Queer Sexualities and Capitalism

Catalog description

Queer Sexualities and Capitalism will explore the relationship between capitalist development and the regulation of sexual life. The course will specifically focus on Europe and North America. The course considers queer sexuality as situated within and against what Christopher Chitty calls “sexual hegemony,” the normative control of sexual life through state power, white supremacy, and capital accumulation. Understanding the historical changes of queer sexuality requires tracing institutions and social relations through which it was contained, disciplined, and defined. These include the role of the family in the social reproduction of class society, the developing fields of Sexology, the changing labor conditions of capitalism, and the sexual politics of colonialism and slavery. Queer, in this sense, includes not only gay or lesbian sexual intimacy, but also gender deviancy, sex work, and those subject to anti-Blackness. The course begins with a theoretical overview putting into dialogue Queer Theory, Marxism, Black Studies, and Social Reproduction Theory. In this theory section, the course will engage the works of Rodrick Ferguson, Karl Marx, John D’Emilio, and Holly Lewis. The course then uses these frameworks to trace the changing role of sexual deviancy in European capitalist development and colonial fantasy through the research of Peter Drucker, Chitty, and Joseph Boone. The last section of the course considers the regulation of gender and sexuality in American racial capitalism, focused specifically on queer Black life from slavery through contemporary cultural politics. Here we will read Angela Davis, Hortense Spillers, and C. Riley Snorton. Students will produce a final paper using the theoretical frameworks of the course to understand a social or cultural phenomena related to queer life or non-normative sexuality.