The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism by Kevin Floyd

by Kevin Floyd

The Reification of Desire  takes two critical perspectives rarely analyzed together—formative arguments for Marxism and those that have been the basis for queer theory—and productively scrutinizes these ideas both  with  and  against  each other to put forth a new theoretical connection between Marxism and queer studies.Kevin Floyd brings queer critique to bear on the Marxian categories of reification and totality and considers the dialectic that frames the work of Georg Lukács, Herbert Marcuse, and Fredric Jameson. Reading the work of these theorists together with influential queer work by such figures as Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, and alongside reconsiderations of such texts as  The Sun Also Rises  and  Midnight Cowboy , Floyd reformulates these two central categories that have been inseparable from a key strand of Marxist thought and have marked both its explanatory power and its limitations. Floyd theorizes a dissociation of sexuality from gender at the beginning of the twentieth century in terms of reification to claim that this dissociation is one aspect of a larger dynamic of social reification enforced by capitalism.Developing a queer examination of reification and totality, Kevin Floyd ultimately argues that the insights of queer theory require a fundamental rethinking of both.

Genres: Queer, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Theory, LGBT, Feminism, Gay

Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Kay Simon · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think this book might be much more helpful to someone who identifies as a marxist and has an interest in Queer theory rather than the other way around. However, my issue with the majority of the book is that it is extremely male/masculine-centered, a majority of the examples have to do with male sexual desire or men/masculinity in general and I was hard-pressed connecting the dots to women-centered examples. This is my biggest complaint of the book, as I feel as if the book would have been much stronger if there was a larger focus on Queer theory overall as right now I feel as if I believe that Queer theory and Marxism work well together but this book didn't change my opinion on the topic much.

[Deniel Floria · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kevin Floyd's The Reification of Desire: Towards a Queer Marxism is a powerful synthesis of queer theory and historical materialism that attempts to trace the origins of masculinity in relation to the emergence of Fordism in the early 20th century.

[Prerna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Have you ever felt trapped within your body? I don't mean in the way you did as a teenager, being hyper aware of all your flaws and lamenting your very existence. I mean in the way that you feel your body has been instrumentalized by the gap between knowledges and bodies, such that the object-subject dynamic is obscured.

You know that form of poetry writing wherein you take a random newspaper, cross out most sentences and frame something vaguely poetic of the words left? (Fun fact, this is how I write my reviews. I'm a complete phony) That's how I feel about my body - it's a grotesque assemblage of excess.

Let's swallow the Foucaudian pill, i.e., the daddy pill. Desire, isolated as it has been from other bodily properties since the early twentieth century, was reified into a sexual discourse. An epistemology of body classification was thus shifted to one of body partitioning. Ugh, this pill isn't strong enough.

Let's swallow the Marxian pill, i.e., the super daddy pill. How did bodies normalized as heterosexual and homosexual subjects become inseparable from bodies as consuming subjects? Sexually disciplined, regulated bodies were simultaneously deployed as strategies of capitalist accumulation. Butler pointed out the interdependency of the masculine and the feminine within the heterosexual matrix, but now we embody the interdependency within ourselves, at least I do.

Queer thus emerges as a terminological abstraction as well as a social abstraction, as an an abstract form of subjectivity and a reified form of subjectivity. Bodies are then in turn regulated by a reifying abstraction of sexual desire. Or so the author argues and I find myself nodding along.

Sexuality, accumulation and the nation-state closely mediate each other the author claims, and I'm honestly tired of them all. I'm tired of constantly engaging with the first of them, in a quest to discover what it truly wants. I have no idea even now because it has a very voracious appetite, apparently. Give me a break. And I'm tired of constantly being exploited by the latter two.

Maybe the cyberfeminists are onto something after all. Liberate me from this flesh prison.

[An · Rating 4 out of 5]

Aquest llibre ha esdevingut un dels textos més importants del marxisme queer. La introducció sobre totalitat-reïficació, Lukács, Butler, Foucault, Jameson... és simplement espectacular. La resta del llibre també és molt interessant, però no m'ha agradat tant. Pel capítol 4 si podeu, veieu abans la peli Midnight Cowboys perquè si no es fa difícil de seguir.
Si us fa mandra l'anglès, no us preocupeu que aquest setembre es publica la traducció del llibre al castellà.

Cites xules:

"Labor is both opposed to capital and internal to it" (p.96)

"[Butler's] analysis of gender everywhere implies that the performance of gender is a form of labor: the compulsory labor of citation" (p.121)

"The subject doesn't work the skills; the skills work the subject" (p.122)

"...homosexual desire is not only *excluded from* but also *constitutive of* masculinity in the first place" (p.164)

"To aspire to totality is here not merely to wish for social plenitude but to critique social fragmentation" (p.212)

Un petonet reïficat que aspira a la totalitat.💖

[Kelvin Dias · Rating 5 out of 5]

Talvez muito acadêmico e, por isso, parcialmente complexo de entender. Contudo consegue fazer uma análise histórica completa, passando por críticas a psicanálise e ao fordismo, até chegar ao modo como o capitalismo vem se adaptando por meio da apropriação de temas e lutas, como o neoliberalismo impulsiona uma 'homonormatividade' e a lógica (capitalista) da sexualidade enquanto algo do âmbito da vida privada.

É um estudo essencial para quem quer trabalhar com gênero e sexualidade em uma perspectiva marxista (e que não seja pós-moderna), embora as epistemologias teóricas queers sejam essenciais para construção do debate e formação do campo. Gostei muito.

[Zeke · Rating 3 out of 5]

useful but poorly written. repetitive to the point of exhaustion

[aerialxav]

Intro

[Taryn Janati · Rating 5 out of 5]

"""using this to remember my fav quotes from the book"" (pg 61) "[The reification of desire as sexuality], together with emerging attempts to manage social consumption, begins to suggest the value of a Marxian reframing of Foucault’s methodological distinction between the family’s inside and outside in terms of capital’s increasing regulation of that border. A reification of desire unfolds as the family is increasingly saturated not only with pathology but also with commodities, amid the normalized consumption characteristic of an emergent, intensive regime of accumulation, from within capital’s emergent distribution of a new sexual knowledge of self. As this cell ceases to be a significant unit of production and gradually becomes instead a significant unit of consumption, this specific example of reification develops within a broader horizon of reification, within what I have characterized as the increasingly consolidated differentiation of the equally abstract, quantified space-times of labor and leisure. Foucault certainly insists that sexuality arose as a tactic by which an emergent bourgeoisie differentiated itself both from the proletariat that emerged along with it and from the ancien régime. But in his elaboration of the Freudian moment in sexuality’s deployment, he also concentrates on the family cell itself, effectively abstracting its outside (beyond the handful of pathologized somatic types he notes as inhabiting that outside), focusing on sexuality’s intrusion into it and obscuring the role of this intrusion in a larger strategy by which the family’s very conditions of existence were increasingly managed as part of an effort to maintain a vigorous rate of accumulation.

Foucault’s unrelenting focus on microsocial levels of cause and effect, on microsocial relations of force, produces a representation of sexuality as an autonomous tactic, an instrumentality that transgresses a spatial barrier, compromises the membrane separating inside and outside, as if of its own accord. But it is not instrumentalized sexuality per se but this much larger-scale effort to manage accumulation, to forestall crisis, that begins to compromise this particular membrane, that provides access to this new sexual knowledge of self. “Sexuality,” to the extent that Foucault’s narrative represents it as “deployed” by no agent other than itself, is a phenomenon he thereby fetishizes in the classically Marxian sense of the term. Here Foucault mystifies what Lukács demystifies, the status of epistemological abstractions—the abstract temporality that psychoanalysis imputes to sexual desire, for instance—as products of an ever more complex division of social labor."