Radical Socialist
AGAINST THE CURRENT advisory
editor Peter Drucker, the author
of Warped: Gay Normality and Queer
Anticapitalism, is one of a handful of
scholars who have in recent years
developed the field of queer Marxism.
Another pioneer of queer Marxism,
Kevin Floyd, died tragically in 2019.
This year the Marxist Literary Group
honored Kevin Floyd’s legacy with a
special issue of its
journal Mediations, including this
tribute by Peter Drucker.
MARXISTS WORKING IN queer
studies have gradually been building a body of theory during the first decades of
the 21st century. We have been synthesizing core Marxist concepts, like class,
totality and reification, with concepts from other paradigms, such as social
construction, performativity and intersectionality. In the small boomlet of
publications that has marked this queer Marxist renaissance, one moment stands out: the publication in 2009 of Kevin Floyd’s The Reification of Desire.(1) All of
us queer Marxists who have published since then have been in dialogue with this
seminal work. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that we have been writing
a series of glosses on it.
The queer Marxism in which Floyd played a foundational role is a new turn in
Marxism’s more-than-century-old dialogue with same-sex activism and
theorizing. The roots of Marxist queer studies go back to the first interactions
between Marxist theorists linked to socialist labour movements, on the one hand,
and successive waves of homosexual emancipation and lesbian/gay liberation,
on the other. The story goes back to German Marxist Eduard Bernstein’s critique
in Die Neue Zeit of sexually repressive legislation in response to the 1895 trial of Oscar Wilde,(2) and to the Russian Bolsheviks’ post-revolutionary decriminalization of homosexuality and support for research in sexology.(3) The near-simultaneous rise of New Left Marxism and of lesbian/gay liberation in the
1960s and 1970s resulted in a new flowering of lesbian/gay Marxist theory. John
D’Emilio’s seminal essay “Capitalism and Gay Identity” (1983), linking “free”
labour under capitalism to identity formation, was widely and lastingly influential.(4) Floyd, too, knew this history – he called D’Emilio’s article
“crucial”5 – and drew on it.
In his deep readings of queer theory and his open-minded attitude toward it,
however, Floyd broke with the dominant tone of the Marxists who came before
him. As queer theory had spread and became increasingly hegemonic in
lesbian/gay studies in the course of the 1990s, many Marxists had responded
initially with skepticism or outright hostility. Teresa Ebert and Donald Morton
exemplified Marxists’ sometimes tendentious dismissal of queer theory’s contributions.(6) In a very different key, Rosemary Hennessy’s Profit and
Pleasure (2000), though it can be seen in retrospect as a key early text of queer
Marxism, was still characterized by a strong critique of the queer theory of the 1990s.(7) Floyd changed the discourse. More than any other person he heralded a
new wave, in which dismissal increasingly gave way to efforts to forge a new
queer Marxism, engaging more deeply with queer theory while trying to avoid
its idealist and postmodernist pitfalls.
Fully versed in queer theory, Kevin Floyd forged a synthesis in which old
Marxist concepts were equally central and invented anew. The synthesis took
him a long way from the Texas childhood and Midwestern life he later recalled in sketching his trajectory.(8) In the tradition he helped found, the category of
totality has been important to queer Marxists seeking a global, non-reductionist
vision. The concept of reification, too, has been both key to Marxist approaches
to queer studies and a fruitful source of divergences. Queer Marxist debates
about these concepts today are unthinkable without Floyd’s ground-breaking
work on them.
The queer Marxism Floyd pioneered is strictly speaking a 21st-century
phenomenon. The “Marxist renaissance” in queer studies has largely been a by-
product of the continuing rapid growth of queer studies generally, particularly in North American universities.(9) At first Marxist approaches in the field were very
marginalized. As Floyd wrote, by the 1990s “what was once a healthy queer
skepticism about the Marxist tradition … congeal[ed] into something more automatic, dismissive, phobic.”(10) It was only after 2007 that several years of
intense capitalist crisis provoked a rethinking of Marxism’s possible “explanatory power.”(11) Published in 2009, The Reification of Desire seized the
moment – and was marked by the moment.
While the book brought a hefty dose of socioeconomic reality to a burgeoning
academic field, it could not reflect an activist upsurge that did not particularly
characterize the time. The academic setting of most Marxist queer studies has
resulted in focuses ranging beyond core concerns of historical materialism –
political economy, social struggles and transformations, and political power – to
the more common concentration in queer studies on philosophy, literature, film
and other arts. The Reification of Desire, too, focused largely on this sort of
philosophical and cultural critique. Like other Marxists working in queer studi
es, Floyd had a strong aversion to economic reductionism, which has
traditionally contributed to Marxists’ neglect of sexuality.
Yet although much of Floyd’s academic work dealt with literature and the
Marxist Literary Group was his home ground, his knowledge and his concerns
always ranged further. He forcefully rejected “depictions of my work as (merely) culturalist.”(12) He participated in North American conferences of the Historical
Materialism network, helping to bring a queer perspective to a largely new
generation of hundreds of Marxist scholars. Though his department’s travel
budget never stretched far enough to allow him to join the even bigger
gatherings of queer Marxists at the annual Historical Materialism conferences in
London, the Sexuality and Political Economy Network that was born there was
in this sense his offspring as well.
Queer Marxists all (to a greater or lesser extent) acknowledge their indebtedness
to feminist theorists who since the 1970s have been emphasizing the conjoined
centrality of class and gender. One of Floyd’s greatest contributions was to show how Judith Butler’s concept of performative gender(13) should be historicized, as a
form of gender that emerged due to changes in early 20th-century capitalism.
Shifting from the earlier, 19th-century emphasis on “manhood” and
“womanhood,” he showed, performative constructions of gender have been defined more by patterns of consumption, dress and everyday behaviour,(14) linked to the “‘scientific management’ of anxieties about changing gender norms.”(15)
To avoid any narrow economic determinism, Marxists in queer studies have
deployed György Lukács’ category of totality to explore how sexuality is
embedded in broader power dynamics. Here too, Floyd made an absolutely vital
contribution, showing the relevance of the category to the study of sexuality. At
the same time, he warned against the dangers of a conception of totality that
would relegate sexuality to the superstructure. In some of his later statements,
moreover, he shrank from choosing between “characterizing global capitalism as either heterogeneous or unified,”(16) thus opting for a contrast between
heterogeneity and unity rather than a more dialectical formulation of unity in
contradiction.
In a third, particularly brilliant contribution, Floyd strikingly developed the
sexual dimensions of the concept of reification (particularly as analyzed by
Lukács). Drawing on historical analyses of the late 19th-century invention of
heterosexual and homosexual persons, he pointed out the particular reification of
gender manifest in these supposedly scientific sexual categories. Today, Marxists
note, male and female bodies are reduced to things to be obtained, like so many
other fetishized commodities.
Yet different Marxists in queer studies have drawn out different implications
from the concept of reification. Floyd initially dwelled on Lukács’ late self-
criticism for failing to distinguish adequately between (humanly inevitable) objectification and (specifically capitalist) reification.(17) Yet in his desire to
emphasize the political importance of “the use of the body as a pleasurable
means,” Floyd ended up emphasizing reification’s positive role as “a condition of possibility for … sexually non-normative discourses.”(18) Curiously, this
emphasis moved Floyd away both from traditional Marxist criticisms of all
existing sexualities under capitalism and from queer theorists’ advocacy of fluid
sexualities at a certain distance from existing lesbian/gay identities. This
reflected his nuanced take on queer politics. While he was one with queer
theorists for example in strongly criticizing same-sex marriage, which he saw as
“[p]art and parcel of neoliberalism,” he argued in an early article that it is not
always “inherently conservative or assimilationalist.”(19)
It is a terrible loss for queer Marxism that Floyd is no longer here to help us
engage with new upsurges and new debates, notably the transformative Black
Lives Matter protests and the astonishing mobilizations that have accompanied
them around the themes #BlackTransLivesMatter and #BlackQueerLivesMatter.
Sadly, we will never know what insights Kevin would have contributed to
understanding this pivotal juncture. All we can do is carry on in his spirit of
theoretical daring and radical engagement.
Mediations: Journal of the Marxist Literary Group, Volume 34, No. 1 (Fall 2020)
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Radical Socialist is an internationalist Marxist organisation based in India.