Pub Date : 2020-09-17DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197530276.003.0004
N. Smith
Focusing on Victorian England, this chapter examines how sex was increasingly constructed as something that was primarily biological in nature, and how this was bound up with discourses of prostitution as a threat to the reproduction of the body politic. In the first section, the author considers how the pathologization of commercial sex as abnormal and unhealthy worked to naturalize the public/private split on which capitalist development rested. In the second section, the author connects the medical, moral, and juridical regulation of sex work to the suppression and stimulation of other modes of sexual deviance including homosexuality. In the final section, the author explores the role of race and empire in constituting white, bourgeois sexuality as natural, privileged, and the antithesis of commercialized sex.
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Pub Date : 2020-09-17DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197530276.003.0003
N. Smith
This chapter turns to the empirical analysis of sex work in Britain as a case that is especially significant for understanding capitalism’s sexual history. Beginning in the Middle Ages, the author considers how England’s political economic order was structured around distinctions between married and unmarried sex rather than those between economy and sexuality. Yet the marriage/whoredom dualism also provided the conditions of possibility for a new dichotomy between economy and sexuality to emerge in early modern England, for it enabled the sexual division of labor to be reconstructed in service of capitalist development. The chapter interrogates how this dichotomy was not only sexualized, gendered, and classed but also racialized due to the critical role that colonialism and imperialism played in capitalism’s rise and expansion.
{"title":"The Rise of a New Sexual Order","authors":"N. Smith","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197530276.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197530276.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter turns to the empirical analysis of sex work in Britain as a case that is especially significant for understanding capitalism’s sexual history. Beginning in the Middle Ages, the author considers how England’s political economic order was structured around distinctions between married and unmarried sex rather than those between economy and sexuality. Yet the marriage/whoredom dualism also provided the conditions of possibility for a new dichotomy between economy and sexuality to emerge in early modern England, for it enabled the sexual division of labor to be reconstructed in service of capitalist development. The chapter interrogates how this dichotomy was not only sexualized, gendered, and classed but also racialized due to the critical role that colonialism and imperialism played in capitalism’s rise and expansion.","PeriodicalId":385794,"journal":{"name":"Capitalism's Sexual History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127854741","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-09-17DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197530276.003.0006
N. Smith
This chapter explores how sex work is constructed as a mode of deviant heterosexuality in the twenty-first century. It contends that ongoing moral panics over commercial sex do important political work for capitalism by distracting attention from the close entanglements between heteronormativity and economic injustice. The chapter begins by investigating the connections between the criminalization of sex work and the austerity agenda that has defined Britain’s political economy since 2010. It then interrogates the linkages between the politics of sex work and the politics of anti-immigration, arguing that neoliberalism has itself been made thinkable through anti-trafficking discourses that restrict labor freedoms in the name of eradicating unfree labor.
{"title":"Deviant Heterosexuality in Austere Times","authors":"N. Smith","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197530276.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197530276.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores how sex work is constructed as a mode of deviant heterosexuality in the twenty-first century. It contends that ongoing moral panics over commercial sex do important political work for capitalism by distracting attention from the close entanglements between heteronormativity and economic injustice. The chapter begins by investigating the connections between the criminalization of sex work and the austerity agenda that has defined Britain’s political economy since 2010. It then interrogates the linkages between the politics of sex work and the politics of anti-immigration, arguing that neoliberalism has itself been made thinkable through anti-trafficking discourses that restrict labor freedoms in the name of eradicating unfree labor.","PeriodicalId":385794,"journal":{"name":"Capitalism's Sexual History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131982025","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-09-17DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197530276.003.0007
N. Smith
This chapter draws together the core themes discussed throughout the book, and points to avenues for future research along with potential ways forward for activism and policy. The author considers how queer, feminist, and leftist agendas might align forces with the sex workers’ movement in order to contest the appropriation and devaluation of feminized labor under capitalism. Emphasizing the need for critiques of capitalism to center rather than marginalize the question of sexuality going forward, the chapter calls for the left to pursue a plurality of strategies and coalitions if it is successfully to challenge neoliberal capitalism, including by reclaiming the commons.
{"title":"Conclusion","authors":"N. Smith","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197530276.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197530276.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter draws together the core themes discussed throughout the book, and points to avenues for future research along with potential ways forward for activism and policy. The author considers how queer, feminist, and leftist agendas might align forces with the sex workers’ movement in order to contest the appropriation and devaluation of feminized labor under capitalism. Emphasizing the need for critiques of capitalism to center rather than marginalize the question of sexuality going forward, the chapter calls for the left to pursue a plurality of strategies and coalitions if it is successfully to challenge neoliberal capitalism, including by reclaiming the commons.","PeriodicalId":385794,"journal":{"name":"Capitalism's Sexual History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132875019","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-09-17DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197530276.003.0002
N. Smith
This chapter outlines the scholarly debate and theoretical architecture that underpin the rest of the book. In recent years, queer theory has come under fire for being outdated, even redundant, on the grounds that its interest in the fluidity of identity comes at the expense of political economic analysis. Contesting such claims, the chapter contends that queer theory is well suited to the study of global capitalism when pursued as a project that is both feminist and historical in approach. To this end, the author brings together the insights of Michel Foucault and Silvia Federici to develop a new framework for analyzing the intersections and contradictions between capitalism and sexuality. The chapter then explicates this framework through discussion of sex work as a particularly interesting and important site for applying the tools of queer political economy.
{"title":"Queer Political Economy","authors":"N. Smith","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197530276.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197530276.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter outlines the scholarly debate and theoretical architecture that underpin the rest of the book. In recent years, queer theory has come under fire for being outdated, even redundant, on the grounds that its interest in the fluidity of identity comes at the expense of political economic analysis. Contesting such claims, the chapter contends that queer theory is well suited to the study of global capitalism when pursued as a project that is both feminist and historical in approach. To this end, the author brings together the insights of Michel Foucault and Silvia Federici to develop a new framework for analyzing the intersections and contradictions between capitalism and sexuality. The chapter then explicates this framework through discussion of sex work as a particularly interesting and important site for applying the tools of queer political economy.","PeriodicalId":385794,"journal":{"name":"Capitalism's Sexual History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128184164","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-09-17DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197530276.003.0005
Nicola J. Smith
This chapter analyzes how the sex/work split became normalized in the twentieth century, and how this helped to render invisible the intimate connections between sexuality and economy. This involved something of a paradox for, on the one hand, large-scale consumer shifts meant that sexual and intimate life was increasingly governed by free-market rationalities whereas, on the other hand, ongoing moral panics meant that sex work was becoming ever more marked out against normality. The chapter argues that these apparently contradictory forces worked together to maintain the illusion that the sexual division of labor did little more than reflect women’s “natural” desires rather than operating as an instrument through which capitalism could extract their unpaid sexual labor.
{"title":"Buying Love in the Twentieth Century","authors":"Nicola J. Smith","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197530276.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197530276.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter analyzes how the sex/work split became normalized in the twentieth century, and how this helped to render invisible the intimate connections between sexuality and economy. This involved something of a paradox for, on the one hand, large-scale consumer shifts meant that sexual and intimate life was increasingly governed by free-market rationalities whereas, on the other hand, ongoing moral panics meant that sex work was becoming ever more marked out against normality. The chapter argues that these apparently contradictory forces worked together to maintain the illusion that the sexual division of labor did little more than reflect women’s “natural” desires rather than operating as an instrument through which capitalism could extract their unpaid sexual labor.","PeriodicalId":385794,"journal":{"name":"Capitalism's Sexual History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128274186","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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