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1 - Sexuality and Capitalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 April 2024

By
Adriana Zaharijević
Edited by
Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks  and
Mathew Kuefler
Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Mathew Kuefler
Affiliation:
San Diego State University
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Summary

The main aim of this chapter is to show that sexuality and capitalism are intrinsically related. Such an endeavour demands extracting sex from the domains of nature, reproduction, and the private, and relating it to the intricate norms of capitalism. The first part of the chapter looks at why capitalism and sexuality have been articulated as belonging to separate spheres of life. How did it come to seem that “being a sex” and “having sex” is so entirely removed from the “investment of money to make more money”? The second part of the chapter provides an overview of the historical evolution of capitalism and its relationship to sexuality, focusing on the nineteenth-century transition from the household family-based economy to a fully developed capitalist free labour economy. The main characters of this chapter are homo economicus and his economically invisible wife, the producers of valuable social relations, as well as various “reformable” or “irreformable” others whose sex is deemed of no value or even against value. The chapter presents social relations as capitalist and sexual, and treats the dichotomies social–natural, public–private, and economic–cultural as interwoven in the (de)politicization of both sexuality and capitalism.

Keywords

sexualitycapitalismsexualityeighteenth centurynineteenth centurysocial/naturalpublic/privateeconomic/cultural
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge World History of Sexualities , pp. 1 - 26
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Further Reading

Barker-Benfield, Ben. ‘The Spermatic Economy: A Nineteenth Century View of Sexuality’. Feminist Studies 1, no. 1 (1972): 45–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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Butler, Judith. ‘Merely Cultural’. New Left Review 227 (1998): 33–44.Google Scholar
Cooper, Melinda. Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservativism. New York: Zone Books, 2017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
D’Emilio, John. ‘Capitalism and Gay Identity’. In Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Snitow, Ann, Stansell, Christine, and Thompson, Sharon, 100–13. New York: Monthly Review, 1983.Google Scholar
D’Emilio, John, and Freedman, Estelle. Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.Google Scholar
Drucker, Peter. Warped: Gay Normality and Queer Anti-Capitalism. Leiden: Brill, 2015.Google Scholar
Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia, 2004.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality. Vol. 1: An Introduction, Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 1978.Google Scholar
Ghodsee, Kristen. Why Women Have Better Sex under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence. New York: Bold Type Books, 2018.Google Scholar
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Hill, Bridget. Women, Work and Sexual Politics in Eighteen-Century England. London: Routledge, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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Matthaei, Julie. ‘The Sexual Division of Labor, Sexuality, and Lesbian/Gay Liberation: Towards a Marxist-Feminist Analysis of Sexuality in U.S. Capitalism’. Review of Radical Political Economics 27, no. 2 (1995): 1–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context. New York: Routledge, 1995.Google Scholar
Padgug, Robert. ‘Sexual Matters: On Conceptualizing Sexuality in History’. In Sexual Orientation and the Social Constructionist Controversy, ed. Stein, Edward, 43–67. New York: Routledge, 1992.Google Scholar
Perry, Ruth. ‘Colonizing the Breast: Sexuality and Maternity in Eighteenth-Century England’. Journal of History of Sexuality 2, no. 2 (1991): 204–34.Google ScholarPubMed
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Weeks, Jeffrey. Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800. London: Routledge, 2012.Google Scholar
Weeks, Jeffrey Sexuality. London: Routledge, 1986.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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