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
“Gentrification and the financialisation of real-estate in most urban centres worldwide has now dispersed communities of dock and warehouse workers, remodelling what were once accommodations for transient sailors, and ‘cleaned up’ red light and gay districts.”
“it’s still true that queer social and sexual relations bring together individuals and groups among whom intimacy is prohibited or taboo in wider society – across hetero norms of sex and romance, but also across race, class, religion, educational experience, language, profession, and national origin.”
"This provides fertile ground for making unlikely connections. Queer sociality throws up opportunities for comradely relations that may otherwise seem unlikely, extending across the division of labour and social prohibition. The historical record includes many examples where this proves true, such as one wealthy industrialist, a trans man living in New York City, Reed Erikson. Styling himself as something of a twentiethcentury Engels, Erikson was of such means that his family yacht Granma, came to be owned by Fidel Castro"
“Less serendipitous perhaps but more typical was the role of queer people in the mass struggle against apartheid. In conditions where crossracial sociality outside formalised conditions of servitude was all but outlawed, those willing to break legal restrictions on queer relations were more often to be willing to break both apartheid bans, and informal norms against race-mixing”
This last section, of course, is the part that has stuff I’m actually enjoying reading
“Relationships across the juridical racial divide were outlawed along with homosexual relations, and ‘cross dressing’. So it’s not surprising then that many of the ‘underground’ organisers of the movement to overthrow this system were LGBTQ. A kind of outlaw solidarity appeared in the face of state racism. This formed a shared basis for significant political action, even if they largely remained closeted in the context of the struggle-era African National Congress, and then in its attendant union and social movement formations.”
“Simon Nkoli, writing to his covert lover from prison, where he had been detained for banned political activity with the United Democratic Front, wrote: ‘I have another idea about launching a new gay association when I get out of prison – maybe a progressive association’. Before Nkoli’s death he achieved this dream, playing an important role in winning the liberation movement over to active defence and affirmation of LGBTQ rights. Remarkably, these efforts were formally enshrined in the nation’s postapartheid constitution.”
“Zachie Achmat’s life history similarly demonstrates this tendency to organise across social divides, with him founding and joining a series of organisations. As a student organiser and member of the Marxist Workers Tendency, Achmat was imprisoned for anti-apartheid agitation. Later, in free South Africa, he launched the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) – pushing back against the AIDS-denialist and medically austere policies of President Thabo Mbeki.”
“Transitional organisations build concrete solidarity across unions and sectors. But they also necessarily operate across the divides of race, nation, gender, sexuality, and other divisions within the working class.”
“The rank-and-file strategy assumes that development of consciousness – from trade union to class, and perhaps from class consciousness to a socialist one – is the project of socialists through the process of building concrete solidarity, within overlapping layers of organisation”
“Does the need to build worker and social movement formations once again require queer and trans militants to save self-assertion and defence for another future date, as implied by anti-identitarian social democrats? Or might defence of gains in LGBT rights, and further pursuit of them, lend themselves to the kind of broad class organising that the anti-apartheid movement against legal race segregation once did?”
“What barriers did the closet and the danger of blackmail place on the kind of subterranean queer connectivity of the past, even as it played a crucial role in cohering a militant minority in and beyond workplace struggle? What role did the devastation of HIV/AIDS play in late twentiethcentury lulls in class struggle organising? This history is harder to trace, but should concretely put to rest appeals to cheap cultural populism in the name of working-class politics”
“In street marches and social movements, at times culminating in mass strikes, we’ve seen the question of transgender peoples’ rights become a focus of radicalising demands. These struggles have paved the way for renewed militancy within the long-captured and staid mainstream feminist and LGBT movements, long-dominated by NGOs. Trans liberation has not existed at odds with ‘bread and butter’ concerns, but has been mobilising as a concern for workplace organising – along with the defence of sex workers, the liberation of Palestine, and opposition to racist police repression. These concerns have never been at odds with workplace organisation”
Alright, the last bit about queer anti-apartheid activists in South Africa was pretty good. There were some points earlier that were interesting. But in general the main thesis of the essay was that queer people should do labour organising alongside cis people, which is obvious to say the least.
I appreciate some of the sentiment–the assertion that class reductionists are inherently missing the point by not understanding the radicalisation potential of intersectional organising. I agree there.
I wouldn’t recommend this essay in particular, but I also wouldn’t dis-recommend it. I personally won’t be seeking out anymore of Griffiths’ writing on this subject, though I am a little intrigued on their specialisation in South Africa.
Thanks for reading along! <3