A chairdre! Time for another discussion on 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 with links to all other essay discussions is here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/395378
Today’s essay is Notes From Brazil by Virgínia Guitzel.
Virgínia Guitzel is a working-class philosophy student at the Federal University of ABC, and a Member of the Movimento Revolucionário de Trabalhadores (MRT), which is the Brazilian section of the Fração Trotskista – Quarta Internacional. She is a participant in the Women’s group Pão e Rosas, which worked in the front line struggling for legal abortion in Argentina.
Feel free to join in the discussion, add your thoughts, comments, questions. I hope we are all able to learn something today <3
Edit: the discussion continues with the next essay, by Kate Doyle Griffiths, here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/414322
Hmm, we’re now at just a general discussion about institutional regression and Bonapartism, which I guess is pretty par for the course in Trotskyist reading materials. Not going to bother to pull quotes here, these are all broad discussions had all over the place.
Not to say it’s uninteresting or anything, it’s just giving a more thorough overview of the political situation in Brazil (this was written before the current elections, where Lula and Bolsonaro are currently in a run-off, Lula with a closing margin in the polls ahead of Bolsonaro)
“As Brazilian socialist feminist Diana Assunção has stated, ‘Preventing the new generations from knowing the history of struggles of the old generations is also a way of dividing us’.”
“Understanding oppression against the LGBTQ+ sectors is to understand a mechanism of capitalist domination based on the economics of sexual misery”
“Beyond the front lines where we trans revolutionaries stand, capitalism also inflicts brutal sexual repression on the whole of the working class. This results in illnesses, unwanted pregnancies, and numerous restrictions on one’s own bodies and desires. Those brought in line by the capitalist order suffer in their own fashion, fostering reservoirs of resentment and selfloathing consistently drawn on by right-wing movements.”
“Control over others’ bodies, the imposition of binary genders predefined by genitalia, heteronormative sexuality, and cisgender conformity are not ‘natural’. These norms are at the service of a specific economic system, which favours a specific social class that organises society (and consequently its morality) to serve its own class interests”
“The sexual question is not separated from class domination. Capitalism allows us to consume not only sexual acts, but films, ideas, fetishes, and a wide range of products that seek to stimulate pleasure and imprison it at the same time.”
“Capitalism, resting on centuries-old institutions such as the patriarchal family and religious dogma that espouse misogynistic, homophobic, and sexist prejudices, aims to transform sex into an almost pleasureless routine act with the sole purpose of reproduction. This is imposed upon billions as the only ‘normal’ sexual expression”
I know I’m pulling a lot of quotes here without saying much, but they generally speak for themselves. I find they’re great parts of this text worth reading, but also things we’ve discussed quite a bit in previous essays.
From ‘Sexo y revolución’ (1973) by Argentinian poet Nestor Perlongher:
“Genitalization is destined to remove from the body its function of reproducing pleasure to convert it into an instrument of alienated production, by only sexualising what is indispensable for reproduction.”
“While Stonewall looms large in most contemporary accounts, the political movement against sexual repression can actually be traced as far back as 1862 in Germany. Germany had the largest and most influential socialist movement in the world until WWI, and the German Social Democratic Party fought against the persecution of so-called sodomites”
When Oscar Wilde was arrested in 1885, Eduard Bernstein of the Social Democratic Party wrote:
“The argument that [homosexuality] is unnatural says nothing, because it is as unnatural as the capacity for writing. What is natural and unnatural is, ultimately, related to the development of society … Moral attitudes are historical phenomena … Sexual relations between individuals of the same sex are so widespread that there is no stage in the history of humanity that can be said to have been free from this phenomenon”
“Friedrich Engels reflected on the power that this question has in challenging the capitalist order, saying: ‘It is a curious fact that with every great revolutionary movement, the question of “free love” comes to light’.”