The Material Queer: A Lesbigay Cultural Studies Reader (Queer Critique)

This pathbreaking anthology turns first to the historical tradition in homosexual theory, from Plato to Freud, and then explores the (post)modern canon: Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Barthes, Irigaray, and Butler. It then situates classic and (post)modern discourses in a dialectical relation to historical materialist theories that go beyond the ethics of desire to relate sexuality to global social struggles. Offering such surprising intellectual conjunctures as those between Heraclitus, Hegel, and Engels; Freud and Volosinov; Lacan and Kollontai; Derrida and Dennis Altman; queer theorists and the Socialist Worker Collective, the volume disrupts the status quo in sexuality studies. Rather than reinforcing (post)structuralist orthodoxies about the difference of/in sexualities, The Material Queer provides sustained materialist interventions in today’s dominant theories, which, while calling for social progress, actually obscure the most effective line of resistance against sexual and other forms of oppression and exploitation.That effective line is a historical materialist analysis aimed at establishing a posthomophobic society in which sexuality is not deployed to justify differences of class that are actually produced in the social relations of production.