Queer As Materialism

Queer as Materialism
Sophie Noyé, Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée and Gianfranco Rebucini, School for Advanced
Studies in the Social Sciences
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.1265
Published online: 22 January 2021
Summary
Since the 2000s, forms of articulation between materialist and Marxist theory and queer theory have been emerging
and have thus created a “queer materialism.” After a predominance of poststructuralist analyses in the social
sciences in the1980s and 1990s, since the late 1990s, and even more so after the economic crisis of 2008, a
materialist shift seems to be taking place. These recompositions of the Marxist, queer, and feminist, which took
place in activist and academic arenas, are decisive in understanding how the new approaches are developing in
their own fields.
The growing legitimacy of feminist and queer perspectives within the Marxist left is part of an evolution of Marxism
on these issues. On the other side, queer activists and academics have highlighted the economic and social
inequalities that the policies of austerity and capitalism in general induce among LGBTQI people and have turned to
more materialist references, especially Marxist ones, to deploy an anticapitalist and antiracist argument. Even if
nowadays one cannot speak of a “queer materialist” current as such, because the approaches grouped under this
term are very different, it seems appropriate to look for a “family resemblance” and to group them together. Two
specific kinds of “queer materialisms” can thus be identified. The first, queer Marxism, seeks to theorize together
Marxist and queer theories, particularly in normalization and capitalist accumulation regimes. The second,
materialist queer feminism, confronts materialist/Marxist feminist thought with queer approaches and thus works
in particular on the question of heteropatriarchy based on this double tradition.
Keywords: Marxism, feminism, materialism, queer, political subject, economics, heteropatriarchy, LGBT politics
Subjects: Groups and Identities, Political Philosophy, Political Sociology, Political Values, Beliefs, and Ideologies, Post
Modern/Critical Politics
Context for the Development of Queer Materialism
The relationship between queer and materialist currents is conflictual insofar as it reproduces the
opposition between the poststructuralist tradition analyzing discourses and representations and
the Marxist tradition interested in material social relations. The Foucaultian and queer
“materiality,” which emphasizes the impact of discourses on bodies, and the Marxist “historical
materialism,” which envisages the production of human life through historically located social
labor relations, are considered incompatible (Hennessy, 2000, pp. 54–61). The materialist
approach, whether Marxism, Marxist feminism, or materialist feminism embodied in the French
materialist feminism, denounces the idealistic posture of queer conceptions. They are accused of
abandoning the role of historical and material structures of domination (and in particular modes
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of production and division of labor) in order to highlight the importance of the symbolic
(particularly the cultural construction of identities). Queer thought criticizes the binary
essentialism of Marxist order theories (at work especially in the concept of class struggle). It
highlights the way in which Marxism considers sexuality as a “merely cultural” issue and leads to
a heterocentric bias in research (Butler, 1997a; Floyd, 2009, p. 2, 2014). Materialism reproaches
queer positions for favoring individual, temporary, and local resistance, to the detriment of
collective and global struggles aimed at overthrowing systems of domination. Conversely, queer
perspectives underline that there is no one outside power, and that aiming for “liberation,” such
as the abolition of relationships of domination, is illusory.
However, since the 2000s, forms of articulation between materialist theory and queer theory have
been emerging and have thus created a “queer materialism.” After a predominance of
poststructuralist analyses in the social sciences, particularly in the United Kingdom and the
United States, since the late 1990s, and even more so after the economic crisis of 2008 and the
austerity policies pursued as a result, a materialist shift seems to be taking place (Cervulle &
Rees-Roberts, 2010, pp. 115–117; Rosenberg & Villarejo, 2012). Beyond the impact of the
socioeconomic situation, the challenges specific to academic logic partly explain the
reconfiguration of fields and academic issues that favor the encounter between these two
currents (Butler, 1997b; Garber, 2012; McLaughlin, 2012; Möser, 2013, pp. 157–159). In queer
studies in particular, in some national contexts like the United States, criticism of their
institutionalization, synonymous with disconnection from the activist milieu and a decline in
their critical potential, motivates a growing interest in Marxist studies, which allow a return to a
form of radicality (Eng, Halberstam, & Muñoz, 2005; McLaughlin, 2012; Shapiro, 2004). In the
feminist field, it is the progressive diffusion of approaches rather than the progressive diffusion,
after years of resistance to the introduction of this current of thought, as in France, that would
explain the possibility of articulation with hegemonic materialist feminism.
The recompositions of the Marxist, queer, and feminist militant fields are also decisive in
understanding how these new approaches are developing. The growing legitimacy of feminist and
queer perspectives within the Marxist left is part of an evolution of Marxism on these issues
(Hennessy, 2000; Floyd, 2009; Raha, 2018). Faced with an LGBT movement increasingly focused
on the demand for rights (marriage, market access, and military service), queer activists have
highlighted the economic and social inequalities that these policies induce between LGBTQI
people and have turned to more materialist references to deploy an anticapitalist and antiracist
argument (Bourcier, 2011, p. 299; Duggan & Kim, 2011/2012; Farrow, 2011/2012). Militant
criticism of the transphobia of feminist spaces partly explains the appropriation of a queer
argument in these circles, while the expression of sexism in queer movements gives ammunition
to feminist theories.
If the idea of a meeting between materialism and queer seems to be making its way into various
national situations, it is obvious that specific academic and activist characteristics exist in each
context that generate particular forms of articulation. The challenges of the conjugation between
a materialist perspective and a queer perspective overlap however, studying the links between
capitalism, heteronormativity, and patriarchy; considering differently the relationship between
infrastructure and superstructure in order to shed light on the material conditions that generate
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cultural production and the discourses that shape the relationships of production and
consumption; and analyzing the cosubstantiality between mode of production, division of labor,
and subjectivation processes.
Today, a “queer materialist” trend doesn’t exist as such, because the approaches grouped under
this term are very different and remain largely in the minority. However, it is interesting to look
for a “family resemblance” and to group them together in these various proposals. Two types of
“queer materialist” corpuses can thus be identified. The first concerns queer Marxism, which
seeks to theorize together Marxist and queer concepts and is particularly interested in the
constitution of sexual and gender subjectivities in both a normalization regime and a capitalist
accumulation regime. The second concerns materialist and queer feminism, which confronts
materialist/Marxist feminist thought with queer thought and thus works in particular on the
question of heteropatriarchy based on this double tradition.
If the conceptual and militant stakes opened by this theoretical-political confrontation are
numerous, it would seem that one of the central and common questions is that of the subject in
struggle. There is indeed a lot of tension between the two methods in this regard. Materialism
thinks of the revolutionary subject as a class subject—that is, organized on the basis of a material
oppression considered as objective and unitary: the proletarians in Marxism or the women in
materialist feminism. On the contrary, the queer method undoes on the one hand the idea of a
subject that existed before the struggle and, on the other hand, the desire to create a grouping.
Beyond the inclusion of queer subjects in the revolutionary anticapitalist or feminist subject, the
question is how to think about the combination of two different thoughts about the construction
of the political subject. This questioning raises in the background the specific place of politics in
the economic/cultural diptych. Reflections on hegemony appear to be interesting avenues for
considering answers to this question, in both the corpuses mentioned.
Marxism and Queer Materialism
From the Difficult Relationship to the Confrontation—Materialism as the Main

Issue
The difficult relationship between Marxism and queer theories may have clearly crystallized in
Butler’s 1997a article “Merely Cultural” (Butler, 1997a), from a speech that the American
philosopher gave the previous year at a conference organized by the Marxist journal Rethinking
Marxism. On this occasion, Butler was harshly critical of some of the Marxist milieus, which she
accused of wanting (once again) to “relegate the new social movements,” and particularly the
struggles of sexual minorities, “to the sphere of the cultural, indeed, to dismiss them as being
preoccupied with what is called the ‘merely’ cultural, and then to construe this cultural politics as
factionalizing, identitarian, and particularistic” (Butler, 1997a, p. 265). If the question raised by
Butler against a certain Marxist orthodoxy seeking to constitute a “progressive and unified”
political field is first and foremost a political question that is part of the debates of the Anglo-
Saxon left at the time, it also implies more properly epistemological implications for the
relationship between queer policies, practices, and theories and Marxism. In this sense, this
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intervention also and paradoxically marks the beginning of a renewed dialogue between queer
theory and Marxism. In particular, the debate that Butler initiated in this text on Nancy Fraser’s
theses, which focus on the distinction between redistributive policies and recognition policies
(Fraser, 1997a), highlights a possible misunderstanding on the question of materialism between
the two traditions, but also the desire to show possible points of agreement, particularly on
economic issues.
Materiality, Historical Materialism, and Queer Materialism

Butler rightly pointed out that
The charge that new social movements are “merely cultural” . . . presumes that the
distinction between material and cultural life is a stable one. And this recourse to an
apparently stable distinction between material and cultural life marks the resurgence of a
theoretical anachronism, one that discounts the contributions to Marxist theory since
Althusser’s displacement of the base-superstructure model as well as various forms of
cultural materialism (e.g., Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak).
(1997a, pp. 267–268)
Butler’s criticism of Fraser’s theses actually focused on the topography of the various social
justice policies she proposed. In Justice Interruptus, Fraser characterized the fragmentation of the
contemporary left in terms of an analytical distinction between a policy of “redistribution,”
which responds to injustices rooted in material, socioeconomic structures, and a policy of
“recognition,” which responds instead to various symbolic forms where cultural injustice is
rooted in “representation, interpretation, and communication” (Fraser, 1997a, p. 14). Fraser
argued not only that the paradigmatic example of redistributive politics is class politics or
socialism, but that the paradigmatic example of recognition politics is the politics of sexual
minorities. Race and gender policies, on the other hand, are “bivalent” because they cannot be
characterized solely in terms of one or the other category. She then suggested that the topics
produced by gender and race hierarchies are the “paradigmatic subjects of the redistribution–
recognition dilemma” (1997a, p. 28) that a progressive “post-socialist” politics should strive to
solve. In so doing, however, she suggested that class and sexuality politics are at the extremes of
the redistribution–recognition spectrum and, consequently, two of the most polarized and
irreconcilable forms of contemporary progressive politics, relatively difficult if not impossible to
articulate. On this subject, according to Butler, Fraser “reproduces the division that locates
certain oppressions as part of political economy and relegates others to the exclusively cultural
sphere. Positing a spectrum that spans political economy and culture, she situates lesbian and gay
struggles at the cultural end of this political spectrum” (Butler, 1997a, pp. 270–271).
In her answer in the journal Social Text, Fraser showed, however, that Butler’s criticism implied a
theoretical confusion between the material and the economic. Like Butler, Fraser did not deny
that politics based primarily on a particular status in society, recognition politics, can have a
material or economic impact on the lives of people affected by these statuses. But she insisted on
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the fundamental difference between these politics and the politics based on the political economy
of capitalist societies, such as class. In this sense, for Fraser, “the economic harms of
heterosexism [are] indirect (mal)distributive consequences of the more fundamental injustice of
misrecognition” (Fraser, 1997b, p. 283) rather than a direct expression of the economic structure
of society. Thus, unlike Butler, for whom it would be necessary to transform the economic
structure and the relations of production for a real sexual emancipation, for Fraser it would be
sufficient to “change the relations of recognition and the maldistribution would
disappear” (Fraser, 1997b, p. 283). If the queer philosopher’s charge is essentially against a
certain Marxism, it is almost ironic to note that Fraser’s theorization center is detached from
Marxism by actually proposing a conception of social justice politics based on a Weberian
distinction between “class” and “status.” In any case, this exchange raises at least two
fundamental questions in relation to the possible dialogue between queer theory and Marxism.
On the one hand, Butler sketched—without defining it—a materialistic conception of sexuality
that would take into account the capitalist mode of production. In her subsequent work, Butler
did not ultimately develop the links between sexualities and capitalist relations of production
(Arruzza, 2015, p. 29), but her criticism of orthodox Marxism initiated an important dialogue
with a nonreductionist and noneconomistic Marxism that opened the possibility of a “queer
economic turn” (discussed in the next section).
On the other hand, although Fraser raised the problem of the ambiguity of the category of
“materialism” used by Butler, which would be different from economics, this ambiguity has
nevertheless been productive. Butler’s insistence on the materiality of sexualities and bodies,
which she explored in particular in Bodies That Matter, published in 1993, opens up rich
discussions in queer studies that sometimes seek to build bridges with the materialistic
theorizations of Marxism.
Foucault’s major influence and a radically constructivist approach characterized the early
classical queer theory works. The major interest was then focused on the cultural sphere through
a Foucaultian discursive analysis. In Gender Trouble, first published in 1990, Butler (2006)
focused, for example, on a profound critique of a universal female subject and showed how
sexuality (including the taboo of homosexuality) informs the social construction of gender. She
underlined how the incorporation of heterosexuality determines the construction of gender
difference. This occurs through reiteration and discursive imposition and the power of
performativity of norms. In the same year, Sedgwick, in Epistemology of the Closet (1990),
analyzed and criticized the discursive and cultural forms by which Western culture is
fundamentally structured from heterosexuality/homosexuality bicategorization.
The emphasis that queer theory had placed on discourse and culture in the broad sense had been
the target of criticism, more or less justified, of a lack of reflection on the body and on materiality.
Butler’s book Gender Trouble (1990/2006) was accused of leaving aside the materiality of the
bodies by focusing only on the discursive aspects of their production. In this sense, some feminist
criticisms (including Barad, 2003; Cheah, 1996; Clough, 2007), from the perspective that is now
called the “new ontological materialism” (Coole & Frost, 2010, p. 7), have accused Butler of
treating the matter by reducing it solely to culture. Rather than demonstrating the materiality of
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sexuality, in Bodies That Matter, Butler focused on understanding the sexual construction of the
materiality of bodies. The materiality of bodies is understood as a historically constructed process
through the sedimentation of norms, discursive injunctions, and hierarchizations resulting from
power relations, which result in the naturalization of bodies and sexes.
By analyzing Marxist theorizations of matter and history, Butler found a similarity between her
own approach and the Marxist one, the historical materialism. Yet, unlike Marxist historical
materialism, the history Butler was interested in is a history of the materialization of discourse
and not a history of discourse as informed by determined social relations. In this sense, Butler
emphasized more the importance of the historicity of discursive practice, the procedural
character of “the sedimentation of conventions by which it is produced and becomes
legible” (Butler, 1993, p. 282) than the history of the material conditions under which these
practices are possible (Arruzza, 2015). This conception of materiality is closer to a
phenomenological conception, which is found in Sara Ahmed’s works. In a 2010 publication,
“Orientations Matter,” Ahmed interpreted Butler’s theorization in phenomenological terms. In
her view, this approach
explores how bodies are shaped by histories, which they perform in their posture, and
their gestures. Both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, after all, describe bodily horizons as
“sedimented histories.” This model of history as bodily sedimentation has been taken up
by social theorists as well as philosophers. . . . For Judith Butler, it is precisely how
phenomenology exposes the “sedimentation” of history in the repetition of bodily action
that makes it a useful resource for feminism.
(Ahmed, 2010, p. 246)
By analyzing Marxist theorizations of matter, Ahmed also found a similarity between the
phenomenological approach and the Marxist one. In fact, she emphasized that in Marx’s work,
the temporal factor is essential in his description of “objects.” For Marx, an object is always the
result of humans’ work on a material. Moreover, for Marx, matter itself is the result of humans’
transformation of nature (Ahmed, 2010, pp. 240–243).
If Butler and Ahmed insisted on the similarity of their theorizations of materiality with that of
Marx—both pointed to Marx’s transformative and temporal conception of matter—Kevin Floyd
also noted “the strong resonance of Butler’s analysis with Marx’s rejection of naïve empiricism
and the importance, in this context, of making a distinction on which Marx, but not Butler,
insists, the distinction between the temporal and the historical. For Marx, materiality is not
merely temporal but social and historical” (Floyd, 2009, p. 116).
The conceptualization of the materiality of bodies in Butler and of objects in Ahmed, as in Marx,
thus seems to take into account the interrelation and even the interweaving between the sphere
of culture and discourse and that of matter. However, for Butler and Ahmed, matter is temporal.
For Marx, on the other hand, matter is historical: it can and must be investigated as a result of the
social relations that are given in the history of the different modes of production. The difference
between Butler’s and Ahmed’s “phenomenological” approach and the Marxist approach lies in
Marxism’s taking into account the history of the different and specific modes of production,
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particularly in capitalism. While time remains an important element in both approaches,

Marxism takes into account mainly system effects, while the phenomenological approach focuses
on the intrinsic temporality of matter by adopting a subjective perspective. For Marx, each mode
of production organizes time in a way that is specific to it. If time remains an important element
in both approaches, Marx takes into account “the historically specific way in which time is
organized” (Arruzza, 2015, p. 38) under capitalism, while the phenomenological approach
focuses on the temporality of matter by adopting “a historicity without history” (Arruzza, 2015,
p. 36). For Marx, it is not only a question of taking into account the procedural temporality by
which matter is constituted and transformed by work, but also the specific function that this
work occupies in capitalism. It is no coincidence that Butler’s and Ahmed’s analyses explain the
materiality of bodies or objects according to the conditions under which they are apprehended by
the subjects and by the importance of time in the processes of incorporating norms or
subjectivity. Moreover, in capitalism, we find intertwined discordant and conflicting
temporalities (Bensaïd, 2002; Tomba, 2014) that must be taken into account. Despite Butler and
Ahmed’s attempts to approach Marxism, the failure of these queer theorists to take into account
the effects of the capitalist mode of production and economics remains an important obstacle to
the possibility of sharing a common conception of materialism. Between the late 1990s and early
2000s, however, there was an attempt, led by queer and queer Marxist authors together, to tackle
the economic effects of capitalism and thus continue the dialogue between Marxism and queer
theories.
The “Economic Turn” of the Second Queer Wave
Introduction: A Renewal and Two Directions

While, as Michael Warner pointed out, the first wave of queer theory was based on
“dissatisfaction with the regime of the normal” (1993, p. xxvii), focusing almost exclusively on
the “cultural constitution of the sexual subject,” a second queer wave focused on the “economic
relations of sexuality” (Merck, 2004, p. 82). This “economic turn” can be considered in at least
two fields of study, which nevertheless remain closely linked: a renewal of criticism centered on
race and sexuality in the “diaspora,” which is confronted with the effects of globalization, and a
critique of the commodification and normalization of sexualities linked to neoliberalism.
The Political Economy of Race

In 1997, in the introduction to the special issue of Social Text, “Queer Transexions of Race, Nation
and Gender,” edited by Philip Brian Harper, Ann McClintock, José Esteban Muñoz, and Trish
Rosen, the authors considered that taking into account the “interrelations of sexuality, race and
gender in a transnational context attempts to bring the projects of queer, postcolonial and critical
race theories together with each other and with a feminist analytic that itself has been a key
factor in the critic of social identity” (Harper et al., 1997, p. 1). A few years later, in the
introduction to a collective work, Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé and Martin Manalansan IV affirmed that
“Queerness is now global” (2002, p. 1). Through this formula, the two authors also criticized gay,
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lesbian, and queer studies that had produced knowledge almost exclusively based on the history
of the movements of white Euro-American sexual minorities. This postcolonial theoretical shift
sought to provincialize sexual epistemology and the sites of application of queer theories,
particularly by taking into account issues of race, ethnicity, and nationality which, despite the
initial wishes expressed, had too often remained at the margins of queer studies. Criticism of
capitalism and a close analysis of the phenomena of circulation and globalization are central to
these studies.
Beyond the influence of postcolonial and subaltern studies that became fundamental at that time
in the Anglo-Saxon university, this critical approach was nourished by the materialist tradition of
cultural studies, in which questions of race and ethnicity are treated in relation to economic
issues and always in a more global political perspective of criticism of capitalism. One of the queer
authors who, in recent years, has used Marxism the most is Roderick Ferguson. Ferguson stressed
that “queer of color critique approaches culture as one site that compels identifications with and
antagonisms to the normative ideals promoted by state and capital” (Ferguson, 2004, p. 3). In
this sense, the queer of color critique shows a marked interest in materiality and uses Marxism,
among other things, to propose a materialistic approach to race, gender, and sexuality. Yet, while
Ferguson acknowledged the ability of Marxist criticism, particularly in Althusser, to take into
account the intertwining of the sphere of culture and economics, he also criticized the ideological
familiarities between Marxist tradition, liberalism, and “revolutionary nationalism,” which are
all based on a deterministic and reductionist treatment of race, gender, and sexuality. In this way,
Ferguson continued and amplified Butler’s criticism of a certain “orthodox Marxism,”
emphasizing how reductionist and economic Marxism inherited from liberal ideology the
conception that race, gender, and sexualities would be fundamentally independent elements of
the economic sphere (Ferguson, 2004, p. 3). The queer of color critique “denotes an interest in
materiality, but refuses ideologies of transparency and reflection, ideologies that have helped to
constitute Marxism, revolutionary nationalism, and liberal pluralism” (Ferguson, 2004, p. 3).
Unlike Marxism and revolutionary nationalism, for which race and class were only secondary
issues in thinking about economic relations and nation, queer of color critique
opts instead for an understanding of nation and capital as the outcome of manifold
intersections that contradict the idea of the liberal nation-state and capital as sites of
resolution, perfection, progress, and confirmation. Indeed, liberal capitalist ideology
works to suppress the diverse components of state and capitalist formations. To the
extent that Marxism and revolutionary nationalism disavow race, gender, and sexuality’s
mutually formative role in political and economic relations is the extent to which liberal
ideology captivates revolutionary nationalism and Marxism.
(Ferguson, 2004, pp. 3–4)
Ferguson then proposed analyses of race and sexuality that gave Marxism an important place,
while establishing a critical dialogue with it. For Ferguson, it was a matter of criticizing those
aspects of Marxism that have failed to take into account the intersections of race, gender, and
sexuality as fundamental components of capitalist society. Taking up a concept of Muñoz (1999),
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Ferguson proposed a method of “disidentification” to use class and race as useful categories of
analysis for thinking about gender and sexualities of color. Through the work of disidentification,
Ferguson emphasized the importance of rethinking the categories of historical materialism to
assess its effectiveness and relevance for the study of the materiality of race, gender, and
sexuality (Ferguson, 2004, p. 5), “from the perspective of a minority subject who is in a lower
position in a representational hierarchy” (Muñoz, 1999, p. 25). Criticizing Fraser’s theses,
Ferguson warned against the limits of simply recognizing queer of color subjects and instead
emphasized the need to approach these subjects as knowledge sites in their own right. Ferguson
argued that, in “this historical moment characterized by the normalization of racialized class
formations, we need modes of analysis that can address normativity as an object of inquiry and
critique” (Ferguson, 2004, p. 148), modes of analysis that he found precisely in historical
materialism thus disidentified. According to Ferguson, the disidentification of Marxist categories
by the queer of color critique is all the more important because this approach poses itself within
the mode of criticism known as historical materialism. It is indeed a question of understanding
the racialization of class from the queer of color subject, from its particular historical
positionality in capitalism, because it is the intersection between class, race, gender, and
sexuality that gives it a specific epistemological point of view within historical materialism.
Criticism of the liberal logic of empowerment of the economic and cultural spheres also crosses
other authors of queer theory who more specifically analyze the effects of the capitalist economy
on contemporary sexual subjectivities and/or racialized subjectivities. These analyses are based
on the understanding of neoliberalism both as a specific form of capital accumulation and as an
ideological and political system of body government through a market redefinition of public/
private division, the promotion of personal responsibility and individual autonomy, and the
promotion of freedom of choice, including the freedom to buy.
Consumption, Neoliberalism, and the “New Homonormativity.”

In a 2002 article analyzing particularly equality politics for and from sexual minorities, Duggan
pointed out that neoliberalism has produced a specific “sexual policy” that she called the “new
homonormativity” and defined as “a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative
assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains them while promising the possibility of
demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity
and consumption” (Duggan, 2002, p. 179). She then sought to study homonormativity in relation
to the specific political economy of contemporary Western societies. The article considers that the
transition from the “revolutionary” demands of the 1970s to the assimilation and normalization
policies of the 1990s and 2000s is the result of a historical change in the accumulation pattern in
capitalist societies. Inclusion and assimilation policies, such as demands for equality and for the
right to marriage and adoption, for example, are part of a new neoliberal historical phase of
governance of bodies and sexualities because they reproduce the logic of market expansion,
commodification, consumption, privatization, and individual responsibility. The institution of
marriage is fundamentally based on the logic of emotional exclusivity and the privatization of
sexuality, in addition to being the main place of consumption of late capitalism.
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Since the 1990s, the neoliberal process of extreme differentiation and isolation of claims policies
has also affected sexual minority policies. Michael Warner explained that normalization is
achieved through demands for equal rights by eliminating the “difference” of queer subjects. In
fact, he pointed out that this has occurred mainly through a process of “purification” and
“gentrification” by which LGBT subjects, particularly gay ones, have been culturally re-evaluated
as desexualized normative citizens (Warner, 1999; see also Schulman, 2013).
From a Marxist point of view, however, in an article published in 1998, four years before Lisa
Duggan introduced the concept in 2002, Kevin Floyd considered the question of homonormativity
as “the entanglement of capital with a range of marginalized sexualities” (Floyd, 1998). He
showed how historically the logic of Fordism and consumption were at the same time the
conditions of possibility of the emergence of sexual identities and at the same time the reasons
for their minorization and social exclusion.
Alexandra Chasin (2000) suggested that from the 1970s onward in the United States there has
been an increase in the interest of large firms to create market niches specifically dedicated to
particular ethnic or cultural groups of consumers. This “cultural marketing” has used cultural
“diversity” as an indicator and economic imperative. In the 1990s, based on market research
focused on subjects with higher purchase value (middle-class or higher White gay men), “gay
marketing” through advertising campaigns produced a gay visibility characterizing LGBT
subjects “in general” as subjects with high purchasing power (see also Floyd, 2009).
The entanglement of sexual identities and capitalism is also the main subject of David Eng’s The
Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialisation of Intimacy. In fact, in this work, Eng
stressed that while the lives of many lesbians and gays in the Global North have benefited from
the social tolerance and equality policies of recent years, not all gay and lesbian subjects have
been able to enjoy these benefits. Given the rich history of LGBT activism since the 1970s, which
has challenged the dominant cultural norms of gender and sexuality, more recently we are
witnessing policies and cultures that Eng defined as “queer liberalism,” which have been
institutionalized particularly through the struggle for rights. Focusing on the United States, Eng
described this queer liberalism as a “contemporary confluence of the political and economic
spheres that forms the basis for the liberal inclusion of particular gay and lesbian U.S. citizen-
subjects petitioning for rights and recognition before the law” (Eng, 2010, p. 3). Analyzing the
2003 Lawrence v. Texas case, which decriminalized sodomy in the United States among consenting
adults in the private sphere, Eng pointed out that the political recognition of sexuality as an
activity relegated to privacy builds a cultural and ideological privilege around domestic intimacy,
the monogamous couple, and a form of “good citizenship” (p. 25).
Lisa Duggan and Diane Richardson noted that the openness to citizenship rights and relative
social tolerance accorded to some contemporary LGBT subjects had led to the emergence of a
division of class and race at the same time. The social acceptance and normalization of
homosexuality were achieved by valuing a certain type of homosexual subjectivity, that of the
White and middle-class gay and lesbian, relegating for the most part other sexual and racial
subjectivities to the abnormal and the abject. The inclusive model that represents the stable
couple has shifted the boundaries of the socially acceptable, leading to the enhancement of a gay
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and lesbian subjectivity mostly privatized, made commercially acceptable, and available for
consumption. In fact, as Ann Pellegrini (2002) and Lisa Peñaloza, among others, argued, the
cultural production of gay and lesbian subjects as “consumers” has produced in these subjects a
“deep sense of social validation and legitimacy” (2008, p. 306), because they were thus
integrated with the neoliberal rhetoric of the market and consumption as sites of democratic
emancipation. Several authors, such as David Evans (1993), David Bell and John Binnie (2000),
and Davina Cooper (2004), have highlighted the participation in the market of lesbians and gays
as consumers—and their support for, and adherence to, cultural norms and dominant values—as
fundamental tools for social inclusion.
From subjects considered dangerous, sick, foreign, or with little to offer to society, through
normalization passing through consumption, lesbians and gays are now evaluated as citizens
worthy of inclusion because they are able to bring values and models of affection and mutual love
within a stable couple relationship, thus supporting the heteronormative hegemony. This process
of normalization within traditional models is explained by the reduction or cultural elimination
of the “difference” of these subjects (for trans subjects see Raha, 2017).
However, as Richardson (2005) reminded us, in analyzing the phenomena of normalization it is

important not to consider the internalization of heteronormative and self-discipline norms as a
fundamentally original characteristic of some “new” neoliberal homosexual subject. In fact,
Richardson remembered, “It is a condition of their social oppression that lesbians and gay men
have long been self-reflexive, self-regulating sexual subjects. The realities of living lives in ‘the
closet’, a ‘life shaping’ social pattern that involves episodes of passing and coming out, both
necessitates and shapes a self-monitoring self” (p. 523).
The novelty then lies in a reconfiguration of the “self-police” imposed by homophobia and
shame, and the desire for normality and respectability through processes of neoliberal
government of self-control with a will to integration and assimilation. Steven Seidman (2005)
recalled that the assimilationist and reformist doctrine, which tries to convince society that gay
and lesbian subjects are citizens “like others” and therefore pushes for the end of discrimination,
has always been the majoritarian one in homosexual formations.
Nevertheless, the combined effect of the neoliberal regime and consumer capitalism, which are
mainly aimed at gay and White lesbian, cisgender, middle-class formations—that is, those who
have real purchasing power and who profit more from rights, increasing their visibility—has
produced an ideological discourse that these formations would be numerically predominant
within the LGBT communities. Such visibility and the hegemonic discourse on the predominance
of these formations reveal a phenomenon of naturalization of what Floyd (2009) called the
“capital-intensive terms of visibility” (p. 200).
In the current neoliberal period, material interests of homonormative formations, their class and
race interests (which are expressed in the claims of marriage, for example), coincide with the
hegemonic neoliberal interests in privatization and financialization of spaces and affectivities.
For Janet Jakobsen (2012), “The sexual relations of heteronormativity naturalize the realm of
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production: both the production of laborers and the organization of wage labor. Sex is not just a
matter of ‘family values’ but a matter of the particular organization of the production of
value” (p. 27).
In The Reification of Desire (2009), Floyd remarked indeed how “the state would, through an
extension of the logic of marriage, privatize the non-heterosexual practices and knowledges that
gay liberation, in the seventies, sought to make so radically public that they might compel a
radical rethinking of the very distinction between public and private” (p. 209). The incitement to
respectability, to be normal, to access heterosexual advantages granted by the state, creates the
conditions for a cultural dispossession of social practices, affectivities, and spaces that gays and
lesbians have created and invented because of their particular position in social relations since
the 1970s.
It is therefore a question of considering homonormativity as a new articulation of power,

constituting a reconfiguration of the ideological apparatus of the neoliberal hegemony of
capitalist societies (Rebucini, 2013, 2017). Duggan (2003) insisted that the process of
homogenizing gay and lesbian formations rests on a wider and simultaneous disintegration and
isolation of these formations (see also Drucker, 2011) and their estrangement from policies of
transformation of the social totality, especially feminist, antiracist, and anticapitalist policies. In
Michael Warner’s words, the homonormative policies call into question the search for that
“queer planet” (Warner, 1993) that Floyd (2009) interpreted as a willingness to invest the totality
of the social world through a “queerization,” and therefore a radical transformation of the
societies of advanced capitalism from a queer position and a queer vision of the world.
Materialist and Queer Feminism
From Opposition to the Articulation Between Feminism and the Queer Move
ment
Queer Marxist works renew Marxist reflections from a queer point of view. They do not confront
the queer approach with the materialist feminist perspective. In this sense, while they very
interestingly link the analysis of sexualities to that of the capitalist system, they do not consider
heteropatriarchy as a specific mode of production and as a system of particular oppression of
women. It is therefore a question of observing here the particular encounter between queer and
materialist feminists’ perspectives.
A strong confrontation has long characterized, and continues to characterize to some extent, the
relationship between feminism and queer movements. This cleavage crystallizes in particular on
the relationship between gender and sexuality. The feminist movement blames queer theories for
ignoring how men’s systemic domination over women determines sexual issues. The queer
movement claims that feminism subordinates sexuality to gender. It would thus fail to account
for the specificity and autonomy of sexuality in the social sphere and would lead to a heterosexist
bias (Richardson, 2012). Radical feminists have criticized the queer position based on an analysis
rooted in Marxist thought (Cameron & Scanlon, 2010). They indicate in that respect that women
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and men constitute opposing classes, because they have opposing interests, with men receiving
material privileges through their domination over women. According to them, queer theory could
not be feminist, because it dilutes the specificity of men’s domination over women and renounces
the overthrow of the gender system. Queer theorists and activists show that radical feminism
renews bi-categorizations (especially male/female) that are exclusive and thus perpetuates
oppressive gender norms.
However, the willingness to bring together materialist feminism and queer methods is
developing in different ways. Some contest the opposition between feminism and queer insofar as
it does not take into account the diversity of each movement and thus homogenizes complex
currents (Richardson, McLaughlin, & Casey, 2012). A more precise genealogy shows how the
materialist feminist also develops a central analysis of the production of subjectivities, and not
just a macro analysis of systems of domination (Guillaumin, 1995; Wittig, 1992). Materialist
political lesbianism presents heterosexuality as a political regime that produces gender division
and hierarchy. With compulsory heterosexuality seen as structuring the gender system, “lesbians
are not women” (Wittig, 1992) because they largely escape subordination to men in the context of
heterosexuality. Homosexuality is thus a way of resistance to the submission of women and of
defeating the gender partition. Queer feminist theories, largely developed by lesbian theorists,
discuss and/or claim in part this legacy of radical lesbian, and in particular Wittigian, approaches
(Butler, 2006; De Lauretis, 2007). Beyond these materialist lesbian references, queer reflections
draw on Marxist theories, which they partly take up (Dorlin & Girard, 2007). Rubin anchored his
initial work in Marxism in order to analyze women’s domestic work as a support for the
reproduction of capitalism (Rubin, 1975). Teresa de Lauretis referred more to cultural studies,
which tries to reconcile materialism and ideology by using, for example, the concept of hegemony
(De Lauretis, 1987). The queer of color theories are largely inspired by the feminism of color and
the feminism of the “American Third World,” which are part of a materialist approach, even if
they subsequently incorporate postmodern reflections (see Bacchetta & Falquet, 2011). The
controversy between materialist feminism and queer theory sets aside points of view that
nevertheless make the link between the two, such as postcolonial feminist writings, which, since
the 1980s, have articulated materialist and poststructuralist analyses (Garber, 2012). Some focus
on showing the points of convergence between the two currents: a constructivist approach, which
shows that gender and sexuality are socially constructed and that gender produces sex; a critique
of heterosexuality; and radical horizons of struggle that result in opposition to rights policies
(Cameron & Scanlon, 2010; Noyé, 2017). Others identify the contributions of each trend in order to
compare the best of each perspective, for example, the emphasis on gender hierarchy on the one
hand, and the plurality of gender and sexuality experiences on the other (Eichner, 2009; Garber,
2012; Lamoureux, 2005; Richardson, 2012). Others are interested in how the combination of the
two approaches transforms theory and practice (Fourment, 2020; Noyé, 2016). The explicit
queer-materialist association, which truly inaugurates a new feminist and queer paradigm, is
still little theorized and seems to be more realized in militant practice than in political thought.
Indeed, a queer feminist militant movement has been emerging since the late 1990s, changing
both the categories of analysis and the repertoires of militant action. Some groups, notably the
Pink Panthers, have played a role as translator in this theoretical and practical crossing (Pagé,
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2017). Although in the literature, postmodern feminism appears to be the intersection of

feminism and queer theory (Marinucci, 2010, p. 128), militant queer feminism nevertheless
claims a materialist and queer feminist heritage. This hybridization challenges the generational
argument that feminism belongs to one generation and queer to another (Halberstam, 2012;
Richardson, 2012). On the contrary, young people appropriate older feminist ideas and radical
feminists of the 1970s and 1980s become familiar with queer ideas (Fourment, 2017; Möser, 2013,
pp. 148–152).
While there is little theoretical literature on the combination of feminism and queer, it should be
noted that these proposals envisage a confrontation between feminist theory in general and queer
theory without specifying which feminist current this is. Reference is often made to radical
feminism, which is poorly defined apart from highlighting the fundamental and systemic
antagonism between men and women, and patriarchy as the common, central, and main
oppression of women. It is perhaps more interesting to question how materialist feminism in
particular, claiming an analysis of a Marxist nature, is articulated with a queer approach, since in
militant practice it is on the basis of these references that articulations take place, but also
because the stakes of their encounter are specific. It is difficult to distinguish the different
tendencies within this materialist feminism, as it varies according to contexts, thus modifying
the content of theoretical and militant transformations. In France, so-called radical/materialist
feminism is the most present, while in other countries, such as Italy or Germany, it is more
Marxist feminism that is influential.
These militant practices of hybridization between materialist and queer feminism, which are
quite recent, and the few studies that accompany them, raise the possibilities but also the
difficulties of confronting the two fields, particularly concerning the understanding of gender
and sexual domination and the identification of the feminist subject.
The Material and Discursive Roots of the Cis-Heteropatriarchy

The combination of materialist feminism and the queer approach reaffirms the centrality of the
notion of “patriarchy” but considers the different mechanisms of its expression. On the one
hand, there is an analysis in terms of stable structures of domination and an analysis in terms of
diffuse and multiple power relations. On the other hand, gender and sexual domination are
understood within a global system of oppression, the “cis-heteropatriarchy.”
Materiality and Discursivity

Radicality characterizes materialist and queer feminism. It is opposed to integration strategies
with the state and oriented toward systemic anticapitalist and antiracist claims. These policies are
based on challenging gender and sexual oppression at its “roots.” The particularity of this
perspective is to link and equate the so-called material and cultural roots, and thus to challenge
the hierarchy of one phenomenon over another, but also the opposition and even the difference
between the two mechanisms. One of the specificities of a combination between materialist
feminism and queer theory is the reformulation of the Marxist relationship between
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infrastructure and superstructure. While materialist feminists have not denied the influence of
representations on social relations, they have generally adopted the ideological model, thus
prioritizing the material base over cultural issues (Barrett & McIntosh, 1979; Cervulle & Clair,
2017, pp. 10–11). Conversely, queer theorists relatively consider the materiality of cultural issues
but in a marginal way (Richardson et al., 2012, p. 12). Thus, one avenue opened up by the
articulation of materialist feminism and queer conceptualizations is to better understand the
material and cultural co-production of gender and sexuality, for example by reviving the
Wittigian tradition, which worked on the materiality of language (Kunert, 2016), with the corpus
of cultural studies or Marxist intellectual history, such as Althusser’s work on the material
existence of ideology (Benoit, 2016), or that of Laclau and Mouffe on the political construction of
material interests in a Gramscian tradition (Noyé, 2016).
Second, the challenge of a confrontation between materialist and queer feminism is to more
specifically understand gender as a mode of production and as a performance (Hennessy, 2012).
The aim is to revive feminist, materialist, and Marxist surveys focusing on the gendered division
of productive and reproductive labor as a basis for gender difference and hierarchy, and to study
patriarchy as a mode of production (household work, unpaid domestic or commercial production
—agricultural, commercial, handicraft, secretarial work, etc.—education of children, and care
work) and the links it may have with the capitalist system. The idea is to observe how the specific
exploitation of women in this work is accompanied by the constant repetition of gender norms,
constructed in specific power relations of pathologization, inferiorization, and marginalization.
Gender is thus understood as patriarchy (i.e., the economic and social organization of male
domination), and as discursive production, which is assignment to normative gender identities
through organizational structures of reality (scholarly, legal, media discourse, etc.), operating
social divisions, particularly between the normal and the deviant (Hennessy, 1993; Taylor, 2010).
A trans materialist current emerges, abandoning the essentially symbolic and discursive
approach to trans positions developed by queer theories, which are accused of decorporalizing
trans issues and denying their material reality. In a materialist and Marxist analysis, it is a matter
of considering trans paths and experiences in a class analysis (Caldwell, 2017; Escalante, 2018;
Gleeson, 2017; Irving, 2012; Irving & Raj, 2014). In particular, the gender transition is seen as a
social, economic, and legal phenomenon (Beaubatie, 2017). These studies highlight the violence,
material hardship, precariousness, and economic exploitation that trans people face, particularly
trans women of color, who are often forced to work in the sex industry (Spade, 2011). Bourcier and
Preciado examined the ways in which “pharmacopornographic capitalism” subjects bodies to
heteronormative order and control and makes a profit from them (Bourcier, 2019; Preciado,
2013a, 2013b). Emphasizing the socioeconomic reality of trans people, the studies focus on the
cross-domination of class and race (Currah & Stryker, 2017; Faye, 2018).
Finally, it will be possible to emphasize the importance of articulating properly systemic

conceptualizations, highlighting the structural and stable nature of social gender reproductions,
and reflections highlighting the more local and diffuse nature of gender power relations
(Bannerji, 1995; Blackwood, 2005). The challenge is then to articulate a Marxian constructivism
with a Foucaultian constructivism. The first presents a macropolitical constructivism that focuses
on social structures and social totality and emphasizes how they reproduce domination. The
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second is a constructivism more focused on micropolicies. It underlines the multiple resistances

within the power system. Thus, the hybridization of the two perspectives suggests that gender is
a social relationship that reproduces itself systematically but is flawed in its repetition, because
the process of reproducing norms is always likely to be destabilized.
This confrontation makes it possible to combine the understanding of gender, as a production of

hierarchical gender classes, men and women, with a gender analysis, which is the construction of
gender identities according to the “male/female” normative dichotomy.
Gender and Sexuality

Here, feminism and queer theory have been criticized for having their own objects or for favoring
at least one of the axes in research (gender/sexuality), and the challenge of queer feminism is to
intimately articulate the two (Marinucci, 2010, p. 140). The notion of “cis-heteropatriarchy”
makes it possible to designate this close link between gender domination and sexuality. This term
refers to the continuum between sexism, homophobia, and cisgenrocentrism, particularly insofar
as these oppressions are based on the rejection of what is perceived as deviant and/or inferior in
terms of hierarchical gender and sexual norms. Heteronormativity, the promotion of mandatory
heterosexuality and the exclusion of other forms of sexuality, is part of the domination of the
male class over the female class, as a continuation of radical lesbian and queer analyses.
Cisgenrocentrism, a rejection of any practice of gender otherness—that is, the failure to respect
social norms of gender and coherence between “sex” and “gender” (Espineira, Thomas, &
Alessandrin, 2012, pp. 293–294)—is a corollary of heteropatriarchy.
This articulation between feminist and queer perspectives opens up new reflections on the notion
of heterosexuality. There is convergence on the criticism of compulsory heterosexuality (Jackson,
2012; Rich, 1980) and the institution of marriage (Meeks & Stein, 2012; Richardson, McLaughlin,
& Casey, 2012). The difficulty, however, lies in combining a radical feminist conception of
heterosexuality as a patriarchal institution that subjugates women with a queer consideration of
heteronormative oppression of nonstraight sexuality. The challenge of articulating the two is to
analyze heterosexuality in a dual continuum: material and discursive oppression; oppression of
heterosexual women and nonstraight sexuality. The combination of the two approaches gives rise
to a renewed critique of compulsory and normative heterosexuality, through reflections on the
nonnormative practices of heterosexual women (Carroll, 2012; Showden, 2012) or on the exit
from heterosexuality as a way out of the sex/gender system and patriarchy as well.
Abolish Patriarchy and Subvert Norms

Materialist and queer convergence inaugurates a reflection on emancipation both in terms of
subversion of gender and sexuality norms and in terms of the abolition of the gender system. The
claim of both heritages gives rise to activism promoting sexual and gender “subversion” and the
“abolition” of structural inequalities between women and men. If the proclaimed horizon is that
of the end of gender as a hierarchical partition system, it can be conceived from the multiplication
of genders and the disruption, here and now, of the gender order. Alongside strategies to
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denounce systemic male domination, there is also the claim of and experimentation with
nonstraight sexual and corporal practices that escape gendered normative criteria, such as
feminist pornography and queer praxis that reveal gender as performance.
The mode of action of the feminist collective La Barbe, for example, which assumes a dual
materialist and queer feminist filiation, is to invade power spaces composed solely of men,
wearing false beards. The militant gesture aims to denounce both the male privileges conferred
by the patriarchal system and to disturb gender boundaries by playing the “bearded
women” (Cannat, Cenival, Hirshorn, Mouzon, & Vernet, 2017). Activists use the practice of radical
cheerleading or “pink silver,” conceived as gender performance (which consists in overplaying
femininity to better deconstruct the stereotypes it implies) in demonstration sites making
antisystemic claims, against patriarchy, racism, or capitalism, as in the case of pink toy blocks
(Fourment, 2017, pp. 56–57; Lorenzi, 2015, pp. 323–343; Marinucci, 2010, p. 146). It is a question
of both deconstructing the binarity of the categories of sex and making visible the material
oppression it produces.
The claim of pro-sex feminism also seems to reveal a queer materialist articulation. At the
intersection of a materialist feminist analysis that conceives of sexuality from the perspective of
male domination and a queer analysis that explores the possibilities of subjectivation in
sexuality, the aim is to claim a form of positive sexuality that does not ignore the issue of sexual
violence and the gender hierarchy in sexuality. The meeting of radical feminism, such as “the
‘theory of no’ to heterosexuality's male gender power,” and the queer approach, such as “the
‘theory of yes’ to the defiant possibilities of sex,” thus gives rise to “the theory of
maybe” (Showden, 2012, p. 3). Materialist and queer feminist reflection can thus work on
alternative forms of pornography, respectful of the working and decision-making conditions of
the actors and attentive to the nonrenewal of homo/hetero or male/female distinction in sexual
practices (Marinucci, 2010, pp. 147–148). The issue of prostitution also reveals an intermediate
position. Where materialist feminists argue that prostitution lies within the continuum of
exploitation and appropriation of women’s bodies and sexuality in patriarchy, queer influence
views it more as sex work, which may appear as a choice and possibility of agency (Showden,
2012). It may then become possible to understand prostitution in the continuum of women’s
economic and sexual exchange (Tabet, 2004) and women’s reproductive work (Fortunati, 1995),
while proposing alternatives to abolitionist demands (Merteuil, 2014).
A New Feminist Subject, Between the Class of Women and the Queer Multitudes
Deconstruction and Reconstruction of the Subject “Women.”

Queer feminism articulates both a deconstruction enterprise of the category “women,” inspired
by queer thoughts, and a claim of this category in the materialist feminist tradition considering
the class of women as the subject of feminism. Indeed, whether in language practices or in the
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existence of women-only spaces, there is a tension at work between the need to de-essentialize
the category “women” and the need to use it to designate the fight against patriarchy and the
specific oppression of women as a dominated social group.
Discursive counterpractice strategies show a queer influence. They highlight in particular the
socially constructed nature of the category “women” and the risk of essentialization included in
the use of this term. Activists use formulations like “person educated as a woman” or “persons
assigned ‘woman’ at birth,” or they put quotation marks or an asterisk in the expression
“women” to emphasize that this term results from power relations and discursive assignment
(Lorenzi, 2015, pp. 320–322). The refusal to repeat binary gender analyses and to stick to a “men/
women” opposition explains the reluctance to use this term and to make it the subject of the
struggle. To avoid the exclusionary dimension of this category for gender-queer and nonbinary
persons, queer feminists prefer to use gender-neutral language, with terms like hir, ze, or hirself
(Marinucci, 2010, p. 95). Finally, inspired by a queer perspective attentive to the particularity of
each identity, queer feminists assert that the category “women” hides the subjective singularity
of oppression. This activism does not seek to bring each person’s background into a generalizing
theory, emphasizing the same belonging to an oppressed class according to a privileged axis of
power, but values personal experience and the extreme multiplicity of members’ identities.
However, the materialist feminist heritage counterbalances this imperative of deconstruction of

binary categories, because it is vigilant not to fall into the negation of the “real” and specific
oppression of women by men, whether concerning sexual violence, the division of labor,
speaking, or moving in the public space. The queer approach is thus criticized because it
minimizes this domination by emphasizing the fluidity of identities and criticizing identity
stability. For example, alongside using nongendered words, queer feminists try to feminize the
language (Lorenzi, 2015, pp. 318–319). Furthermore, women-only spaces seem to have once
again become a militant imperative since the 1990s in queer feminist collectives. The women-
only spaces are claimed as a radical/materialist feminist heritage, which helps to counter men’s
structural domination over women. While feminists pointed to the disappearance of the
specificity of women and lesbians and the reaffirmation of the dominant male subject in queer
movements (Pagé, 2017, pp. 544–548), queer feminism maintains a study close to that of
materialism, considering that women, as a class exploited and oppressed by the men’s class,
remain a relevant subject in the feminist struggle.
Beyond the reaffirmation of the subject “women” as a class of sex, nonmixed organization is
indicative of a materialist analysis of how to construct a political subject politically. Against the
queer imperative of disrupting identity categories, it reintroduces a “separatist” and binary
analysis between an “us” and a “them,” based on a materialist reflection opposing the camp of
the dominant to that of the dominated.
Page 18 of 28
A Plural and Temporary Subject

However, queer politics, while seeking to destabilize binary oppositions, have also constructed an
“us” as opposed to the heterosexual system. The combination of materialist and queer
perspectives thus largely reconfigures the feminist political subject. The subject “women” is
never claimed as the only feminist subject, which mostly encompasses “women, dykes, trans.” It
also includes gender-queer and intersex people, and sometimes gay men. It can be said that the
feminist subject, in a materialist and queer interpretation, is both the class of women and the
“queer multitudes” (Preciado, 2003), both in terms of the identity of the persons concerned and
also in terms of the way they are treated.
If materialist analysis tends to consider trans people in the oppressor’s camp, either because they
have left it and have therefore been socialized as men (MtF), or because they join it and then
enjoy the privileges (FtM; Chedaleux, 2017; Merckx, 2013), queer feminism of the 2000s, on the
contrary, views trans issues and experiences as feminist issues (Trujillo, 2009, 2011). Queer
feminism thus develops in close connection with transfeminism insofar as queer influence would
have played a particular role in bringing trans issues to the feminist struggle, for example
regarding the depathologization of trans people (Navarro, 2019, p. 8; Outrans, 2012, p. 177). But
queer transfeminism should be distinguished from materialist transfeminism (Koyama, 2003),
taking up the trans materialist perspectives developed above.
From a traditional acceptance as a struggle for women’s equality or emancipation, the “feminist
mission” is “to advocate for women and other people oppressed, exploited, and otherwise
marginalized by patriarchal and misogynistic systems and people” (Collective, 2013). On the
other hand, if queer movements could be characterized by nonstraight affiliations, it is now
possible to ally with straight women from a queer position (Navarro, 2019, p. 3). The international
feminist strike movement on March 8 is interesting from this point of view, as it occurs in many
trans-queer-feminist contexts (for example, in Argentina and Italy). If the strike is used as a tool
of struggle, and therefore serves to promote the strictly material stakes of gender domination,
the call mentions not only that it is a women’s strike but also sometimes a “women's and gender
strike . . . against violence against women and/or LGBTIQA persons” (Collectif, 2017). It is thus a
question of building “a ‘we’ that embraces women, lesbians, transvestites, trans people, and all
the dissident identities of the cis-hetero-patriarchy” (Collectif Ni Una Menos, 2018).
The separated spaces are for women and “queer multitudes.” A dilemma arises between
deconstruction of gender and sexual identities on the one hand and separated spaces that
reaffirm identity assignments on the other. There is then a contradiction between the need to
recreate boundaries (who is included/excluded from the separated activist spaces) and the
imperative not to recreate essentialist assignments based on physical recognition (Robles, 2018).
One of the solutions to this problem that has been found is to have collectives base their action on
“felt” and therefore nonobjective identities. Separated spaces exist for people who “feel
concerned” or “feel part of” the “girls, dykes, trans” categories, thus largely transforming the
materialist perspective of identity (Fourment, 2017, p. 63). Creating separated spaces in the
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feminist movement has a different meaning. It is not seen as the consequence and the means, or
not only, of the class struggle of the sex classes. It is seen as a tool for everyone to disassociate
themselves from the norms that have constructed them as gendered individuals.
This feminist subject here is strongly rooted in a queer tradition where the subject is plural. It
values the diversity and uniqueness of its members more than their unity. Queer influence is also
present in the temporary nature of the common identification. If a “we” emerges, especially in
the formulation of who can participate in separated collectives, it is changing. This subject is
flexible. It could be based on oppression of gender (girls, dykes, trans people), gender and
sexuality (women and queer people), sexuality (nonstraight sexuality), or race. This “we”
depends on the identification of a “they” that is also not fixed and varies according to the
identification of certain alliances. Sometimes they are “cis men,” sometimes “straight cis men,”
sometimes “White cis men,” and so on.
There is thus a tension between queer post-identity assertion, which seeks to proliferate
identities, and materialist claiming of systematically oppressed identities, making “men” the
“main enemy” (Pagé, 2017, p. 541). The articulation of materialist feminism and queer
movements reformulates the analysis of the construction of the political subject. While the notion
of class may remain relevant to designating common material interests shared by women, they
are not considered as objective but as the result of a discursive and political construction. The
notion of queer multitudes is interesting in testifying to the diversity and fluidity of political
subjects, but it does not sufficiently designate the antagonistic and unitary nature of the queer
feminist subject. The hegemonic construction process of the political subject may then be
relevant to consider this tension between class and multitudes, because it envisages political
regrouping, beyond the affirmation of individual specificities and identity rejection, but also
affirms its nonessentialist character, because it is politically constructed.
Conclusion
The articulation between materialist feminisms and queer perspectives proposes a new
conception of the domination of gender and sexuality, now understood in a material and
discursive continuum of “cis-heteropatriarchy.” The queer and feminist political subject is plural
and moving, between class and multitudes.
Further Reading
Camfield, D. (2016). Theoretical foundations of an anti-racist queer feminist historical materialism. Critical Sociology,
42(2), 289–306.
French, S. (2017). Staging queer feminisms: Sexuality and gender in Australian performance, 2005–2015. London, UK:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Kalender, U. (2011). Queer in Germany: Materialist concerns in theory and activism. In L. Dowing & R. Gillett (Eds.),
Queer in Europe (pp. 71–85). Farnaham, UK: Ashgate.
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Lewis, H. (2016). The politics of everybody/feminism: Queer theory and Marxism at the intersection. London, UK: Zed
Books.
Noyé, S. (2014). Pour un féminisme matérialiste et queer (For a materialist and queer feminism) <http://
www.contretemps.eu/pour-un-feminisme-materialiste-et-queer/>. Contretemps.
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Queer As Materialism

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Queer as Materialism

Context for the Development of Queer Materialism

Marxism and Queer Materialism

From the Difficult Relationship to the Confrontation—Materialism as the Main

Materiality, Historical Materialism, and Queer Materialism

(1997a, pp. 267–268)

(Ahmed, 2010, p. 246)

particularly in capitalism. While time remains an important element in both approaches,

The “Economic Turn” of the Second Queer Wave

Introduction: A Renewal and Two Directions

The Political Economy of Race

(Ferguson, 2004, pp. 3–4)

Consumption, Neoliberalism, and the “New Homonormativity.”

However, as Richardson (2005) reminded us, in analyzing the phenomena of normalization it is

It is therefore a question of considering homonormativity as a new articulation of power,

Materialist and Queer Feminism

2017). Although in the literature, postmodern feminism appears to be the intersection of

The Material and Discursive Roots of the Cis-Heteropatriarchy

Materiality and Discursivity

Finally, it will be possible to emphasize the importance of articulating properly systemic

second is a constructivism more focused on micropolicies. It underlines the multiple resistances

This confrontation makes it possible to combine the understanding of gender, as a production of

Gender and Sexuality

Abolish Patriarchy and Subvert Norms

Deconstruction and Reconstruction of the Subject “Women.”

However, the materialist feminist heritage counterbalances this imperative of deconstruction of

A Plural and Temporary Subject

Butler, J. (1997a). Merely cultural. Social Text, 52/53, 265–277.

Caldwell, S. (2017). Marxism, feminism and transgender politics <https://isj.org.uk/marxism-feminism-and-

Cheah, Ph. (1996). Mattering. Diacritics, 26(1), 108–139.

Collective. (2013). A statement of trans-inclusive feminism and womanism <https://

Escalante, A. (2018). Marxism and trans liberation <https://medium.com/@alysonescalante/marxism-and-trans-

Farrow, K. (2011/2012). Afterword: A future beyond equality <http://sfonline.barnard.edu/a-new-queer-agenda/

Rebucini, G. (2013). Homonationalisme et impérialisme sexuel: Politiques néolibérales de l’hégémonie

Tomba, M. (2014). Marx’s temporalities. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.

Queer Intersectionalities in Politics

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