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The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism Hardcover – June 12, 2009
Kevin Floyd brings queer critique to bear on the Marxian categories of reification and totality and considers the dialectic that frames the work of Georg Lukács, Herbert Marcuse, and Fredric Jameson. Reading the work of these theorists together with influential queer work by such figures as Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, and alongside reconsiderations of such texts as The Sun Also Rises and Midnight Cowboy, Floyd reformulates these two central categories that have been inseparable from a key strand of Marxist thought and have marked both its explanatory power and its limitations. Floyd theorizes a dissociation of sexuality from gender at the beginning of the twentieth century in terms of reification to claim that this dissociation is one aspect of a larger dynamic of social reification enforced by capitalism.
Developing a queer examination of reification and totality, Kevin Floyd ultimately argues that the insights of queer theory require a fundamental rethinking of both.
- Print length304 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherUniv Of Minnesota Press
- Publication dateJune 12, 2009
- Dimensions6 x 1.2 x 9 inches
- ISBN-100816643954
- ISBN-13978-0816643950
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Product details
- Publisher : Univ Of Minnesota Press; 1st edition (June 12, 2009)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 304 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0816643954
- ISBN-13 : 978-0816643950
- Item Weight : 1.3 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 1.2 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #8,376,014 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #11,286 in LGBTQ+ Demographic Studies
- #21,678 in Political Philosophy (Books)
- #43,665 in Literary Criticism & Theory
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While Floyd's book is tight, thoughtful, and arrestingly clear for an academic work, he seeks to merge queer theory with marxism rather than place queer theory within marxism. The result is bleak. It reminds me of Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories--a tiny queer population scattered by a rising brutal militarism. Lost is the brilliant innovation which those original Communists brought to the American Gay Movement when the Mattachine Society was first formed. There, three men rethought Lenin's priniciple of the right of self-determination for oppressed people and applied it to homosexual men, treating them as if they were an oppressed nationality. Implicit in this tactic was the recognition that queer survival is intimately intertwined with the survival of working people as a whole.
Perhaps a few months ago, a friend and I were lamenting the lack of interest among local California gay organizations in the fight for single payer national health care, a central issue to working people in the United States, and a primary concern of union members--and plainly a concern to anyone who is HIV positive. These organizations were focussed on gay marriage. No one can say these things for sure but it is probably the case that today in Massachusetts the number of gay men who have decided to marry is probably little different than the number who are HIV positive--both small minorities within a small minority. Yet, one issue offers the possibility of joining in coalition with larger class forces; the other, though 'assimilationist' does not.
I am grateful for Floyd's book and recommend it to anyone who is interested in queer theory--if only for his brief insightful critique of Foucault and Butler. Yet, I still look forward to the day when the descendants of the founders of the Mattachine Society return to their roots.