Queer Sex and the Crisis of Capital

Sexuality is not a space protected from the tedium and violence of life under capitalism, argues Christopher Chitty, and neither is it the product of capital's top-down maneuvering. Instead, it is a terrain of class conflict. Chitty's sprawling Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System takes us from early modern Florence to the postwar United States to tell a story about how capital flows shape sex and how, in turn, sex powers the crises of capital. “Alternate or queer sexualities,” Chitty writes, “historically emerged along the fault lines of transformed property relations” (178–79). A sophisticated and daring text in queer Marxist thought, Sexual Hegemony refuses the artificial choice between Karl Marx and Michel Foucault, the material and the discursive. Made possible by Max Fox's careful editing of the late Chitty's unfinished dissertation, Sexual Hegemony is the product of a comradeship and queer care that...