The history of (homo) sexuality under a Queer Marxist lens: reflections on sexual hegemony, family abolition and Portuguese LGBTQ movements

Proceedings of The 3rd International Conference on Gender Studies and Sexuality

Year: 2023

DOI:

[PDF]

The history of (homo) sexuality under a Queer Marxist lens: reflections on sexual hegemony, family abolition and Portuguese LGBTQ movements

Pedro Vidigal

ABSTRACT: 

In the following paper I intend to revisit Christopher Chitty’s original proposal in Sexual Hegemony (2020) to reinscribe the history of a (homo)sexual modern subject in a Marxist historical-political view. In this direction, it gives us important clues to start where Foucault concluded in the first volume of History of Sexuality by ascribing a historicity to modern sexual identities but going beyond it. Because what Foucault saw as an explosion of discursive apparatuses around sexuality which were created and served a particular modern capitalist class (without giving many clues on how and why), Chitty’s proposal uses the Gramscian concept of hegemony to understand how norms around sexuality and gender became a tool creating social control and consent: thus, homosexuality became a problem and its emergence became the figure by which was controlled, excluded or cured. This paradigm permits us to see how norms around sexuality and gender are profoundly inscribed in relations of production and reproduction. In this sense, it is crucial to think about the role of the prominence of the heteronuclear family as a key element to sexual hegemony, but also its role on the formation of a subject recipient of labor rights, and the problems it raises to a queer emancipatory horizon. The last part of this paper will consist merely of the beginning of a research I intend to do: understanding Portuguese queer movements within this problematics and adopting a theoretical standpoint akin to an exciting and emerging “Queer Marxism”.

keywords: family abolition, LGBTQ history, Queer Marxism, Sexual hegemony