Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System

Theory Q

by Christopher Chitty, Max Fox (Editor), Christopher Nealon (Introduction)

In Sexual Hegemony Christopher Chitty traces the 500 year history of capitalist sexual relations by excavating the class dynamics of the bourgeoisie's attempts to regulate homosexuality. Tracking the politicization of male homosexuality in Renaissance Florence, Amsterdam, Paris, and London between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and twentieth-century New York City, Chitty shows how sexuality became a crucial dimension of the accumulation of capital and a technique of bourgeois rule. Whether policing male sodomy during the Medici rule in Florence or accusing the French aristocracy of monstrous sexuality in the wake of the French Revolution, the bourgeoisie weaponized both sexual constraint and sexual freedom in order to produce and control a reliable and regimented labor class and subordinate it to civil society and the state. Only by grasping sexuality as a field of social contention and the site of class conflict, Chitty contends, can we embark on a politics that destroys sexuality as a tool and effect of power, and open a front against the forces that keep us unfree.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Queer, Politics, Sexuality, Theory, LGBT

240 pages, Paperback

Published August 7, 2020

Reviews

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you read one book on queer theory it should be this.
If you read one book on capitalist social forms through history it should be this.
The premise is that sexual behaviours cannot be separated from the conditions of capital that produced them - and Chitty goes briskly through 500 years to demonstrate how each point homosexuality became visible it was due to a crisis or change point in capitalist production.
The last two chapters are really excellent, summing up a lot of my thoughts and disappointments with queer theory and arguing articulately that homosexuality is deeply unlikely to be a point from which to demand political change: instead it is wealth, class, and geographic inequality.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

really good! historicizes sexuality as a site of class struggle, and makes a compelling case for understanding queerness as defined through resistance to bourgeois sexual norms and contingent in form on the prevailing organization of production, rather than as a transhistorical identity category united by shared experiences of an equally transhistorical “homophobia.” definitely technical in parts, but very well-written, and remains grounded in the stakes of its arguments (most of the time). excited to see new scholarship take up chitty’s call to deepen the inquiries that this book begins!

[Buck · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful work, however incomplete it may be. Read if you want a riposte against both the logics of assimilationism/progressivism. And a rather prescient(if pessimistic in the end) account of how the dissolution of the antagonistic character of transgression in queer struggles over public spaces and leisure in the mid 20th century has led to the seeming ineffectiveness of homosexuality as a counterhegemonic positionality in the present age, as symptomatic of the marketization of the politics of the self.

[Harry McDonald · Rating 5 out of 5]

Genuinely astonishing. The most brilliant, rigorous, challenging piece of academic writing I've read. The sadness of it's ncompleteness is part of its magic. Talented, brilliant, incredible, amazing, show stopping, spectacular, never the same, totally unique, completely not ever been done before, unafraid to reference or not reference, put it in a blender, shit on it, vomit on it, eat it, give birth to it etc.

[C · Rating 5 out of 5]

"There is one point... which... Marx and I [Engels] always failed to stress enough in our writings... That is to say, we all laid, and were bound to lay, the main emphasis, in the first place, on the derivation of political, juridicial, and other ideological notions, and of actions arising from the medium of these notions, from basic economic facts. But in so doing we neglected the formal side—the ways and means by which these notions, etc., come about—for the sake of the content...

Ideology is a process by the so-called thinker consciously, it is true, but with a false-consciousness. The real motive forces impelling him remain unknown to him; otherwise it simply would not be an ideological process. Hence he imagines false or seeming motive forces. Because it is a process of thought he derives its form as well as its content from pure thought, either his own or that of his predecessors. He works with mere thought material, which he accepts without examination as the mere product of thought, and does not investigate further for a more remote source independent of thought; indeed this is a matter of course to him, because, as all action is mediated by thought, it appears to him to be ultimately based upon thought.

The ideologist who deals with history (history is here simply meant to comprise all spheres—political, juridicial, philosophical, theological—belonging to society and not only to nature) thus possesses in every sphere of science material which has formed itself independently out of the thought of previous generations and has gone through its own independent process of development in the brains of successive generations. True, external facts belonging to one or another sphere may have exercised a codetermining influence on this development, but the tacit presupposition is that these facts themselves are also only the fruits of a process of thought, and so we still remain within the realm of mere thought, which apparently has successfully digested even the hardest facts.

It is above all the appearance of an independent history of state constitutions, of systems of law, of ideological conceptions in every domain that dazzle most people. If Luther and Calvin 'overcome' the official Catholic religion or Hegel 'overcomes' Fichte and Kant or Rousseau with his republican contrat social indirectly overcomes the constitutional Montesqieu, this is a process which remains within theology, philosophy or political science, represents a state in the history of these particular spheres of thought and never passes beyond the sphere of though. And since the bourgeois illusion of the eternity and finality of the mercantilists by the physiocrats and Adam Smith is accounted as a sheer victory of though; not as the reflection in thought of changed economic facts but as the finally achieved correct understanding of actual conditions subsisting always and everywhere—in fact, if Richard de Cœur de Lion and Philip Augustus had introduced free trade instead of getting mixed up in the crusades we should have been spared five hundred years of misery and stupidity" (Tucker, 767).

This Engels quote on Ideology helps us understand ideology in all spheres of thought. Chitty's work and last two chapters of the book especially reflect this understanding of Ideology as he carefully examines the history of sexuality as its been written and understood in the past 50 years since Gay Liberation and Gay History has become a historical field of thought/ideology, and the history/ideology of sexuality that can be examined further back, before the one of the first Ideological conceptions of Homosexuality (word coined in 1868) and even before Karl Heinrich Ulrich's conception of same-sex attraction (mannmännlichen Liebe/man-manly love) and Urning/Uranian theory (in the early 1860s).

In the first few chapters Chitty explores in panoramic detail the development of homosexual (adj.) subcultures arising from the development of capitalism in hegemonic capitols over time, and the development of persecutory and sexist ideology that reacted against these homosexual (adj.) practices. Instead of looking at these male workers and other men as homosexuals or Gay people, he looks at their relations and sexual practices as men having sex with men in the historical-material context of the time. On historical-materialism, Engels wrote:

"According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life... Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining [element], he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure: political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a battle, etc., juridicial forms, and then even the reflexes of all of these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas [/ideologies], also exercise their influence upon the course of historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their forms" (Tucker 760).

Chitty looks at various elements of the superstructure, such as political forms of class struggle, juridicial forms, philosophical theories and religious views, alongside his examination of the class and capitalist-hegemony theories that help him flesh out his analysis of sexual hegemony, which he doesn't posit as (and is not at all) a unifying (Marxist) theory of the history of sexuality, but just as an analysis of the history and, in the last two chapters, historiography.

What isn't explored, and perhaps what was outside the purview of this study, is a synthesis of this analysis of homosexual and homosocial history and the self and communal understanding of same-sex/gender relationality and mannmännlichen Liebe/man-manly love, as Ulrich's perceived it. The last two chapters of this book, along with the Engles quote from the beginning of this review, can lead one to believe that Gay is not just an identity but an Ideology born of false-consciousness and reproduced. What we're left with after reading this book is the challenge to further synthesize the findings to come to a better consciousness of same-sex relations intimacy and love.

Of all the possible case-studies he could've chosen in addition to the ones he did, I wish Chitty could have been able to step out of the world systems theory framework to look at the system of intimacy in Hawaiʻi before sexuality was constrained, criminalized, and enclosed like the ʻāina (land) after the Hawaiian Kingdom shifted to Western modes of politics, religion, and sexuality. Two books to that could help with such a synthesis of Chitty's ideas would be J. Kauanui's Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty and Jamaica Osorio's Remembering our Intimacies. But that's a project for another person to run with at another time.

Quotes from ed. Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader 2nd edition (1978).

[Neal Spadafora · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating book that 'returns the history of sexuality to a history of property.' In the first half of the book, Chitty's aims to use Giovanni Arrighi's rendition of world-systems theory to connect the periodic policing of sodomy with certain ebbs and flows within capitalist finance. By focusing on Medici's Florence, 17th century Dutch maritime practice and domestic law, 18th-19th century British imperialism, and 20th century American hegemony, Chitty charts how the policing of sodomy (which is not at all times the same as homosexuality) is derivative of financial crisis within the capitalist world-system. At all times, Chitty has a sharp for grounding what would be vacous and ahistorical notions of homophobia within a certain political economy; and in doing as much, Chitty pays particular attention to erotic intrusions on public space, labor practices, the displacement of agrarian peoples in cities, and spaces that allowed for surplus populations of men to congregate.

Given this is an incomplete writing that was originally written as a disseration, there are a fair amount of spots that are either demonstrating Chitty's familiarity with the literature or in need of further elaboration. Despite these entirely understandable shortcomings, Chitty's work demonstrates a remarkable level of theoretical and historical sophistication. This is a fascinating piece of writing that demands further research and development.

[Roxy The Bolshevik Girl · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredible theorisation of the role of sexual politics in class societies, and a beautiful meditation on the history of homosexuality. A must read.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

The topic of male homosexuality in relationship to class war history had been bouncing in my head for a couple months, unaware a text I saw namedropped in a twitter reply was already in my backlog tackling this very subject.
I can't attest of the accuracy and veracity of the historical work, I'm not in academia, just a layman interested in the subject. Past the planning chapter the historiology is riveting, especially for a PhD thesis which by nature tends to be quite dry, some editorial work had been mentioned in the forewords to make it more accessible for publication but there's a cynical voice transpiring especially in the expression of ideas which made me crack a smile in some paragraphs.
A thought provoking read which I hope will be source of further radical reflection Chitty hadn't the chance to conclude given the tragic circumstances of this book's publication.

[Rachel Blume · Rating 3 out of 5]

Obviously, Chitty’s novel conception of the relationship between homosexuality, capitalism, and political instability is groundbreaking and several points while reading this book I was struck by how cool his arguments are. If not for his tragic death, Chitty would have been a giant in the field of queer theory, and the world is worse off without him.

That beinf said, I was frustrated oftentimes while reading this book at how overly diffuse his arguments were and how certain threads (eg the aids epidemic or male prostitution) weren’t discussed nearly enough. I think that comes down to organization, which Chitty obviously had no control over.

It’s definitely a tough read but worth it if you’re interested in exploring the ideas and histories behind sexual identity and capitalism.

[William Moriarty]

“The experience of defeat allows for a retrospective differentiation of what was counterhegemonic in homosexuality from what was oppositional but ultimately subsumable by a more flexible postbourgeois sexual hegemony. To be sure, the homosexual appropriation of companionate marriage is capable of supporting semipublic cultures of stranger intimacy, which theorists have argued is essential to the queer counterculture. Such seemingly incongruent practices have become non-subversive life options in high-income societies. What was counterhegemonic about homosexuality-its appropriation of urban spaces for public sex, its identification with other antisystemic movements-may no longer be so for a post-bourgeois cultural dominant. Although the freedom to participate in queer cultures of stranger intimacy presently depends upon a sexual health infrastructure to which there is still uneven access, and although wealth inequalities continue to deepen, it is hard to imagine that homosexuality will provide the basis for any future politicization of sex. It seems far more likely that any future politicization of sexual health will be part of a wider social movement responding to worsening conditions of life, further cuts to public-sector spending, and hostility toward the ruling elite. How the precarity of some bodies will link up with that of others in future struggles is difficult to predict.”

[Joey Mopsink · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably the best book I read this year, genuinely

[Giitanjali Chiya · Rating 4 out of 5]

this is some very very vital scholarship that has changed the way i’m reading and perceiving different eras even outside of the timescapes under investigation in the book. Loved it!

[Kathleen O'Neal · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the fall of 2023, I was assigned this book for both Dr. Roger Lancaster's Social Institutions graduate seminar as well as in Dr. Samuel Huneke's Global History of Gender and Sexuality graduate seminar. The story behind the book's publication is tragic. The book was the product of the Ph.D. thesis work of Christopher Chitty in his program in the History of Consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Around the time he was finishing up this work, Chitty committed suicide and after his death, his friends rallied around his work and edited it and published it in order to help preserve his legacy.

In the Introduction, Christopher Nealon says of this book, "It is primarily a book about male homosexuality... It is also a book about the role of the policing of homosexual activity in the era of the rise of capitalism - or, to be more precise, the role played by the classes that would become the modern bourgeoisie in strategically weaponizing 'sodomy' in a struggle against both the aristocracy it hoped to displace and the peasant, proletarian, and lumpen classes whose capacity for labor it needed to manage" (1). The work relies heavily on world systems theory as articulated by the economist and historian Giovanni Arrighi. At the heart of Arrighi's theory is a concept of successive hegemons in the context of the global capitalist order since the fifteenth century. Arrighi pays particular attention to periods of financialization in which power shifts from one hegemon to another. Nealon writes, "Chitty's intuitive stroke of genius is to ask: If the history of capitalist production has indeed been structured this way, what does capitalist reproduction look like in such periods?" (5). In seeking to address this question, Chitty looks at sodomy and the law in Florence during the fifteenth century, Dutch cities in the seventeenth century, France during the revolutionary era and then in the nineteenth century, and finally "American-style LGBT identity politics" (5) in the present day.

For me personally, the most striking feature of the book was Chitty's narration of the often violent legal and social repression faced by those engaged in homosexual practices in various times and places. Also of interest to me was Chitty's treatment of intergenerational homosexual male relationships in various contexts. Chitty's materialist emphasis was also illuminating from my perspective.

This is a book I hope to revisit at some point as I have gained more background in some of the history, economics, and philosophy that Chitty's analysis is built upon. It seems like it will be a work that will reward multiple readings and it was a pleasure to discuss it in two different classes during the same semester.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

I tend not to review academic books on Goodreads but I'll leave a few words here. Please note that this is not a formal review, just excerpts from the exegesis I wrote up on it.

This is really quite a brilliant work of scholarship – Christopher Chitty engages with Foucault and Marx in incredibly innovative ways, thinking through (specifically male) homosexuality as tied to property. Specifically, his argument is that the policing of homosexuality throughout history is inextricably connected to financialization; repression or acceptance of homosexuality is thus based less on some nebulous “phobia” or “panic” and more on hegemonic societal structures that allow dominant forces to regulate or repress homosexuals, particularly in times of crisis or contingency. Thus we see interspersed between periods of acceptance or at least neutrality the occasional upswing of anti-homosexual rhetoric and politics. This occurs not because anyone is actually anti-gay, but because homosexuality runs against dominating heteropatriarchal economic structures.

Some things I like: Chitty’s point that we remember the wealthy or economically privileged queers in history rather than the average worker; the waning of sexual affect is tied to postmodernism; actually, the entirety of Chapter 5 is superb—I really enjoy his reading of Foucault; the history of urinals as tied to cruising and identity formation; the reworking of the term “queer” to tie it to, and tear it away from, property.

Some issues: this book focuses specifically on white Western male homosexuality. As long as you go into the book aware of that, certain issues (an almost complete omission of lesbians and other sexualities, excluding a nice discussion of Adrienne Rich’s lesbian continuum; engagement with POC queer theory and history; engagement with feminist theory) become easier to swallow. Also, this book sorely needed some sort of engagement with (feminist) social reproduction theory; the text meanders and I was left wanting more at some parts; and I find the footnotes in particular kind of weak.

To summarize: this is a great work of scholarship with some flaws due to the situation out of which the book was produced (this is an incomplete dissertation edited and published after the death of the author). It may not be perfect but it will work as a great jumping-off point for scholars working to intervene in existing views of queerness, particularly those interested in political economy. I’ll be citing this quite a bit in my future research.

[Leaving_Marx · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sexual Hegemony was a pretty interesting read. I read it with friends as a part of a reading group following Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici, both sharing a similar timeline where their historical analysis focuses and teases out ideas around sexuality and/or gender and the construction and repression of these ideas in the formation of Capitalist world systems.

I found Chitty's approach interesting by telling a working-class, queer history which draws on sources from court records and documents. His sources combine with his narrative to describe in detail the persecution of men for violating sodomy laws and paint us a picture of life and desire among young men in the cities whose way of life and desire are made by the world around them.

The most interesting points I got from this book were chitty pushing back on the cultural roots of modern homosexuality being so heavily influenced by bourgeois gay men in literature whose experiences of the closet, duel lives, respectability, and privacy fly counter to the tales of desire on the streets, alley ways, and ships of the cities Chitty explores. Further to that point chitty argues that there is so many ways of life that have involved homosexuality and a certain antagonism tied into the spaces men meet, and that today the Gay Rights movements fights for a sterile, clean, and private equality which has become the standard which the world sees as sexual liberation.

The book was challenging to read, thank god I had friends to read it with. I would recommend it. Part 1 was interesting and informative but most relevant as a conversation among gay historians. Part 2 and specifically the final chapter felt like the consolidation of his thoughts and ideas which felt the most challenging and dangerous and therefore the most exciting part to read.

[Yupa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Visti titolo e sottotitolo temevo fosse uno di quei saggi postmoderni ultrafuffosi, fatti di tanta retorica, acrobazie verbali, pirotecnia (il)logica ma volta la carta e sotto non c'è niente. E invece è un saggio serio, con una bella base materialista, e l'autore, che la sa lunga, mobilita dati e date per interrogarsi su come le condizioni sociali e produttive, partendo dalla prima modernità, abbia plasmato le norme sessuali che, com'è noto, col tempo sono cambiate e neanche poco, con un occhio particolare rispetto all'omosessualità, interrogandosi su quanto quest'ultima, nelle forme che ha storicamente assunto, sia stata antagonista od organica alle norme imperanti. L'autore si rifà soprattutto a Marx e Foucault, ma con intelligenza, e le sue tesi sono piacevoli da affrontare, al di là poi se siano condivisibili o meno.
Molto più militante e forse meno solida la postfazione, che permette comunque di dare una sbirciata a una certa impostazione politica, quella della sinistra radicale che tenta l'impresa di coniugare l'aspirazione alla rivoluzione comunista con la liberazione delle identità e sessualità marginali, due cose che, com'è noto, spesso producono scintille se messe insieme. Sono posizioni per cui avrei forse provato una certa simpatia qualche vita fa, oggi mi limito a osservare con curiosità come diverse di queste istanze partano da una sinistra che si vorrebbe rivoluzionaria se non anarchica e poi, per oscuri percorsi, vengano fatte proprie, anche se magari avulse dal contesto di partenza, dalle istituzioni consolidate e dallo stesso Stato (significativo che la postfazione citi a più riprese il poi defunto DDL Zan).

[Jamie Burke]

Cw suicide

I don't usually write reviews, especially of nonfiction, but I feel obliged to here.

I went into this book with the vague understanding that it was a history of the persecution of sodomy, and the ways class dynamics affects that. What I did not realize going into this book is that it was published posthumously. The story of how the book came to be is described in the most unflinchingly personal foreword I have ever read, which takes six scant pages to detail how the book’s editor (Max Fox) befriended the author (Christopher Chitty) while Chitty was in grad school, and how after Chitty’s suicide Fox felt the emotional need to make sure his brilliance could be seen and understood more widely, and therefore constructed this book out of unpublished drafts of Chitty’s work. While there were indeed some glistening ideas explicating how the regulation of sexuality is imbricated with the regulation of class, the book unfortunately suffers under the weight of the impossible task that Fox set himself: that of wishing to edit as lightly as possible while turning a hard drive full of drafts into a coherent book. The resulting work has some pretty wild stylistic swings, from an extremely historically grounded account of sodomy persecutions in Florence in the 15th century to a brief exegesis of Foucault to an aside about the development of the first public urinals in Paris and London, and back to headier queer theory. I certainly enjoyed reading it, and it gave me new ideas and made me think in new ways, but it just did not cohere as a book.

Rating: unrankable/5, but recommended if the intersection of Marxist theory and queer theory is your jam

[KT · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent study of sexual hegemony defined "to exist wherever sexual norms benefiting a dominant social group shape the sexual conduct and self-understandings of other groups, whether or not they also stand to benefit from such norms and whether or not they can achieve them" that enables the author to historicise sexuality using a longue durée approach as well as building on Foucault and Marx

The author follows Arrighi's analysis that highlighted that periods of financialisation (that signal the decline of one hegemonic centre and the rise of the next) tracked with periods of increased policing of homosexuality, which leads to their argument that homophobia is not a timeless or religious prejudice that heightens at an opportune moment, but instead the problem of male homosexuality represents the form taken by a particularly political contradiction in bourgeois society.

The author identifies that societies in which communities of producers have been separated from their means of production have problematised sexuality, most notably homosexuality. Focusing on male homosexuality in particular, the author argues that tensions and antagonisms to sexual hegemony have less to do with a "phobia" or "panic", independent of political and institutional context, but have more to do with an uneven process of development in which dominant groups, who viewed sexual regulation and repression as in their interests, intervened in these relations of force to effect such transformations

[Burc · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book a few years ago and keep thinking about it every now and then. It's Arrighi (which I have still not yet read) meets the History of Sexuality (which I have).

The basic point of the book that I find very powerful is that commodity supercycles are related to the birth of sexuality as an autonomous category and form of governance. This is because such supercycles involve decoupling of biological reproduction from the reproduction of ownersihp, through things like depeasantization and proletarianization. Sexuality emerges as a way to mediate these new classes and their relation to biological reproduction. From this premise the book follows Arrighi's Long Twentieth Century pretty closely, looking at Florence, Amsterdam, London and then New York. Last, I feel the book completely changed my appreciation for what Foucault was doing. Has a great discussion and critique of Foucault, through a discussion of nominalism and realism.

Anyway, I should probably read Arrighi and get back to this book later. I really enjoyed it though.

The unfortunate circumstances in which the book was published means that some of the material is disconnected from one another. There's especially a marked change intone and focus from part 1 to part 2. Still worthwhile reading both.

[Celeste · Rating 5 out of 5]

Despite being assembled from an unfinished manuscript due to Chitty's death, this is one of the most exciting books to come out of sexuality studies for a long time. Chitty is a close reader of Foucault, yet is also keen to undo Foucault's own hegemony in the field of queer studies. Chitty takes issue with a determined, top-down understanding of sexual identities and forms, instead drawing our attention to the material conditions shaping their existence.

Unburdened by orthodoxy, his attention to the material practices and cultural forms of proletarian sexualities demonstrate sexuality as a site of dialectical contestation. His historical overview gives a rich sense of this dynamic unfolding, using both a materialist analysis as well as an understanding of hegemonies and counter-hegemonies contesting one another. He also historicises the field of queer studies itself, and contests the field's attachment to queer as a revolutionary subject in the "postbourgois cultural dominant" of the contemporary US.

[Aquamarine Tango · Rating 4 out of 5]

For students of the history of gender and sexuality, I'd consider this essential reading for a new Marxist perspective. Certainly, Chitty's idea of the criminalisation of homosexuality as the result of emergent bourgeoisie societies is not without criticisms for essentialism et al., but his analysis of the role of class in the history of sexuality is a welcome break from the more essentialist readings offered in most modern readings and a return to form to the original, 'radical' readings of the 60s and 70s. His idea of homosexuality's criminalisation as a tool of ruling-class hegemony will surely find its way into the sociology textbooks of tomorrow as an intriguing Marxist reading of the subject, and deserves more discussion. 10 years after Chitty's death, his work remains as relevant and intriguing as ever and it is hoped that more writers will follow with such understandings of the subject.

[Paige McLoughlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

People currently living through the trans panic going on currently in the US know that sexual mores are used as a cudgel and a distraction from larger issues in a time of crisis. Authoritarians have an high disgust sensitivity which can be exploited in times of change with behavior that is outside the norm to galvanize a political movement and distract from other categories such as class or racial politics. Distracting the populace in the era of mass politics is a necessity for a ruling class to remain in power. An ideology based on sexual mores or some other irrelevant category makes for excellent redirection of political energy toward safe targets. I enjoyed this book largely because it takes this Gramscian insight into Queer politics and is a good explanation of moral panics during times of political or economic crisis. Anyway excellent book.

[Priscilla · Rating 5 out of 5]

A difficult book to review. Chitty's writing on homosexuality and maritime trade is thrilling. It was exciting to see him weave together Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition with The Many Headed Hydra. However, I wish he would have been able to do further research--the historical writing was the most engaging to me but so much of it was extrapolation from secondary source. The unfinished ghostly feeling is of course the nature of this piece. Overall a touching tribute to a great thinker. So glad this exists.

[Zach · Rating 4 out of 5]

Above all, a work that demonstrates the seriousness of what it means to be producing materialist knowledge in our present interregnum. Doesn't simply replicate or take as a given the politics, methods, or results of queer theory, gay liberation, or foucault-inspired historiography. These materials are all absorbed, historicized, plumbed for their limits, and transformed. Sometimes I wonder whether dialectics is something simply invoked rather than deployed. This work is an antidote to my pessimism on that matter and implicitly issues a challenge to think better.

[world boo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. Rest in power Christopher Chitty.

[Alexandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would like to speak to someone at Duke University Press about ethics in publishing

[Katerina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chitty provides a new perspective, compelling research, and accurately ties in the text and argument to an analysis of contemporary queer politics.

[E.T. Bowen · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow

[Sohum · Rating 4 out of 5]

there's a lot to love here--I can only imagine what it might have looked like if it were finished. tales of its brilliance are not overstated...