A chairdre! It’s time once again to dig into the essay collection Transgender Marxism.
The PDF is here - https://transreads.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/2021-07-15_60f0b3d5edcb7_jules-joanne-gleeson-transgender-marxism-1.pdf
The intro discussion, which includes links to all essay discussions, is here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/395378
Today we’ll be talking about the fifth essay in the collection, A Queer Marxist Transfeminism: Queer and Trans Social Reproduction by Nat Raha.
Nat Raha is a poet based in Edinburgh, who completed a PhD at the University of Sussex entitled ‘Queer Capital: Marxism in queer theory and post-1950 poetics’. Her current research investigates radical transfeminism, and race in UK poetry and poetics. She has performed her work internationally, and is the author of three collections and numerous pamphlets of poetry. Nat is co-editor of the Radical Trans-feminism zine.
As usual, I’ll be pulling quotes and taking notes.
Please, feel free to add your own thoughts, ideas, questions, comments. This is something I’m doing for a discussion group I lead in real life, but I am including my initial read-through and note-taking here as a way to spark a discussion, or share a little bit of knowledge.
At the very least, I hope we can all learn something together, or that someone will find having the PDF helpful <3
(I’m sleepy as heck today, so it’ll be a lot slower than usual, with frequent breaks, but I promise we’ll get through the whole essay)
Edit: the discussion continues with the essay by Virgínia Guitzel here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/412487
“Women and feminised workers from the Global South (that is, workers of colour) are often responsible for the social reproduction of people in or from the Global North”
This happens through many ways, either through the vast expropriation of labour in offshored factories, mines, and sweatshops, which requires a massive labour force in the Global South whose reproduction and care is provided by women, or, more directly, through the very common occurrence of women from the Global South being hired on (underpaid if paid at all) as caretakers, nannies, nurses, housekeepers, maids, etc, of families in the Global North.
It’s also important to note that often you’ll see analyses of Marxist (and other intersectional) feminism that speaks of workers of colour as “feminised.” This is because during the transition to capitalism, when colonisers were accumulating wealth through the overwhelming exploitation of Black and Indigenous workers, the gender classes of “man” and “woman” weren’t extended to the exploited peoples as such.
Colonised women were expected to toil in the fields alongside colonised men, and colonised men were expected to cook and clean and provide other forms of reproductive labour alongside the women. In this way, it can be seen that the colonial classes of “man” and “women” were primarily crafted along racial lines of “whiteness” and as such people of colour were inherently feminised workers.
“the theoretical implications of queer positionality within, or more often than not exclusion from, the social factory of capitalist society remain absent. Correcting this would require the recognition of the particular burdens of socially reproductive labour placed upon queer and trans life.”
“Contemporary queer femme and trans cultures have addressed how the reproductive labour necessary for queer and trans communal survival falls disproportionately on certain femme/feminised, trans, poor, disabled people, sex workers, and/or people of colour”
This ties in with our previous discussions of the social reproduction of queer and trans identities themselves. Given a lack of care and access to social programmes, waged labour, and other institutions of cis society, queer people rely heavily on creating community circles of mutual aid.
In Paris is Burning we see the house system: small family units of queer people who support one another not only through their transitions and expression of identity, but directly, through gig jobs, sex work, and “mopping” (shoplifting techniques).
In the queer community, the most marginalised often are the core of unpaid labour amongst the community itself: providing education, emotional support, and caregiving.
“Linking femmephobia, transmisogyny, and sexism more broadly to the lack of respect given to femmes, Piepzna-Samarasinha emphasises that poor, of colour, sick, disabled, parenting, sex worker and/or rural femmes still ‘hold it the fuck down’”
“the only damn way you or anybody survives is by helping each other. No institutions exist to help us survive – we survive because of each other. Your life is maintained by a complex, non-monetary economy of shared, reciprocal care”
“Homonormativity emerges in the wake of neoliberal capitalist structural adjustment, and its transformation of the conditions of socially reproductive labour”
Homonormativity is the state assimilating gay families into the nuclear family model. It is seen as a victory or liberation, but there’s nothing liberatory about it. By folding queer identities into the already-existing capitalist model of a family, it merely allows the perpetuation of unpaid domestic labour and the exploitation of a larger range of people, while simultaneously working to de-radicalise queer people by attempting to convince them that they have achieved equality.
Assimilationist politics cannot achieve liberation, and are always tools of the state to de-fang demands for equitable conditions. The most marginalised are never extended these invitations to normative structures, and are robbed of allies (either straight allies or the newly-assimilated and lesser-marginalised queer allies) in their fights and painted as exaggerative and over-reactive: why continue to fight, the argument goes, when gay marriage has already been legalised?
“It offers specifically a ‘promise’ of ‘a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption’.”
“Duggan emphasises that this occurs alongside the political rhetoric that caring labour – including supporting disabled persons, child care, and adult social care – is a ‘personal responsibility’ of families, rather than that of the state.”
The individualism promoted by capitalism is a way to to dismember any potential community-based action, and to more easily centralise wealth amongst the bourgeoisie.
Every time you see someone talking about how the care of someone else is “not their responsibility” what you are seeing is capitalism’s ultimate success in robbing humanity of a communal mindset.
“Social divestment and austerity measures have become defining features of the daily lives of many LGBTQ people – precarious work (both waged and unwaged), precarious housing, precarious benefits, precarious healthcare, precarious immigration status. This has been especially harsh on those of us who are disabled, migrants, or people of colour”
We’re seeing major cuts to social programmes (especially disability benefits) across the board in capitalist countries, usually coupled with eugenics-based policies that are direct descendants of the sterilisation policies that were so common-place in the 20th century (and still exist in many forms today both for disabled people and for trans people). In the UK the Disability Living Allowance was stopped. Employment benefits for the unemployed can be suspended arbitrarily, childcare credits have been limited or revoked, the NHS is being defunded at an increasing rate alongside pushes for complete privitisation. Queer services are being cut, shut down, and vilified. Migrant workers are subjected to passport checks when seeking care, and access to jobs is being restricted.
Likewise in Canada disability benefits haven’t been raised in decades, despite the massive inflation, the housing crisis, and the fact that disabled people are evaluated on a per household basis. Meaning that a disabled person can’t afford to live alone, but that to live with others, even strangers, means losing benefits. This is coupled with an increase in MAID (medical suicide) accessibility, whereby being financially unable to support yourself is now an acceptable reason for the state to fund your death. Public health, like in the UK, is being completely divested of public funding in order to make privitisation seem more appealing to voters. Queer healthcare services are being shut down, as are access to abortions. Migrant workers are publicly denouncing their living conditions as being literal slave conditions.
In the US–well US news dominates headlines all over the West, so many of us are already familiar with the repressive push there, the anti-LGBTQ laws being passed that turn doctors into police, that criminalise educators, that punish children and that are so severe California is allowing asylum claims from other states! Abortion restrictions are leading to mothers being locked up for failing to carry to term, citizens are being deputised to hunt down those who seek abortion, and people are being saddled with insurmountable, lifelong debt for just…getting sick.