Queer Marxist Feminism: Why A Queer Lens is Necessary

I actually think that queer struggle is critical to class struggle. Here’s my reasons why. (I will be expanding this in subsequent posts on the subject of what a Queer lens can bring to a marxist materialist analysis.)

1) Queer struggle’s radical roots includes a ruthless critique of everything, no seriously.

Feminism was critical to Marxism and political theorizing period because it expanded our understanding of what was socially determined. Human beings are adaptable creatures and for this reason we are prone to assuming aspects of our world are the way they are because they are supposed to be, or because they are ‘natural’. Feminism was the first theoretical weapon that exploded many assumptions about what we could critique and what was permanent and unchanging reality.

I think a queer lens is important here because, like feminism, queer political analysis has refused to shy away from any aspect of our lives, as being outside the realm of the political (i.e. social power relations). Queer radical struggle began as a critique of the idea that difference should be stigmatized, that there were certain or correct ways of expressing our individual identities and cultures. Queer politics dug deep in its analysis when it disputed that there were certain correct or natural families, that they had to be based on blood or kinship at all. A queer lens is powerful tool for a marxist materialist analysis of the family as a fundamental unit of capitalist consumption.

I learn every day new history about the ways in which people’s ideas about love, marriage and the family have evolved alongside capitalist development. Did you know that people used to take honeymoons with their whole family? It wasn’t until a certain level of accumulation in the industrialized world took place that the notion of a couple, radically separated from society, emerged as a dominant ideology. There was a precipitous increase in disatisfaction once this occurred, as both men and women receded from community and public spaces because they were being told they should look solely to one another for emotional sustenance and care. Couplehood became a refuge from the rest of the world. Remember Marx on the Jewish Question? He argued that the idea of rights was flawed because it was based on affirming the individual’s right to own property, and thus it had an assumption of a hostile world of competition built into it. We must make these broader connections as we gain insight into the historical evolution of human society under capitalism. Queer materialist marxist analysis is key here.

Furthermore, Queers put these theoretical insights about the family into practice when they disputed the idea that there are right and wrong ways to live and love, that people do not have to live in monogamous, relationships. Queers questioned heterosexuality and the nuclear family as the ‘normal’ ways of organizing society, and shed light on ways in which society structures participation so that these institutions are made to be compulsory. They also brought a scathing critique of heterosexism as a foundational block of patriarchy. I am not saying that heterosexuality or monogamy are inherently patriarchal, nothing is inherently anything. I am saying that the unquestioned element of compulsion that lays behind them in our capitalist society has gone unquestioned and its been bad.

Audre Lorde said it best when she argued that capitalism inherently stigmatizes difference because it needs to rationalize people being excluded, because it needs to explain the inequalities that persist in our world. This is incredibly true. Capitalism could never, and will never recognize or respect the full diversity of humanity and the way we live, eat, dance, and love, because it always needs to promote competition and create outsiders. At the same time, I think that capitalism is often incredibly successful at socializing us in its ways of thinking and relating.

How many of us have internalized ways of valuing people, places or things in ways that require something else to be negated? How many of us have internalized a judgmental view of human expression that wants to put everything in a category, that wants to constantly assemble a scale of behaviors and ways of being and place someone else in a lower tier?

This is a reality, I think. I have seen it play out in the left. We are all prone to it, myself included. I think that often those who have been subject to oppressive devaluation by dominant culture have attempted to push that back by turning the lens of judgment and negativity back the other way, and at times it swing too far the other way. What do I mean? For example, I know that in the political spaces I am in there is often disparaging done of straights, whites and dudes. Now, I am not going to say that I don’t take part in this disparaging.

Sometimes it feels SO good to snidely dismiss the dominant culture. In some ways we have to dismiss it, in order to live, because so much of dominant culture is inherently antagonistic to anything that falls outside of it (queers, people of color, womyn, to name a few). That’s how capitalism is, its dominant culture reflects the ruling class ideas in society because its intellectual strata tend to be drawn from the top tier of society. Now with corporate control of music, even creative work seems to be selected for its compatability with ruling class values. This was always the case but there used to be more of a space for the few choice talented independent voices to slip in. Now even those spaces are compromised.

Capitalism thus violently asserts itself as the only right way. But, in a different, non-classed society, would differences have to be treated this way? I don’t think so. And I think that acceptance, love and a non-judgemental attitude towards one another can actually be a really radical practice that is in diametric opposition to the way people are socialized to relate in capitalist society with its endless comparisons and competitions and economy of scarcity. There’s enough love and acceptance for human expression of all kinds if we get rid of profit and capital.

2) Queer struggle has not shied away from sexuality and SEX. Too often this realm has been sectioned off as an area unfit for political analysis.



I think that Marxists and political people period tend to shy away from the realm of the erotic and the sexual. Why? Hundreds of years of puritanical training in the west have taught us to have a deeply shameful posture towards a critical aspect of all of our selves. We are all sexual beings, and our sexuality comes in different shapes, sizes, etc.

If my self-help journey has taught me anything (and by golly it has), its that denying or repressing aspects of yourself is very inherently unhealthy. It leads to deep abiding shame, and as evidenced by the never ending scandals involving republicans and catholics, repression does not actually negate the aspects of yourself you do not like. Evidence actually shows the opposite—that what you repress or deny about yourself actually becomes further embedded in your brain.

Audre lorde talks about the way womyn are denied from connection to the erotic. The more I read about western science and the way it fragments and shames aspects of the body and the self the more I think Lorde is probably really right on to point out that reclaiming the erotic is important. In general I have come to realize that feelings are a type of knowledge that gets endlessly dismissed in western-centric society, but which actually can and does yield important insight, and truth. I used to dismiss people when they said that to me. I thought they were new age relativist hippies. Literally. But now I realize the truth to the idea that feelings are truth, they tell us what we need. Any avoidance or repressing of our own feelings and needs ends up strengthening them and the requisite shame that will follow. It’s a vicious cycle.

In the U.S. we see this schizophrenic shame about sexuality and sex and also the nonstop flooding of our psyches with sex. I think that all shame limits us, all secrecy makes us smaller, more narrow. Having hang ups or having to deny our own sexual desires and wants forces us into a dishonest relationship with the most important being we have a relationship with—ourselves. ‘

The western mind-body dichotomy has taught us to regard feelings as ‘non-rational’. It has taught us to treat emotions as inconveniences. We learn to judge and label our own feelings as wrong or right instead of treating our feelings as a sacred part of our integrated whole that has important information for us. I think acknowledging our erotic and not shaming any part of our natural desire is important for a holistic self-love for ourselves and for others. It is deeply anticapitalist when combined with a larger political struggle for change.

A Note on Judgement & Capitalist Culture

I think it’s important that we learn to be accepting and loving towards all kinds of cultural expressions and ways of living and loving. This doesn’t mean we absolve ourselves of the power of cultural critique. Culture can still strengthen or affirm dominant ideologies and thus the power structures around us.

We can still be aware of the unequal playing field that exists, wherein certain ideas, ways of living, dressing, loving, etc., have cultural hegemony due to their compatability with the ruling class way of living.

However I find that lecturing people about their cultural choices tends to backfire. The best way to disrupt cultural ways of being and acting that are rooted in ruling class ideology, is to embody an alternate model ourselves. Nobody can decide to get free for you, at the end of the day you are going to have to make that decision yourself. Judging people, versus evaluating actions or behaviors that are hurtful to us, is the key to get rid of capitalist shaming culture.

Snide remarks and cold, cool dismissal of ANYTHING comes from a deep insecurity. Cynical or flippant dissing of others protects us from showing desire or interest or curiosity in something and thus feeling vulnerable. I am always concerned when I see the left (and I include myself in this) engaged in the game of “whose the f-up? Lets ostracize them. We are way better/different/righteous”

Often we are so conditioned to see being critical and rigorous in our politics as being synonymous with tearing others apart. I think we can separate politics from people and not be so quick to personalize our political critiques. We once were wrong about the way the world works. We still are wrong. I am not agnostic about truth, we can be critical and not relativistic, but a critical part of being critical is accepting we are probably wrong on plenty of shit and lets not act as if we have never been wrong before.

Lets give others the room to be wrong without feeling as though they are worthy of contempt or disrespect because they espouse a view we disagree with. Dismissing people with a flippant, cool, attitude often says more about our own confidence in ourselves, and in what we believe in, than what we think of anyone else. Plus, it is counterproductive to personalize political ideas in that particular way, because it leads to people protecting their ideas the way they protect their own self worth—and that can lead to dogma since all human beings have a need to feel special and worthy of love and acceptance.

*Note: I also think that judging and shaming ourselves or others for judging and shaming is counterintuitive. Gahh. Is that a judgement? Hahaha Oh lawd. JK 🙂 How’s this: judging others for judging others is not a good idea FOR ME. You make your own choices. Also, the above sermon is all MY opinion only… 😉