women’s oppression – here conceptualised to include the biological, social and economic – are not just relevant to theories of political economy, but have important implications for feminist praxis: since she conceives of (cis) women’s bodies as a primary, essential locus of exploitation they also represent a crucial grounds for feminist solidarity-building and activism. This issue is explored at length in Beyond the Periphery of the Skin and prompts Federici (2020: 3 italics author’s own) to ask: ‘surely can we conceive of experiences like maternity, childraising, and social subordination to men as constituting a common terrain of struggle for women?’ This line of questioning is again developed in opposition to certain strands of feminist and trans theorising, which, according to Federici (2020: 9), encourage us ‘to discard all ‘biological’ factors in favor of performative or textual representations of the body and to embrace, as constitutive of our being, our growing assimilation with the world of machines’.
The political economy of trans oppression: beyond bio/logics
Despite rejecting essentialist explanations of women’s oppression, these arguments retain what I term, borrowing from Sari van Anders (2014), an underlying form of ‘bio/logics’. 14 In other words, while biological factors are not deemed to play a determining role in producing gender identities and therefore gender oppression, they are still viewed as a primary component: something ‘foundational’ and ‘elementary’. This understanding of gender oppression is informed by a set of prior assumptions regarding the biological fixity of bodies (in McNally’s case) and a lingering attachment to biology in the constitution of womanhood (in Federici’s case). My issue here is neither with the attempt to re-affirm the materiality of bodies, nor with the importance accorded to women’s experiences of sexual and reproductive exploitation. 15 Rather, my concern is that without fully interrogating and undoing the link between (biological) sex and (social) gender – between sexed bodies and gender identity – a certain degree of bio/logics is left intact. To accept that biological difference grounds oppression in a ‘preconditional’ (Vogel, 2013: 147) sense runs the risk of conceptualising the body as prediscursive and obscuring the wide range of power relations and norms that converge upon, inscribe and govern not just gendered bodies but sexed ones. 16 This neglects the queer insight that sex as well as gender is socially constructed and that the norms and practices that make gender appear coherent and cohesive also work to render bodies intelligible.
This matrix, referred to in queer theory as heteronormativity, tells us that it is not biological difference itself but the construction and ascription of difference – biological, physical, corporeal – that is critical, as this underpins the social and economic conditions that determine gendered and sexualised oppression. Construction, as Butler (1993: 1) notes, does not mean something ‘artificial’ or ‘dispensable’; it means that sex functions as a norm and that the regulation of that norm ‘produces the body it governs’. Put more simply, queer and trans accounts of the body do not contend that there are no dimorphic sexual differences, that is, characteristics or features that can be understood as ‘male’ and ‘female’, but that how these differences are grouped together and classified is a fundamentally social (and disciplinary) act (Serano 2016; Stryker 2008). 17 There is also much greater variation and mutability in sexual characteristics than is recognised through binary sex categories focused on sexual dimorphism. This means, at the very least, that we must understand the biological constitution of bodies not as relatively fixed in an ontological sense, as per McNally’s account, but as fixed through a set of social acts, processes and interpretations.
This point is recognised, in part, by Sébastien Rioux (2015: 201), who notes that ‘racial hierarchies, gender orders and heteronormativity are not constructed out of thin air but rather through biological processes, corporal practices, and physiognomic attributes that are mobilized as physical markers of difference’ (p. 201). Rioux (2015: 198) further acknowledges that the connection made between biological difference and social facts within the social reproductionist tradition of Marxist feminism does not ‘provide a fully reconstructed theory of women’s oppression’. However, he does not develop this point further and instead quotes McNally’s argument that the ‘reinstatement of the body . . . must begin with the maternal body – understood in both its biological and social senses’. Again, Rioux’s account attributes a bio-social materiality to women’s bodies and women’s oppression that is fundamentally linked to processes of social reproduction. While this incorporates a constructivist understanding of gender, it does not apply this lens to the question of ‘biological’ sex. 18
This may seem like a relatively minor clarification. However, narrativisations of the body that focus on the necessary coincidence/conjunction of (female) biology and (gendered) social ‘facts’ not only risk reproducing the ‘displacement’ of the bodies onto women (Pettman 1997), overlooking the heterogeneity of actually existing family forms, kinship structures and intimate relations, and downplaying the extent of dis-unity within the category woman (particularly from the perspective of race). At times, they also encourage a slippage between biological difference, understood here in fixed, binary terms and social difference. This slippage is exemplified in Federici’s (2020) writing on trans embodiment: paradoxically, a testimony to the relevance of difference in our experience of our physical makeup comes from a large section of the trans movement that is strongly committed to a constructivist view of gender identities, as many undergo costly and dangerous surgeries and medical treatments in order to transition to a different gender. (p. 50, italics mine)
In this passage, Federici emphasises differences between women and trans people in terms of their ‘physical makeup’, which she counter-poses with a constructivist view of gender identities. By framing this as a ‘paradox’, she seeks to impute a form of bio-essentialism to any trans person undergoing hormonal or surgical transition processes, an argument frequently advanced by trans-exclusionary feminists to critique trans politics and identities (Zazanis, 2021: 35). The passage is also rather contradictory, as Federici (2020: 50) goes on to highlight the limits of sexual dimorphism and the ‘broad range of possibilities that ‘nature’ provides’, using the example of intersex people. Nonetheless, the central point remains, according to Federici, that we cannot ignore key material and physiological facets of embodiment by arguing that they are culturally produced.
To address this ‘paradox’, for many trans and non-binary people, it is not surgery or hormones that define their transition but rather social acts of self-making, or what Rosa Lee (2021: 67) calls, ‘self-fashioning practices’. Trans subjectivities therefore challenge the duality and stability of sex and illuminate the extent to which sexed bodies and the gender they assume are contingent and mutable; they highlight the ‘social and temporal nature not only of gender, but of the sexed body’ (Lee, 2021: 67). While medical technologies are no doubt worthy of scholarly enquiry (and indeed trans scholars have themselves written widely on this topic), abstracting them from a broader set of social transitioning processes is misleading and obscures key insights into how categories of sex and gender are produced and regulated, as well as inhabited, subverted and resisted. This brings to mind Butler’s (1998: 41) interrogation of Marxist feminist theorising, where they asked: ‘how is it that suddenly when the focus of critical analysis turns from the question of how normative sexuality is reproduced to the queer question of how that very normativity is confounded by the non-normative sexualities it harbours within its own terms . . . the link between such an analysis and the mode of production is suddenly dropped?’ On the basis of this analysis, Butler’s question should be re-posed to include non-normative sexuality and non-normative gender identities, such as trans and non-binary.
From a political economy perspective, Federici’s analysis of gender reassignment surgery and the impossibilities of/threats to feminist solidarity posed by queer accounts of the body illuminate what is at stake when materialist approaches preserve the links between sex-as-biology, social gender, and oppression (even while critiquing them) and fail to take into account wider formations of racialised heteronormativity. From these cis-normative footings, trans bodies can only be positioned ‘inside’ the boundaries of capitalism in very narrow terms, as sources of profit for the medical-industrial complex, for example. These footings also work to downplay and disguise the commonalities in struggle over issues like sexual and reproductive control, bodily autonomy, and gender-based violence as experienced by trans people and cis women. Federici’s framing thus replaces biological determinism with a form of bio-social determinism, whereby ‘the “social construction” of womanhood’ becomes a ‘deterministic form of socialisation, rather than evidence of gender’s artifice and malleability’ (Pearce, 2019:21). At the very least, this determinism contradicts her emphasis elsewhere on the multiple, historically contingent character of ‘the body’.
The commonalities in struggle between cis women and trans people are starkly highlighted by the eugenicist logics informing laws on forced sterilisation discussed earlier, which were historically not only applied to trans people, but to working-class women, Black, Indigenous, and women of colour and disabled people (Lowik 2018). These practices are one expression of the shifting forms of class-based, racial, gendered and bodily violence that have characterised the longue durée of colonial-capitalist expropriation and exploitation. The global data on intimate partner violence (Peitzmeier et al. 2020) also reveals another common terrain of struggle as constituted through violence perpetrated primarily by cis men. Crucially, then, this lingering bio/logics constrains understanding of the relationship between capitalism and the body beyond cis-gendered people (and in so doing distorts analysis of cis-gender oppression) and re-instates a semi-naturalised gender binary premised on male and female sex categories.
These might seem like controversial claims, particularly given the contributions of the Marxist feminist tradition to unveiling invisibilised and feminised forms of labour, the social and economic bases and functions of gender roles and linking this to capitalist political economy. Indeed, I do not wish to overstate my critique here; there remains plenty to agree with in Beyond the Periphery of the Skin, particularly its emphasis on ‘multiple histories’ of the body and how these histories are marked by hierarchies of race, gender and generation (Federici, 2020: 11). My argument should also not be read as a call for political economists to neglect the materiality of the body or to construe the body solely as an effect of discourse. 19 Rather, it is to make the point that attempts to refute queer and trans accounts of the body – which question the fundamental stability of sex as well as gender – can end up reproducing and reifying the kind of bio/logics that Marxist feminist scholars have long sought to disrupt.
In light of this, I argue that, contra Federici, studies of gender and social reproduction in feminist IPE should adopt a queer (and specifically trans-inclusive) account of the body, as well as a queer-inflected account of gender and sexual oppression under capitalism more broadly. In Marxist feminist theorising on social reproduction, biological reproduction is not only understood to comprise the ‘acquisition and redistribution of the means of existence’, such as shelter, food and clothing, but crucially the reproduction of the labour force (Katz, 2001: 711). Intimate relations, configurations of family, and households therefore matter to political economy because the reproduction of persons is key to the gender division of labour and to the overall reproduction of the working class; as Johanna Brenner and Barbara Laslett (1991: 314) note, social reproduction entails all the activities ‘directly involved in maintaining life, on a daily basis and intergenerationally’, including ‘the construction of sexuality’. Broadening the horizons of this analysis to recognise the role of heteronormativity within these processes of (re)production also tells us why, from a political economy perspective, trans people have historically been constituted as deviant or abject subjects: because they challenge the gender division of labour and the heteropatriarchal household/family as a naturalised and ahistorical status quo, as well as the institutionalisation of binary sex through marriage, inheritance and citizenship laws. In short, trans modes of difference threaten some of the key relations, norms, and institutions through which social reproduction is organised. Accounts of social reproduction that focus exclusively on the reproduction of labour power as imagined/enacted through the activities of cis men and women thus neglect those individuals who are excluded from these processes and, importantly, how it is the combination of both inclusion and exclusion, the normative and the abject, that gives sexual and gender power relations their foundational and systematic character.
Read through the lens of queer political economy, the denial of trans people’s rights to parenthood, family life, marriage, their exclusion from employment, state benefits and access to healthcare – essentially the denial of full citizenship to trans people – is rooted in the same structures and relations that simultaneously rely on and devalue (cis) women’s identities, bodies, and work. The requirement that trans people be sterilised as a condition for legal recognition within some jurisdictions is not, in this sense, so much a parallel to state-sponsored efforts to control women’s reproduction and fertility as it is part of the same disciplinary project. This is central to understanding the political economic foundations of trans and other forms of gender oppression is at least four ways: first, it shows that the violent sanctions experienced by trans people for transgressing gender norms are intimately connected to the modalities of gender-based violence that women experience under capitalism; second, it reveals how gender-based violence, again including anti-trans violence, works systematically to police and uphold particular relations between (cis) men and women, notably the gender division of labour; third, it indicates that trans oppression is intrinsic rather than extrinsic to the exploitative logics of the global capitalist economy; and finally, most simply, it reveals that the exclusion of trans women from the category woman (and trans people in general from concepts of personhood) has political economic roots.
These reflections have sought to illustrate why it is both surprising and, in a sense, not surprising that Federici struggles to extend her analysis of violence and embodiment beyond (cis) women. In short, I have argued that there is an underlying tension within the ontology of the body as conceptualised within Marxist feminist scholarship on social reproduction, which could be resolved through greater attention to the concept of heteronormativity. Put more bluntly, my analysis suggests that the bio-social materiality of women’s oppression as it is construed within key strands of feminist IPE relies on heteronormative and specifically cis-normative assumptions, which attribute an ontological fixity to biological sex and/or retain an attachment to binary sex and biological difference that is not adequately problematised or deconstructed. This has the effect of confining gender variance (and the disciplinary regimes and social and economic power relations that constitute it), at best, to the footnotes of political economy analysis. This approach is insufficient to understand the coercive power of gender norms and the forms of exploitation and oppression experienced by minoritised gendered groups, as well as their centrality to the functioning of power within the capitalist state historically and contemporaneously, as will be illustrated in the following example.
The case of Sir Ewan Forbes-Sempill illustrates how UK law has historically and structurally grounded discrimination towards both women and trans people in terms of inheritance. Forbes was a trans man born as the child of Lord Sempill in Scotland in 1912. Assigned female at birth, Forbes later re-registered his birth certificate to change his sex to male. While his transition went relatively unremarked at the time, controversy arose upon the death of Forbes’ brother in 1982, which made him eligible for inheritance of the baronetcy, which included a sizable estate. Inheritance of the baronetcy was limited by primogeniture, meaning that the title could only be passed to male children (Playdon 2021: 36). Forbes’ cousin subsequently challenged the inheritance and forced Forbes into a legal battle to prove his status as a man. As Zoë Playdon (2021) explains, although the Scottish court eventually found in Forbes’ favour, many of the documents relating to the case were subsequently hidden or destroyed and the case was shrouded in secrecy, to the extent that it was almost entirely erased from legal record and could not be used as a precedent. Thus, while Forbes’ individual experiences were no doubt mediated by his class position, the institutional response to the case reveals the depth of the perceived threat to practices of primogeniture presented by trans subjectivities. This case was also the catalyst for changes to the law that imposed a series of complex legal and medical requirements on trans people’s ability to change the sex marker on their birth certificate. These changes lie at the heart of the current controversy over the GRA in the United Kingdom, as discussed in the ‘Introduction’ section, which continue to shape trans people’s struggle for full citizenship rights today.
Reading this historical example through a ‘queered’ social reproduction lens illuminates the intimate links between inheritance and property laws, the (re)production of the gender binary, and the uneven distribution of power and resources along gendered lines. In other words, it shows how the material basis of trans oppression is inherently linked to that of cis women’s oppression and to the institutional organisation of gender norms and social reproduction more broadly. This firmly positions trans oppression within the boundaries of the economy and within the more conventional parameters of feminist political economy research. Put simply, then, addressing the blind spot on trans oppression in IPE matters because otherwise we end up with a partial and inaccurate picture of how gender and sexuality are materially produced and regulated which, in turn, threatens some of the foundational insights of feminist IPE: namely, that states, markets, households and other political economic phenomena are gendered structures. This also has political and practical implications, because if we misunderstand the character of the problem – that is, gender oppression – then we cannot formulate appropriate solutions to address it.
Conclusion
Recent scholarship within queer political economy has highlighted the intimate links between sexuality and capitalism, as well as the potential insights offered by queer approaches to the study of IPE. This article has sought to advance this literature by examining the political economic foundations and facets of trans oppression and considering how this links to (cis) women’s oppression under capitalism. Specifically, the article responded to Silvia Federici’s claims about the threats posed to feminist political economy theory and praxis by queer accounts of the body and the incommensurability of feminist solidarity-building with trans modes of difference. In so doing, I argued that critical and feminist IPE scholarship needs to better understand the social construction of sex, as well as gender, and to grapple with how heteronormativity produces, and is produced by, the material (and discursive) bases of gender oppression.
My analysis of the writing in/out of the cis/trans body in IPE raises far-reaching epistemological, methodological and empirical questions as follows: how scholars working in the materialist tradition understand categories of sex and gender; how critical IPE approaches the study of the body and social reproduction under capitalism, including non-normative genders and sexualities; and whose voices and experiences of embodiment, oppression and exploitation matter when it comes to the study of global capitalism. In sum, the article has argued that a fully realised account of the political economy of gender cannot be established by ignoring or marginalising trans subjectivities and the types of oppression trans people experience. Nor can it be remedied by adopting an ‘add trans and stir’ approach. Rather, we need to revisit and revise our ontology of gender, power and social reproduction within the global capitalist economy using a queer and trans-inclusive lens.
In terms of future research, if we take seriously feminist IPE’s empirical and normative aims of documenting, understanding and challenging injustice and exploitation, then the project of analysing how capitalist social relations marginalise, devalue and at times render uninhabitable trans lives is especially pressing. As this article has sought to demonstrate, trans bodies, like cis women’s bodies, are a key site ‘upon which the hierarchies of global capitalism are inscribed, imprinted, produced and performed’ (Smith and Lee, 2015: 65). They are also a site where these hierarchies are challenged and subverted. In this sense, the social reproduction of trans life, particularly for working-class and poor trans people and for Black, Indigenous and trans people of colour, may be indelibly marked by oppressive structures and power relations, but it is also a crucial means of resistance.
