Abstract
Recent scholarship within the Marxist tradition has taken up sexuality more explicitly in its theorizing. Journals such as Endnotes and Invert have tried to queer historical materialism as a method. Christopher Chitty was one of the emerging thinkers among queer Marxist theorists. This book, as his unfinished dissertation, opens us to new terrains in sexuality studies, historiography, and labour studies.
Sexual Hegemony provincializes contemporary sexual categories by situating the production and the reorganization of such categories in the long durée of the labour market and capital circulation. Chief to Chitty’s concern is to illustrate that homosexuality as a recognized identity cannot be understood separately from proletarianization and the dialectic movement of class struggles. As Nealon points out in the introduction (p. 9), the assimilationist-resistant binary has characterized most of queer theory today. For Chitty, the point lies in exploring the processes in which homosexuality becomes entangled with capitalist accumulation and class relations.
Chapter one presents us with key terms for the book, such as queer realism and sexual hegemony. ‘A relationship of sexual hegemony’, as Chitty defines, ‘works wherever sexual norms benefiting a dominant social group’ (p. 25). He further elaborates that habituation to such norms sometimes serves as ‘status’ and thus secures wealth and prestige.
In the next two chapters, Chitty traces the shifting sexual relations between men of different socio-economic statuses in the Mediterranean during the 15th and the 16th century and in Dutch during the 16th and the 17th century. Using Florence and Amsterdam as two case studies, Chitty demonstrates that the changing trade relations, capital accumulation and empire formations shaped and regulated same-sex practices between men of higher and lower statuses. For example, in Florence, as the economy transitioned from an agriculturally based one to a weak structure of guilds, young boys at that time were subjected to a labour market more dominated by cash nexus. These economic relations intersected with age, sex and status, producing distinct sexual geographies in the urban landscape of Florence.
Chapter 4 takes us to 18th century France and England. Chitty’s main objective is to situate the emergence of queer sexualities within capitalist property relations. Displacement and dispossession recoupled biological reproduction with the means of reproduction. This recombination did not mean that pre-industrial sexual relations were completely revamped. Rather, Mediterranean residual sexual formations continued in later Dutch and British hegemony.
The last part of this book presents the most innovative theorizing. Chapter 5 lands its temporary place in the contemporary emergence of queer theory. Surveying Foucault’s ‘repressive hypothesis’, he suggests the contradiction of Foucault, that is, a reduction of ideology and ideological effects to discourses and texts, rather than social struggles. Chitty is aware of the material aspects of discourse; thus, whenever he seems to critique Foucault, he is simultaneously insisting on Foucault’s insights. The chief contradiction, as he makes clear, is that Foucault posits a hegemonic sexual scientific understanding of sexuality in the West without accounting for how it achieved hegemony (p. 155). It is at this point readers will realize what Chitty sets out to do: to provide a historicized account of such hegemony within the emergence of capitalist private property and social relations of exploitation.
Readers familiar with U.S. queer politics will find the last chapter informative. Reading across Antonio Gramsci, Michael Warner and Lauren Berlant, he insists on thinking about homosexuality as an imagined community in relation to shifting capitalist social relations. The defeat of sodomy laws throughout advanced countries is the result of the neoliberal advancement of the private personhood as the limits of state power (p. 183). The book ends with the controversy of Chelsea Manning. As Chitty writes, the fence that keeps those protesting queers in check is just one symbol of the fragmentation of sexual and cultural hegemony. And perhaps, as I interpret, it will be in the cracks where social struggles and liberation come into new shapes.
After reading the long durée of sexuality Chitty presents, I am first curious about the absence of feminist theorizing. One can surely argue that Chitty is perhaps too preoccupied with responding to his contemporary critical queer theorists. Yet, I wonder what Chitty can take from social reproduction theory. Second, Chitty’s focus on North Atlantic sexual formation inevitably renders other geographies invisible. Third, Chitty’s argument would be strengthened by engaging with women of colour and queer of colour theorists, especially in the last two chapters where Chitty arrives at the contemporary moment of U.S. LGBTQ+ politics.
This said, Chitty’s work opens many possibilities for postcolonial, decolonial and geographically grounded analysis. As a researcher of Chinese queer politics, Chitty provides a way of thinking about sexuality within East Asia’s long tradition of inter-sovereign trades, market civilization and proletarianization. I am excited about the multiple ways in which Chitty can speak to all our heterogenous temporal-spatial problematics. I wish I had known Chitty earlier, and I want to tell his family and loved ones that Sexual Hegemony will rock the world of Marxism as well as queer theory in the Anglophone academia.