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
“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.
“In the stark absence of strategy-focused Marxist analysis that looks beyond or primarily outside electoral efforts”
I’m actually really lost on this one. What Marxist analysis looks within electoral efforts? I truly have no idea what Griffiths is talking about here, most Marxist analysis looks beyond electoralism. What are they reading?
“Specifically his approach to rank-and-file organising has lately been popularised within both the right and left wings of the DSA, and well beyond.”
Again with the DSA. This is the issue I think I’m coming up against with Griffiths. They consider the DSA socialist and seem to have largely read writings about electoral “socialism.”
I’m left with the impression that they think being trans has inherently elevated them past settler socialism, but they seem to be advocating for settler socialism but with queers.
Now there’s like two entire pages just describing Moody’s book and not offering any new ideas that I couldn’t get from reading Moody’s book myself.
It doesn’t even have anything to do with queerness, it’s literally just describing rank-and-file strategies of strikes and slowdowns.
Which is obviously important. But I don’t see anything inherently on topic about rehashing someone else’s book and then adding “and queer people should do this too.”
Like, yes. Of course queer people should participate in the broader worker’s movements and labour organising. Everyone should.