Written by Kate O’Halloran | 23 February 2010

Kate O’Halloran strives to understand how capitalism defines sexuality

As I stood watching Rocco D’Amore perform at the November 2009 Rally for Same-Sex Marriage Rights, a woman tapped me on the shoulder from behind. ‘Hey, I love your top!’ she said. I was amused, since I was wearing a screen-printed hoodie I had made with the words ‘THE REVOLUTION IS MY GIRLFRIEND’ on the back. It’s a relatively obscure reference to a Bruce La Bruce film (queer male director of pseudo porn) called ‘Raspberry Reich’ which basically mocks the extreme left-wing, in this case, a group of ‘homosexual terrorists’. Then it came. ‘So, do you hold anti-capitalist politics?’

As a long-suffering uni student, these are familiar dreaded words reminiscent of trying desperately to make your way to the union building for lunch without being stopped by the socialists. It’s harsh, but true. I know of (queer) friends who, when asked if they supported bringing an end to homophobia, answered that no, they definitely did not. I always felt slightly guilty at these moments. After all, how often do you see people standing on the streets fighting homophobia? Could we not find a way to just get along?

So you can imagine my surprise (at myself) when I answered ‘yeah, definitely’ to the question of whether or not I held anti-capitalist politics. At the most simple of levels, it seems a no-brainer. Of course I hate working copious hours in dead-end customer-service jobs, compensated with minimum wage and docked half an hour every shift for lunch breaks I never get the time to take. I agree wholeheartedly that capitalism, for the most part, is the exploitation of many for the benefit of a scarce few. But I followed my response with an excuse about why I couldn’t make the Socialist Alternative meeting later that night. Why?

I feel that I, and perhaps many in the queer community, have a difficult and contradictory relationship with those of anti-capitalist persuasion. I think there are several reasons for this. Firstly, it is not immediately clear what relationship capitalism has to sexuality, and I think we could benefit from a more clear explanation and discussion of.

Michel Foucault has an interesting take on the topic. He argues that the seventeenth century was a time of relative sexual freedom – of ‘open transgressions’, where sexual interactions were laid open without secrecy or shame. This was eventually replaced by the Victorian era, where a few shifts in the way we understand sexuality today began to take place. Sexual activity became appropriate only in the home, and for the purposes of reproduction. Foucault subsequently argues that this repression of sexuality coincided with ‘the development of capitalism’ and the ‘bourgeois order’.

It is easy enough to see how this shift in our understanding of what is sexually appropriate might pave the way for homophobia. At a basic level, sex between anything other than a heterosexual, fertile couple is constructed as hedonistic, selfish, pointless. And when the home is understood as a place for man and wife, the ‘legitimate’ couple of Victorian sexual sensibility, what hope has queer sex or queer love of taking place behind its doors?

It becomes slightly easier, from here, to see how queer sexuality fails to conform to either these repressive standards of sexual existence, or capitalism more generally. As Foucault argues,  sex which was non-reproductive, for pleasure alone, stood in the way of intensive work. Since capitalism relies on the exploitation of its workers, it could only hope that the labour force would reproduce itself, increasing its working capacity.

And yet, as is evident today, capitalism could never fully contain what it defines as illegitimate sexuality, which rages on at its margins. But as Foucault also predicted, capitalism then finds a way to reintegrate alternative sexuality to feed its system of exploitation and production. You might hear people talk about the ‘Pink Dollar,’ or DINK (Double Income No Kids), which is the notion that queer couples have more disposable income than others (presumed to be without children, two adults partnered in a monogamous relationship). If we’re thinking cynically, it might be why Midsumma is sponsored by IBM, or Mardi Gras by Fotxel and ANZ, for example.

Corporations target the queer community explicitly as a market for profit but fail to act on or acknowledge the fact that the entire system is predicated on inequity and the status of the queer as second-class citizen. It is why, despite my misgivings about the conservative and patriarchal institution of marriage, I will stand and march for same-sex marriage rights. Because queers don’t deserve to be written out of the constitution, to be lawfully discriminated against and denied basic human rights and freedoms afforded to those who more conveniently adopt the status-quo defined in and around both the Victorian era and the rise of capitalism.

So why don’t the queer community and the Socialist Alternative or Alliance see eye to eye on more occasions? When a campaign like Equal Love lists both the Socialist Alternative and Alliance amongst its supporters, when, let’s face it, they make really good badges?

One more reason, I think, is the Socialist Alternative’s stance on what they term ‘identity politics’. The Socialist Alternative maintains that the only way to combat oppression in our society is a revolution which will replace the current capitalist system with workers’ governments based on workers’ councils. This means that nothing should get in the way of a workers’ revolution, and workers of all varieties should band together, with enough people-power to overthrow the current regime. In some ways, I think, this leads to misguided dismissals of groups which organise and rally around a cause or injustice other than an economic one, framed as a cause to define and control all others. This is perhaps why I read things on the S.A. website I can scarcely understand – that ‘feminism argues that women should organise separately around "women's issues,"’ or that ‘the idea of identity politics is that there is a more moral or righteous way to live - in the ghettoes.’

Problematic statements aside, I still believe that socialists who are aligned with political parties such as the Alternative or Alliance can positively contribute to the anti-homophobic queer movement. I hope we can find a way to work together despite the differences in the emphasis we place on the various forms of oppression in society which, as the Socialist Alternative rightly point out, never operate in isolation.