Queer Sex and the Crisis of Capital

Sexuality is not a space protected from the tedium and violence of life under capitalism, argues Christopher Chitty, and neither is it the product of capital's top-down maneuvering. Instead, it is a terrain of class conflict. Chitty's sprawling Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System takes us from early modern Florence to the postwar United States to tell a story about how capital flows shape sex and how, in turn, sex powers the crises of capital. “Alternate or queer sexualities,” Chitty writes, “historically emerged along the fault lines of transformed property relations” (178–79). A sophisticated and daring text in queer Marxist thought, Sexual Hegemony refuses the artificial choice between Karl Marx and Michel Foucault, the material and the discursive. Made possible by Max Fox's careful editing of the late Chitty's unfinished dissertation, Sexual Hegemony is the product of a comradeship and queer care that mirrors the book's politics.Among Sexual Hegemony's most striking interventions is Chitty's insistence (one supported by a rich historical archive) that heterosexism is a tool of class struggle rather than a prejudice rooted in morality or religion. Queer sex is, sometimes, a material problem for the capitalist state. Classes weaponize the hetero family (and the straight sex that props it up) in uneven ways—Chitty convincingly writes against any sort of progress narrative—and this has little to do with what they really believe about good sex. Sexual Hegemony invites us to think about bourgeois morality not as morality that happens to be bourgeois, but as a slippery normative structure that helps create the conditions for bourgeois life (and, yes, hegemony).Neither is the weaponization of sexuality only something that comes from the top down. The working and ruling classes have made use of sexuality as a tool of class struggle, but sexual hegemony's specifically bourgeois character comes from its force as a weapon against both ruling- and working-class antagonists. Chitty's discussion of sodomy policing in early modern Florence shows how sexual policing both served the ends of controlling working-class access to public space and “provided a pressure valve” for critiques of nobles’ unchecked power (66). Later, Chitty takes us to the French Revolution and to the bourgeoisie's use of “scandals of appetite” to claim class power. The bourgeoisie turned to a scientific discourse on same-sex sex to rationalize its struggle against the excesses of the ruling class and authorize its role in reigning in the unruly publicness of the lower class. Throughout, Chitty shows a historical trend in which the working class bears the harshest costs of moralism. Ruling-class libertines emerge embarrassed but with the basic structures of class power intact.Moving to the turn of the twentieth century, Chitty tells a story of how the working class's growing access to middle-class respectability brought about a democratization of bourgeois sexual morality: “Socioeconomic progress is directly to blame for a wider basis for sexual repression” (136). Here, Chitty is not explicitly engaged with leftist feminist writing on family abolition, but his interventions remind readers that the family was never for working-class class people in the first place. Readers of contemporary politics will see sexual moralism's uneven force in the ways bourgeois critiques of ruling-class sexual consumption get quickly turned against the working-class others who labor in sex markets, as when football magnate Robert Kraft escaped solicitation charges while the migrant sex workers he patronized did not. Chitty's history is also an education in tactics for the now.Sexual Hegemony's focus is on European queer masculinities, and one casualty of its incompleteness is a lost opportunity to engage queer of color and feminist critique. Still, its interest in the unruly solidarities among sexual outsiders positions the text in broader conversation with thinkers ranging from Cathy Cohen to Silvia Federici, who share a commitment to a materialist analysis of sex that builds anti-capitalist solidarities. If, as for Chitty, the normal is a “status” that confers material advantages on those who can access it, to be queer is to lack that status. “Rather than marking a utopian opening up of . . . logics for self-transformative play,” queerness signals the material realities of life outside the institutions of hetero capitalism (26). This method, what Chitty calls “queer realism,” beckons a queerness that is both grounded and expansive.Throughout Sexual Hegemony, we find queer men and poor women who have the wrong kinds of sex connected in the threats they pose to the status quo. That part of same-sex sex's disruptive force comes from its capacity to bring people together across class, race, and national lines links it to sexual labor, another space where “stranger intimacy” troubles social segmentation. Sexual Hegemony figures queer sex itself as a sometimes practice of solidarity. Chapter 3 introduces us to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sailors whose “ ‘dirty passions’ across lines of class and race” threatened solidarities that undermined not only the governance of ships but also the entire project of chattel slavery (101). Sexual Hegemony takes no easy guesses at the shape future sexual solidarities will take. Instead, it offers a usable past that helps us think better about what it might look like to build them.In his introduction, Christopher Nealon notes Chitty's agnosticism about what sexual futures will or should look like. This agnosticism runs throughout the text, posing one of the book's most striking confrontations with queer studies. Chitty refuses to narrate a queerness that sits outside capitalist social relations, telling a queer history that resists both the politics of respectability and the discourse of queer alterity typically offered as its anecdote. To release attachments to queerness as alterity—its “purely negative relation to some law or norm”—is to “ask instead about the transformative and emancipatory possibilities of love and intimacy outside the institutions of the family, state, and couple form” (145). How to pursue a queerness that actively, materially, antagonizes the property relation? In the best sprit of queer anti-capitalist scholarship, Chitty makes us want to try

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