Semester.ly

Johns Hopkins University | AS.191.346

Queer Marxism

3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

(-1)

Ever since queer theory emerged as a distinct field of critical inquiry in the early 1990s, its relationship to Marxism has been fraught. Marxian insistence on the primacy of production relations in structuring social reality has turned many queer theorists away from Marx in search of an understanding of how regimes of sexual normalcy operate to conserve a world of gender binarism organized into heterosexual domestic units. However, in the course of the last decade, the global social crisis has left many critics reexamining the relevance of Marx for grappling with issues of sexuality, reproduction and normalization, culminating in a seminal work by Kevin Floyd proposing a path Towards a Queer Marxism. If normality is not a fact of nature but a value relation that is socially produced, as queer theory has insisted from its inception, then Marx’s account of how our societies produce value might prove useful for queer theorizing. This course explores an emerging field of scholarship appearing under the banner of Queer Marxism. It examines theories, mechanisms and processes of social production and reproduction as they apply to family structures, sexual subcultures, child rearing, organization and distribution of labor, and gender embodiment, all the while having in mind the difficult questions about the possibilities for social change in a wider material world in which we are situated.

No Course Evaluations found