以下文章刊於《逆流》（Against the Current）15卷第五期，2000年。
網頁請見http://www.igc.apc.org/solidarity/indexATC.html
另外說明一下，標題lean world中的lean意思就是「臨界生產」（lean
production，又譯為瘦身生產、精實生產）中的lean。
The Opening and Commodification of Gay Space :
Queer in a Lean World
by Alan Sears
THE QUEER MOVEMENT has made impressive gains in the thirty-one
years since the Gay Liberation Front emerged out of the Stonewall
Riots in New York City. It is now possible for many lesbians and
gay men to live relatively open lives in fairly supportive
environments with access to real community resources.
Yet many others have benefited little from these gains. There
has been little change in the lives of the most vulnerable queers,
including transgendered people, queers living in poverty, people
of color, people living in the closet and many women.
Before the Stonewall riots, queers were largely culturally
invisible except for negative stereotypes. A predatory gay man
or lesbian was sometimes depicted in a movie, play or novel, but
they were usually killed off by the end of the story. Now shows
like "Will and Grace" are prime time hits on conservative American
networks.
Magazines, books, movies and plays have lots of queer characters,
ranging from lesbian heroes in detective novels to the closeted
high school teachers. It is a real gain to have some point of
reference in popular culture, even if these are often chaste
images of white middle-class gay men or lesbians.
In Canada, queers have made significant gains in the areas of
human rights protection and workplace benefits. The Federal
government and every Canadian province now include non-
discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in their
human rights codes. Many unions, particularly in the public
sector, have bargained for non-discrimination clauses in
collective agreements and full benefits for same sex-partners.
Indeed, from the perspective of Canada or much of Western
Europe, the United States is an exceptional backwater in its
denial of human rights. This is particularly surprising when
you remember that the contemporary lesbian/gay liberation
movement first emerged in the United States.
Yet these gains should not make us smug. The state continues
to coercively police sexuality. Male Toronto police officers
recently raided a women"s night at a Toronto bathhouse, using
liquor license standards as an excuse to harass and terrorize.
Extensive spying and entrapment operations in parks and
washrooms across North America continue to turn up vulnerable,
closeted men who are often exposed to the glare of destructive
publicity. High school is still a hotbed of harassment and
violence against young people who are labeled "queer."
Indeed, the threat of heterosexist violence and harassment
is pervasive. The horrifying incidents that come to public
attention, such as the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard, are
just the tip of the iceberg. The threat of violence hangs
over even the most open queers, who often do complex
calculations of the risk of exposure in specific settings.
The danger of violence increases dramatically the farther
one strays from the gender-normative gay male and lesbian
images that have entered public consciousness. Transgendered
people, people of color and queers on the street are openly
targeted for harassment and everyday violence, including
ongoing abuse at the hands of police.
Victories in Lean Times
This is a situation in which real and important gains for
some gay men and lesbians have to be understood in the context
of the many queers who have won little or nothing. Further,
the most important of these victories have been won in the
last 20 years, a period marked by a sharp shift to the right.
The overall political climate has been marked by poor-bashing,
anti-affirmative action measures, immigrant-bashing, the rise
of the right, the decline of the left and a generally defensive
stance on the part of the labor movement.
Those gains that were won have come for two reasons. First,
they came through struggle: Queers have mobilized again and
again, taking to the streets to protest against state violence,
queer-bashing, inaction around AIDS and the denial of our human
rights. In doing so, we have changed the world and, perhaps
more importantly, changed ourselves into activists. None of
these gains would be here today if it was not for this gutsy
activism.
Queers are not the only people, however, who mobilized in
the face of this right-wing offensive. Anti-poverty groups,
immigrants rights organizers, anti-racist activists, feminists
and labor movements activists have fought back hard. We need
to probe a bit farther, then, to understand the changes in
capitalist society that have created certain spaces for the
consolidation of lesbian and gay identities in a generally
hostile climate.
Capitalism and Sexuality
The word "homosexual" first emerged in the 1860s. A new
word was required to explain a relatively new phenomenon.
Of course, there was nothing new about women having sex with
women or men with men. The new aspect that this new word
"homosexual" tried to capture was the emergence of a same-
sex orientation as a full-time sexual identity.
This shift was a product of specifically capitalist social
relations. The separation of home from paid employment in
capitalist societies provided the ground for the emergence
of the homosexual.
In pre-capitalist societies, individuals would produce
(expend energy to transform nature to meet their wants and
needs) and reproduce (restore energy and raise the next
generation) with the same people. People would hunt, gather,
harvest, eat, play, raise children and have sex in the same
kinship-organized community.
In capitalist societies, production is separated from
reproduction and paid employment is removed from home.
This opens up new spaces, as our access to the key productive
resources in society no longer depends directly on our
location within kinship structures. At some level, the
employer in a capitalist society does not have to care
about what employees do on their own time, as long as
they show up ready to work.
Capitalism both opened up new possibilities for the
exploration of sexuality and eroded family structures
through long hours of work and inadequate pay. In the
later 1800s and early 1900s, state policymakers and moral
reformers began to worry that the working class was going
through a process of "moral degeneration."
In many households, men, women and children were all
employed for pay outside the home. Overcrowded housing
units meant that children were exposed to sex and that
boys and girls lived in close proximity. Non-marital
heterosexual relations and homosexuality seemed to be
thriving in the streets and the bars. State policy-
makers saw moral reform in part as an antidote to
working class militancy.
A revived working class family was seen as a potential
pillar of stability as well as an ongoing source of new
workers. The state developed a range of new forms of
moral regulation to shape the working-class family in
the period 1880-1920 in Canada, Britain and the United
States. Male homosexuality was outlawed. (Women were
omitted from this legislation in Britain, as sexist
law-makers could not even imagine that women had a
sexuality independent from men.)
The new gender order was reinforced by activities,
such as segregated home economics classes for girls
and shop classes for boys in schools. The unpaid
labor of women in the household was subjected to new
forms of scrutiny, as public health nurses would
suddenly show up on the doorstep to inspect and instruct.
Moral Deregulation and Queer Capitalism
The regime of moral regulation that emerged in the
early 20th century was incorporated into the welfare
state structures that emerged after World War II It
remained largely intact until the 1960s. The past
thirty-five years have seen a partial moral deregulation,
in the face of changes in capitalist society and the
emergence of militant lesbian/gay and women's movements.
Capitalism, then, both opened up new spaces for the
development of sexuality and shut them down with a
regime of moral regulation. In the recent past,
this regime of moral regulation has undergone important
changes.
There has been a partial moral deregulation as rules
have been relaxed in certain areas of life. Yet at
the same time, new forms of moral policing have been
introduced, for example in the harassment of people
receiving welfare benefits and homeless people.
Moral deregulation has been closely related to the
deeper penetration of commodification (the production
of goods specifically for the market) into our everyday
lives. In North America, bread once baked in the home
is now mainly purchased on the market. Birthday parties
are increasingly organized at commercial venues like fast
food restaurants.
The market is fundamentally amoral. It is about making
a buck. The old regime of moral regulation was actually
a barrier to making a buck in certain ways. For example,
restrictions on gambling kept that ultra-high profit
industry on the margins of North American life.
The shift to the right in the last twenty years has
included a fair amount of deregulation as barriers to
market expansion at any cost have been removed.
Transportation industries, for example, have been
deregulated in such a way as to decrease safety
inspections, health and safety protection and limits
on competition. There have also been elements of moral
deregulation. Casinos now compete to suck money out of
the pockets of working class people in Windsor and Detroit.
This moral deregulation has largely followed market
forces and has therefore included elements of sexual
liberalization. Commodification is strongly associated
with sexualization as advertising endeavors to charge
everyday objects with desire. Overly strict sexual
regulation is an obstacle to this process of sexualization.
The deregulation of sexuality is in some ways parallel
to the legalization of gambling. The state has reoriented
activities that stood in the way of profit-making. The
market-viable aspects of lesbian and gay existence have
therefore gained some space.
Indeed, the whole idea of "gay community" is generally
associated with commercialized spaces such as bars,
publications, stores, heavily sponsored pride marches
and queer personal style as expressed in clothes and
haircuts. The last twenty years have seen many non-profit
gay community publications and spaces shut down in the face
of commercialized competition.
This commercialized gay lifestyle is not equally accessible
to all. These spaces tend to be oriented towards men rather
than women, in part because men generally have greater
buying power. People with lower incomes have very limited
access to these spaces, which generally run on the principle
of pay to play.
People of color generally don't fit the "image" generated
by the commercialized queer culture industries and face
racism in queer communities. Transgendered people are
often excluded by the gender-normative orientation of
these spaces.
Indeed, gay men have been pioneers in the development of
a new market-oriented masculinity that is spreading to
heterosexual men. Hey, it's okay to care about your
appearance, guys—you can be manly and shop all at the
same time.
The rise of a commercialized gay lifestyle has been
associated with a political shift away from radical
liberationist politics within queer movements. The
radical lesbian and gay liberation movements that
emerged in the 1970s after the Stonewall riots had
a set of politics that marked a serious departure
from earlier queer organizing. The focus was on
militant activism to confront power rather than
trying to earn favor with the powerful; visibility
rather than respectability; and opposition to the
compulsory family system rather than assimilation
into it, seeking an end to the official state monopoly
on defining acceptable relationships.
These liberationist politics have gone in and out of
favor in the thirty-one years since Stonewall. By the
1980s, a more moderate reform orientation dominated the
movement. This reform-oriented movement favored lobbying
to get inside power rather than militant activism,
respectability more than visibility and assimilation
into the family system rather than opposition to it.
Liberationist politics were revived by a wave of
militant AIDS activism beginning in 1987. AIDS had
a devastating effect on queer communities. The official
response to this crisis by governments and the media was
absolute silence except for the occasional derogatory
reference.
Queer communities organized a whole range of AIDS
services and preventive interventions. The anger
around AIDS also relaunched militant liberationist
politics, around such organizations as ACT UP, AIDS
Action Now, Queer Nation and the Lesbian Avengers.
Queer Capitalism, Class and Liberation
The 1990s saw the consolidation of commercialized queer
capitalism. An elite layer of professional queers (including
businesspeople, lawyers, doctors, journalists and professors)
as the spokespersons for queer communities. In the absence
of radical liberationist movements, this professional class
often defines lesbian and gay communities and politics.
This group tends to favor court challenges rather than
mobilization and commercial festivals (like Pride Day
Parades) rather than protests. Given the specific
location of queer communities within many North American
cities, this queer professional class has often been a
leading advocate of gentrification and the coercive policing
of the homeless.
The emergence of queer capitalism makes it particularly
important to understand the relations between class politics
and queer liberation. The business and professional types
who often speak for queer communities do not necessarily
consider the interests of more vulnerable queers. We are
living in an era in which social polarization is increasing,
so the rich are getting richer and poor are getting poorer—
a polarization reflected in queer communities, where some
are benefiting from contemporary social changes and others
are suffering.
The specific character of class relations within queer
communities requires more attention than I can give it here,
for example looking at the relations between the queer service
working class (in bars, stores and services) and their (sometimes)
queer employers, work relations within the sex trades, and the
specific experiences queers have had with welfare systems and
homelessness.
The class-divided character of queer communities is also a
reminder about strategies for organizing and building alliances.
A strong labor movement can help drive queer rights forward.
The contemporary lesbian/gay movement emerged first in the United
States, and the infrastructure of organization there is very
well developed; yet compared to Canada, lesbians and gay men
in the United States have gained relatively little in the way
of official rights and recognition.
Canadian queers have a proportionately weaker movement, yet
substantially more rights. One of the crucial reasons for
this is that the more powerful labor movements in Canada (
and in much of Europe) have contributed in important ways
to the development of rights and recognition. In 1981,
Canada's most militant union (Canadian Union of Postal
Workers) was the first to win a collective agreement clause
specifying non-discrimination on the basis of sexual
orientation. In 1985, library workers in the Canadian
Union of Public Employees were the first to win full
benefits for same sex partners and their dependents.
In each of these cases, queer unionists had to organize
and fight to convince their sisters and brothers that queer
rights was a union matter. Once one set of workers have
won these rights, it is possible to spread them across
the unionized population. These rights have now spread
across much of the public sector in Canada; breakthroughs
in the private sector have been harder to secure in the
face of determined employer resistance.
Socialism and Queer Liberation
Real queer liberation is a crucial wedge in the struggle
to smash the system of sex and gender repression that
impoverishes all of our sexual and emotional lives.
Capitalism sucks out our life energy into the effort to
keep ourselves alive, either through work, on inadequate
benefits or in the streets.
This system displaces our sexual and intimate energies
onto commercial transactions, so we achieve gratification
by shopping. It pits us against each other in cut throat
competition. If socialism means anything, it must be access
to the resources, knowledge and power to control our bodies
and our lives. Queer liberation is not an optional add-on
to Marxism, but a fundamental feature of socialist politics.
Just as queer liberation will always be partial in a
unequal capitalist society, so our vision of socialism
cannot be complete without an end to sex and gender
oppression. Queer liberation must be part of a struggle
for all-round freedom.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Alan Sears presented this paper at the August 2000 Sumer S
chool of Solidarity. He is a member of the New Socialist
Group in Canada and teaches sociology at the University of Windsor.
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