Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism

by Rosemary Hennessy

Drawing on an international range of examples, from Che Guevarra to "The Crying Game," Profit and Pleasure leads the discussion of sexuality to a consideration of material reality and the substance of men and women's everyday lives.

Genres: Feminism, Queer, Theory, Nonfiction, Gender, LGBT, Politics

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

Reviews

[Prerna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'll be honest, I'm not immune to aesthetization of daily life, I've even been impulse buying things just because they're pleasing to look at. I've spent too much time on Pinterest going through all those curated boards - a close up shot of an apricot with a quote from Call Me By Your Name on it, a window partially hidden behind blossoms, a cozy reading nook with too many strings of LED lights surrounding it, a postcard with a vintage stamp, corporate style art (you know, the google doodle kind,) lgbtq tshirts. I could go on. But behind this absolute time-wasting activity also lies my usually-ignored knowledge of the ugly truth - I'm just a fetishist, and of the worst kind. Late capitalism has promoted the integration of art into life, but as Hennessy points out in this book, only in ways that are complicit or in accordance with the requirements of commodity exchange. Desires are continuously worked and reworked - yes, look at us, we have seemingly endless options. But these desires have only taken specific forms, have only been allowed to take specific forms.

It's like one of those simulation programs, really. The 'abject' which designates what has been expelled from the social body is always accompanied by a negative charge, because it has literally been rendered the Other. Thus the relationship between value projected onto bodies seems to be inextricable from their value to capital.

Hennessy acknowledges that gendered, racialized and sexual bodies are dense transfer points in the history of capitalist value accumulation. Cultural value is complicit with exploitation. She is a Marxist feminist and tries to understand sexuality through historical materialism. She is critical of both postmodernism and post-structuralism because she sees them as limited and even conservative. I'm not sure how much I agree with her on this.

But, Hennessy also urges feminists to see and understand desire and subjectivity as produced and to adopt the dialectical historical lens in doing so. She asks to resituate sexual politics on the ground of human needs, and this, I very much agree with.

[boocia]

this was a lot of fun ! definitely a little dense for me

stylistically i think this set of essays follows the endearing quality of many marxists writers, which is being very bulldogish about their point and unafraid to be blunt as fuck if other thinkers don't have their act together around that point. hennessy reiterates over and over that sexuality, like all things cultural/societal, is directly a product of the injustice of the exploitation of workers. the failure of butler, zizek, and the 'new left' of the 90s is also in their analyses diverging away from and obfuscating how identity is a product of the capitalistic exploitation of workers. idk! it's just pleasing how aggressively she'll bring everything back around to this central premise, a doggedness i've seen in lenin n in suvin n in levinson etc, it's just funny that they're all like this. it's also just fun in that classic bit that poststructuralists use of like, oh this new innovative idea that observes the structure but is outside of it? it's actually still inside the structure! MY new idea, however ...

defs not her point, but something about this series of essays was weirdly therapeutic. i think i have weird memories of not Connecting to 'queer culture' in college+beyond. (1) hennessy describing the limitations of not just idpol but also postmodern gender fuck in terms of what types of identities it can construct / make visible, and specifically what kinds it does not, and SPECIFICALLY how the centering of homosexual individualized Desire and Pleasure and Expression is a bit of a dead-end (individualistic highly re-ified self+desire is for selling rainbow t-shirts) just resonated with that. it was mindblowing that she names defining homosexuality by what you desire (man-loving-man) as opposed to what you do (sodomy) is a historically more recent phenomenon and opens a lot of interesting doors i think. she is pointing to forming community around other things, like communal needs and communal exploitations. (2) hennessy's connection of a rise in queer identities that are flexible and myriad + butlerian performative-symbolic-gender-fuck with the 80s/90s construction of a western consumer invested in "lifestyle/aesthetic" that can adapt to trends and new products etc. was cool. if cisnormativity is a product of capitalism and colonialism, then one has to question in what ways queer identities are informed or directly formed by them too. she ends up pointing to id-pol, and the production of queer identities in late capitalism, as a bit of an alibi for capitalism in the ways that are to us now obvious (pinkwashing corporate america does not a revolution make). but i think therapeutic in that it's not so weird that the queer identity does not resonate for everyone; it was never constructed to do so, especially never for non-western or non-middleclass people. so in this way a historical materialistic read on the construction of the queer identity was super helpful and interesting.

i also really enjoyed her methodology to explain 'tolerance' - or even celebration - of queer identities in the west and amongst the upper classes especially. she did it through a reading of 'the crying game', which i still don't know too much abt. but at the end of the day the bit about how the movie allows a trans woman to exist as a woman worthy of love and recognition, but also makes sure that she's a passive and protected and man-dependent woman, and also also makes sure she doesn't actually get to be with the romantic male protag at the end, is sort of this cover-all-the-bases play to account for the heterogeny of global capitalism. we want gender flexibility and gender role flexibility because production is changing, we want women in executive roles in companies in america. but we still need heteronormativity to be the bedrock, we still need it to exist so that we can pay women in south america pennies to make shoes. so this sort of approach is representative of how this book wants us to question identity; in what ways is queer identity as conceived of and regenerated in the West - championed a lot by white intellectuals - able to exist as it exploits and makes invisible other oppressions?

in a way this book is arguing for a sort of intersectionality, but it's not really about intersectionality, because intersectionality still falls, for hennessy, in the trap of identity politics - what 'categories' exist all should be questioned in terms of why capitalism has made these discrete visible ones, basically, and how well these categories Really fit our experiences. for her obviously the point of connection is dialectical materialist, is the exploitation of labor and how it effects everyone in very specific and contextual ways but is still the root of social identity and of oppression. she champions the term 'dis-identification'. if the "good subject" is someone who conforms to societal norms, and the 'bad subject' is the one who rejects norms (provides expression of suffering resentment and rebellion within capitalism) but otherwise does nothing to truly change society, the hairsplit is that disidentification is the critical awareness that these identities are informed by historical and material conditions and can begin, from there, to i guess make ppl socialists? the example she brings is honing in on ways, say, that being queer 'doesn't fit', and trying to figure out what is materially causing this misrecognition to bring awareness as to the cause and then action to rectify. the cause, again, is going to be capitalism lol.

finally i love the way she writes about the way capitalism doesn't meet people's needs as the "monstrous" and "hidden" empirical reality "outside" of capitalism. the latency of the discomfort, of the horror of identities not being enough and of society not being enough, kinda just makes me think about how scifi horror is good and what sf horror does. so that's fun.

good one!

[Keri Day · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great text on the historical relationship between capitalism and the formation and emergence of sexual identities. Although it is a scholarly piece of work, it often felt somewhat dense and unclear in terms of the prose. Overall, a wonderful feminist Marxian analysis of sexuality and why political economy is important to the future of cultural studies in relation to race, gender, and sexuality.

[brady steele · Rating 4 out of 5]

hennessy as a writer is incredibly nuanced and detailed, providing a huge volume of theoretical density that amplifies the impact of these “invisible” systems of violence. this truly converges marxist feminism in a really foundational way, both in understanding gender and sexuality as touch points for a broader anti-capitalist movement base as well as critiquing the identity politic based neoliberal/postmodern tendencies of society in the early 21st century. some sections felt repetitive or too tangential but overall, this book is a ground working piece of literature that doesn’t receive the recognition it deserves for its expert critique and analysis of capitalist power as it relates to queerness

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

Late Capitalism... that's the 18th, early 19th century, right? Wrong. Hennessy is just another preacher in the Church of Marx.

[Ash · Rating 3 out of 5]

The conclusion to every chapter is essentially "the theory focused on how identity formed in discourse is too divorced from material reality," an argument often leveled against Post-Modernism. I would suggest however that Marxist theory ends up in a same rut by declaring that class consciousness is the only way to equality while lacking just as much of a practical solution.

[thinker bell · Rating 4 out of 5]

very theoretical analysis on identity politics and how it fits in imperialism, the limits of staying within the confines of identity politics only from a marxist feminist perspective. Always connecting class in the identity realm.

[Sandy]

ok it's a bit of a slog from 'the academy'-- but i get so bored with queer self focus and analysis that is divorced from economics

[Suraj Kumar · Rating 4 out of 5]

A mandatory read!
Hennessey reinvents Historical Materialism in a manner that makes it the most relevant and crucial theoretical perspective of the current times.
An eye opener in many ways.

[thegillmachine · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is the most useless review you’ll ever read, but i will never be able to stop thinking about this or stop referencing it in any of my queer marxist theory work.

[Sean Lundergan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some good critiques of non-material social/cultural theories. Kind of disjointed argumentation and at times excruciating prose.

[G · Rating 2 out of 5]

good points, poor writing