Transversing Sexualities and Critiques of Capital

Abstract

This forum has come about through a series of conversations and discussions over a period of time in 2021-2022. Our ambition was to bring together scholars from different disciplines and perspectives, hoping for mutual curiosity and dialogue. We invited the participants to the forum to consider the following question:
 “How can we understand the complex and often contradictory ways through which sexualities and capital are related to, shaped by, and constitutive of each other?”
 Due to restrictions and exigencies of the corona situation together with time zone obstacles, the conversation had different modes. The fi rst part of the forum consisted of an online video-recorded conversation between M.E. O’Brien, Nat Raha and Grietje Baars. The conversation was moderated by Liu Xin and Mathias Klitgård. Laura Horn provided editorial support. Jin Haritaworn and Lisa Adkins then kindly sent their contributions to this conversation in writing. What you will read in the following is hence a conversation across three continents, which mixes synchronous and asynchronous elements, and which aims to show the strengths but also divergences and open questions in these different engagements.

The anti-feminism of anti-trans feminism

“…Monique Wittig makes clear that regimes of heterosexuality – what other scholars have called ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ (Rich, 1980) or the ‘heterosexual matrix’ (Butler, 2007 [1990]: 7) – play a crucial role in defining, stabilising and reproducing gender. Very consciously, I will ask us to see the theoretisation of and from a variety of lesbian genders as constitutive for this political project (Butler, 2007 [1990]; Dahl, 2010; Enke, 2012; Lorde, 1984; O’Brien et al, 2021; Rich, 1980; Wittig, 1992. See also Chu, 2018; Tudor, 2019 and Hamilton, 2022 for queer- and transfeminist re-readings of radical feminists that engage with the contradictions and pain that might come with these re-encounters.…”