The book’s final chapters propose a Marxist theory of sexuality and desire that takes these movement case studies as its origin point. Their activities, considered a political genealogy of the US late-twentieth century, reveals the state’s celebration and promotion of the bourgeois nuclear family and its component emblem of the propertied citizen, which “mediated the contradiction of the bourgeois state by disavowing racial, gender, and sexual differences that were necessary to the production of an exploitable workforce and surplus labor populations.”5 Queer politics expressed the general material contradictions that this disavowal of difference sought to obfuscate. For example, Black lesbian feminism expresses the reality of the economic conditions that led to the doubling of the number of poor families led by single mothers in the wake of economic crisis; of all poor Black families, 75 percent were led by single Black mothers, reflecting the particular effect of this development on Black women.6 Likewise, AIDS activism is the social expression of the intense reality of real estate speculation in neighborhoods affected by the epidemic—an intensified site of a broader project of gentrification in many communities. These theoretical articulations set up the note of political promise with which Stoeffel ends the book: while recognizing the many ways that capitalist society instrumentalizes and weaponizes pleasure, he advocates celebration of the tradition of desire suffusing movements for collective autonomy.
In systematizing this analysis, Eros and Empire accurately casts movements that have been considered in terms of identity politics as material struggles. This is not only in the sense that they organize around satisfying material needs; the necessary work of pointing this out has been done well previously. Stoffel presents the new theoretical claim that these struggles emerge from the dialectical movement of capitalist class relations. As such, the book defies the braindead positing of an opposition between class politics and identity politics, including as it is posited by some Marxists. Eros and Empire offers a real starting point to the many more Marxists who have been inattentive to these forms of political activity because they don’t align with their models of class struggle. This is especially true of queer and trans struggles, which have only really entered Marxist analysis as a sort of generalized antibourgeois opposition or through recognition that many of their members are working-class. In terms of feminist struggle, a theory of social reproduction stemming from its woefully inadequate treatment in volume one of Karl Marx’s Capital clarifies the theoretical terrain of queer and trans life. However, because this analytic is based on the sexed and gendered division of productive and reproductive labor it has been difficult to disentangle it from heterosexuality. It is only now that the queer and trans analysis has found primary engagement there. The work of Kay Gabriel, Amy De’Ath, Sophie Lewis, and Bruno Monfort shows that social reproduction theory is not only relevant to women and LGBT people, but rather reveals the material basis of the domestic; it is the inextricability of these two categories, even as they are both constituted by internal contradictions related to feminization and racialization.
This book’s particular contribution to this broad generational project is a theory of desire. Stoffel distinguishes between a “vertical” form of desire, which attaches people to “objects that promise entry into the propertied conditions of whiteness, heteronormativity, Americanness, and other normative categories” from a “horizontal” form of desire, which resists subsumption and therefore “threaten[s] to disorganize, destabilize, and disturb the reproduction of those normative attachments” and thus is “corrosive and threatening to the reproduction of bourgeois society.”7 The former produces the conditions for the latter, but ultimately, it is the vertical form that cannot endure. This is not because desire is anarchic, but because capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacy stoke, indeed depend on, desires they cannot ultimately satisfy. If fascism emerges and remerges by heightening this tendency of the bourgeois state to sustain itself on the production and disappointment of the feeling of belonging together and getting what we want (communism), to build on Walter Benjamin’s most famous formulation, we must respond by politicizing desire. As Stoffel teaches us, this does not only look like the joy of a picket line or the pleasures of sectoral comradeship, perhaps especially on Turtle Island. It also looks like provocations of gay seizure of public space, Black women strategizing together, and friends helping each other survive another day in the luxury of community.
It is no accident that this deeper materialist understanding of queer struggle comes from Stoffel’s consideration of these movements in their proper, and often neglected, transnational context. Nationalist incorporation of these struggles as representative of who we are depends on the sublation of New York’s relation to Cuba, Combahee’s relation to Algeria, San Francisco’s relation to South Africa, and Minneapolis’s relation to Gaza. Stoffel’s fine attention to the individual histories of these movements, including their internal contradictions, provides theoretical tools just as considering the real work of proletarian self-organization has grounded historical materialism. “Yanqui go home!” in Venezuela is the same as “No human being is illegal on stolen land!” in Anishinaabewaki. Offering hospitality to all people is the same thing as enacting vengeful inhospitality to the infrastructure and agents of colonial capitalist extraction. Here is there; there is here. From Punjab, to Abyei, to Derry, to Sonora: the border crossed us. We can hope for equally careful historical accounts that provincialize the United States by looking back at its movements from the outside.
If there is one thing that we know about the struggles to come, it’s that they must be total. Every shoulder must be at the wheel of uprising. The bourgeois media and political class have demonstrated that no amount of mass uprising will dislodge their fealty to the white supremacist image that they hold in their heads of the US working class. No matter how assiduously we tally the average incomes of a Donald Trump voter, they will not be moved. Theirs is the racist, misogynist, homophobic, transphobic, which is to say anti-working-class, lie that misrecognizes the donning of the outfits that Anderson Cooper imagines to be typical of white rural and suburban culture as a class position, even when worn by the owners of multimillion dollar second homes. They don’t believe this lie because they are ignorant. They promulgate this lie because it serves them. If Eros and Empire teaches us one thing, in my view, it is this. Or rather, that is the second lesson; the first is to always recognize the particular scapegoat of the moment as the protagonist of the imminent universal coalitional struggle to come.
