In his book, Global Sex, Dennis Altman complains that his students of queer theory fail to appreciate the historical circumstances which the theories that they study were intended to explain. Here, Floyd cannot be said to be guilty of this sin. Capitalism creates abstractions which take on a seeming reality all their own, a process Lukacs called 'reification.' However, these ideas are inseparable from the particular historical and social soil from which they were grown. Floyd deftly elaborates how movies like Midnight Cowboy can be understood within the context of a post-Depression regulatory impulse known as Fordism, an intentional policy of engendering consumption in a somewhat vain attempt to stabilize capitalism's relentless and anarchic accumulation of productive capacity. Floyd further analyzes how ascendant financial capital has supplanted the strategy of Fordism with a vicious neoliberalism which simply steals the little space which Fordism permitted queer communities. Those interested in this approach might also read Rosemary Hennessy's Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism.
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.
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