This book attempts to synthesize Marxist theory with feminist and queer theory— or rather, to argue for a Marxist perspective while addressing the many criticisms of Marxist thought that feminists and queer theorists have made over the years and integrating their concerns into a materialist framework.
Chapter 1 is nearly 90 pages on “Terms of the Debate,” intended to get everyone on the same page about the different sets of theory, regardless of which school of thought the reader comes from. Chapter 2 is on “Marxism and Gender,” and 3 is on “From Queer Nationalism to Queer Marxism.” Chapter 4 is conclusions, ending with “10 axioms toward a queer marxist future.”
I’m trying to keep this exam list focused on history of sexuality/sexual historiography rather than queer theory, but my tentative exception is for books that provide histories of sexual theory— like this one, and like an anthology I finished several months ago but haven’t blogged about yet.
There’s relatively little work on queer Marxism, since the American Communist Party was Stalinist and therefore pretty homophobic, so I found it useful to read an overview of the various debates between the two. I knew Foucault broke from the CP in part due to homophobia, and that impacted his writing, but I didn’t know most of the other stuff.
However, I was frustrated with this book at times since I think it gives a bad-faith reading of postmodernism and queer theory. Or at least, whatever works Lewis is referring to when she critiques “postmodernism” and “queer theorists” are making pretty different arguments than the works I’m familiar with, and she often doesn’t refer to specific authors or titles. I think there are super valid materialist criticisms to be made of postmodernism and queer theory, but this book alternately either doesn’t make them or obscures and undermines them in the eyes of anyone who is somewhat familiar with them via what I feel are disingenuous (or maybe just mistaken?) readings of their arguments. For example, Lewis criticizes the idea that gender/other things are “discursively constructed” but then argues that they are “socially constructed.” I still don’t understand how those are meaningfully different. But then again, because my education has definitely been a mix of postmodern-influenced theory and Marxist-influenced theory, maybe my understanding of various postmodern/poststructuralist concepts is “wrong” because they were taught to me with Marxist components already integrated.
When I got to Chapter 3, which includes a similar critique of postcolonial thought, I really wasn’t sure how to react, because I’m much less familiar with those theories. I just don’t know if this had an accurate portrayal of po-co theory or if it was similarly strawmanning.
In other parts of the book, though, I do think Lewis does a good job of being sympathetic to why political movements developed in the directions that they did (like queer nationalism) and how they led to positive developments in comparison to what came before. Part of what took me so long to finish this book is that I was reading it alongside a reading group that was discussing similar issues, and I was spending a lot of time arguing with other people in the reading group about queer theory and doing background research to see which of us was actually correct. (I still think I’m correct but bought some other books to read to make sure.)
This is one of those books that made me think about how everyone says you should read for main ideas and connections with other texts, you don’t necessarily have to closely read the whole book, but….I definitely did read the whole book, and I think that’s part of why it went so slowly for me. Need to go through all the pages I marked and compile a doc of my notes/things I thought were important.