Abstract
In Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the Global System, the late Christopher Chitty reflects on the various institutions and practices of financial centres since the 15th century. Chitty suggests that (male) same-sex desires emerged along the ‘fault lines’ (p. 24) of transformed property relations and uneven development. The book’s attention to financial cycles adds a profound and necessary materialist engagement on the emergence of queer sexuality and amplifies the conviction that sexual liberation is necessary for overcoming the capitalist world system.
Sexual Hegemony is smartly ordered across six chronological chapters. These chapters take readers to Florence, Amsterdam, Paris, London and across the United States to discuss how financialization in these cities ‘generated some of the first socially visible cultures of sodomy’ (p. 30). Imperial financial expansion extends what Chitty calls sexual hegemony, which are the sexual norms of a dominant group that render different sexual practices minor. The presence of a sexual hegemony necessitates Chitty’s queer realist approach, which emphasizes how counter-normative sexual practices operate as a lack of social and property status. These two concepts, which comprise Chitty’s primary contributions, suggest that the mainstream acceptance of LGBTQ+ rights is not really about liberation from sexual conservatism, but part of a longer pattern of extending bourgeois sexual hegemony at the moment of [capital’s] political-economic liquidation’ (p. 173). In this way, Chitty both articulates a queer geography in which queerness congeals in relation to propertyless-ness/proletarian-ness in capitalist space while also emphasizing that financialization is not a new phenomenon but one that happens in the Gramscian time of monsters.
However, I hesitate with how Sexual Hegemony alludes to the emergence of modern ‘gayness’ from a Western history of male same-sex desire. Gayness is typically framed as a universal category that encompasses various kinds of difference, and by not addressing the conditions of historical difference the book may invite readings of ‘[gay] histories posited by capital’, 1 or history 1. History 1 is a view of differently located subjectivities as embodiments of capital, which subsumes difference in the making of commensurate global subjects. While Chitty rightly rebukes the mainstream view that ‘gayness’ emerged from the loosening of restrictive moralities, the book’s prioritization of Euro-American queer experiences occludes the violence by which queer racialized people continue to be sublated into notions of the ‘global gay community’. By not acknowledging colonial enclosure and the production of difference as a name for those from whom imperial actors and settlers stole property, the book situates racialized and culturally specific queer lives as emerging without histories of resistance. Here, I am thinking about Deborah A. Miranda’s discussion of the extermination of the joyas and how the making and regulation of legible Western LGBTQ+ identities further the American settler-colonial project. 2 Acknowledging that colonial property regimes both emerged through violence and made the conditions for speculative private property regimes in Europe possible would provide greater context to the book’s argument that bourgeois sexual hegemony is a property relation.
Altogether, Sexual Hegemony is fresh. Queer realist approaches to the cracks in financial capital allow us to feel hope with how queer re-territorializations of the ‘local’ open a door to the potential of queer Marxist social transformation; a door that Chitty is so clearly asking us to walk through. However, Chitty’s labour is a starting point; queer emergence must also account for local conditions. For example, Petrus Liu locates the emergence of queer cultures in mainland China and Taiwan in cross-strait Cold War relations. 3 Reading local conditions focuses attention to and learning from the fissures and cracks of the present world, allowing us to flag capital’s homogenizing tendencies. As scholars, we honour the labour of Chitty’s life by doing this as our part in the project of liberation from capitalism.
