The Political Economy of Sexual Identity

Abstract

This article makes a case for developing a theoretical account of historically determined gendered, trans, and queer epistemologies out of value-form readings on social reproduction. The materialist turn in queer studies is revisited here first by critically engaging with Meg Wesling's GLQ article “Queer Value” (2012) in order to present a non-ontologizing conceptualization of labor that would avoid politically affirming stances toward historically feminized positions within the process of reproduction of labor-force. Second, the author reads the Foucauldian account of sex through the fetish character of capitalist social forms to expose the functioning of a sociohistorically specific epistemology of the body. Ultimately, the article unfolds a negative understanding of queer and trans processes of embodiment as precariously inaugurating new modes of sociality unrealizable under capitalist social reproduction.