Time for yet another essay on Transgender Marxism
This essay marks the halfway point!
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 previous essay discussions is here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/395378
If you’re unsure what this post is: I’m leading a discussion group in real life on Intersectional Marxist Transfeminism, and I thought some of my comrades on the Internet may be interested in reading this essay collection as well.
This will be my initial read-through and note-taking. I hope to spark a discussion, or at least for us to learn something new together. So feel free to add comments and ask questions <3
Today’s essay is Queer Workerism Against Work: Strategising Transgender Labourers, Social Reproduction & Class Formation by Kate Doyle Griffiths.
Kate Doyle Griffiths is an anthropologist at City University of New York’s Graduate Center, a lecturer at Brooklyn College, and co-chair Red Bloom in New York City. Kate is an editor of Spectre. They are an ethnographer who writes about Southern Africa and the USA, workers, strikes, health and medicine, gender, Queers, race, class, Marxism and what is to be done.
Edit: the discussion continues with the next essay, by Farah Thompson, here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/417377
“I don’t like calling for ‘queer’ or ‘trans’ or even ‘feminist’ Marxism. Each of these additions is simply an elaboration of Marxism made into a useful tool for struggle.”
This is an interesting point. On the one hand, Marxism seeks the eventual dissolution of all class hierarchies, arriving by means of socialism at a classless society. (for instance, this is why in China, a Marxist state, there is no real talk of “feminism” per se, as the Marxist stance inherently invokes equality for women).
However there is a large group of, I’ll call them vulgar Marxists, who practice class reductionism in their analyses. That is to say, who see all class stratification as directly connected to relations to the means of production. To such groups ideas such as queer liberation, racial equity, disability rights and feminism are seen as distractions from class struggle at best, or bourgeois decadence at worst.
There is an argument amongst such class reductionists at times that the proletarian struggle should be the only consideration, and that intersectional applications of class analysis are subversive to class struggle. Because of this, while I agree that “Marxist feminism” and “trans Marxism” are really not any different than “Marxism” itself, they become, to my mind, useful addendums in promoting the importance of addressing disparate class oppressions in concurrence with proletarian class struggle, and not as an afterthought.
“One of the most relevant recent debates on the US left has focused on what theoretical and political approach Marxist organisers should take towards not just so-called ‘identity politics’”
“often what has been called the ‘anti-woke’ side of this debate unites an overt political commitment to cis/heterosexism, natalism, and the nuclear family, with an aggressively ‘colour-blind’ and anti-introspective approach to racism and nationalism. This vein of socialism imagines as its enemy a ‘camp’ of the left that doesn’t exist – one myopically concerned largely with matters of representation or calculations of privilege.”
I call this “settler socialism,” that is to say, socialism that seeks to continue colonial systems of oppression, but with workers in charge.
“The stakes in this debate are high, as a renewed interest in socialist organising has spread across the US since 2016. One left group alone, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), has surpassed over 100,000 members.”
Very bold to claim that the DSA has any interest in socialist organising.
That is peak settler socialism.
“From early childhood, trans and queer people often develop the ability to mask and manage our own affect – this codeswitching is a skill picked up through sometimes brutal necessity.”
This is kind of a weird usage of the term code-switching, which is generally in reference to multilingualism (especially in relation to Indigenous and Black people having to switch between their native languages/creoles and the “standard” English they were forced to learn to communicate with white anglos).
“More broadly, the skills to manage trans and queer existence on a social level lend themselves to exploitation as skilled labour in the spheres of social reproduction and hospitality.”
This can be connected to our earlier discussion of Social Cognitive Theory, where queer identities are generally socially reproduced through communal and reciprocal processes of education and affirmation in queer circles. This lends itself to an experiential specialisation in reproductive labour.
“Queers are often found in posts where it is more likely to result in abuse, stigma, dismissal, and blackmail when we are discovered: education, childcare, service labour, health care, and the Church”
The Church? Is there a statistically high chance of queer people working in churches?
Hmm, I did just look up some stats in the US and polling is showing nearly half of queer people are religious. That’s not surprising given how fervently religious the nation is. I can’t find any stats about queer people actually working in churches, I wonder where Griffiths got that information, there’s no citation in the entire paragraph.
Anyway, they do rightly point out that work involving reproductive labour also tends to be work most dangerous for queer people, as queer people are often vilified as predatory and unsuitable to give care.
“The Marxist perspective we need here is one that can go beyond the failures of liberal feminism and a queer politics which emphasises ‘diversity’, ‘inclusion’, and ‘tolerance’ – precisely because it raises the possibility of resistance to liberal cross-class co-optation, and distinguishes itself from reductionist invocations of ‘class’.”
We’ve seen time and again how easily liberal identity politics are co-opted by the bourgeoisie, and the limits that representation offers in liberation. It doesn’t matter how many queer people are exploited in the labour market (inclusion) when the state is legislating away queer rights.
“[Kim] Moody is probably the most well-known Marxist analyst of class composition and strategic power in the Anglophone world.”
Really? I’ve never heard of him or his book, On New Terrain.
Griffiths likes to make a lot of uncited claims I’m noticing, and also is rather fond of speaking on behalf of others. Really annoying to see some academic use “we” in reference to trans people as a whole.
It’s instantly alienating to any trans person reading this that doesn’t fall in line with the thing that was just said under the generalised “we.”
I’m keeping an open mind here but I’m sure it’s obvious that I haven’t been a fan of Griffiths’ writing from the start. I think it might be that many of the previous writers were grassroots educators and direct activists, whereas Griffiths is an academic. I tend to find that academics often lose sight of the ways in which their own material conditions and class interests as intelligentsia are not in complete alignment with the proletariat.