Hennessy - Returning to Reproduction Queerly.pdf

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Returning to Reproduction Queerly: Sex, Labor, Need Rosemary Rosemary Hennessy Published online: 22 Aug 2006.

Rosemary Hennessy (2006): Returning to Reproduction Q ueerly: Q ueerly: To cite this article: Rosemary Sex, Labor, Need, Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society, 18:3, 387-395 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08 rg/10.1080/0893569060074 935690600748074 8074 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.o

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RETHINKING MARXISM

VOLUME 18

NUMBER 3

(JULY 2006)

Returning to Reproduction Queerly: Sex, Labor, Need1 Rosemary Hennessy 3 1 0 2 y a M 3 2 3 1 : 8 0 t a ] y r a r b i L x e s s u S f o y t i s r e v i n U [ y b d e d a o l n w o D

Historical materialism’s critique of capitalism and queer critiques of the material history of sexuality find a fruitful intersection in the concept of social reproduction. The making of history involves the reproduction of social life * /what Marx referred to as ’’species-being’’ or what might be called ‘‘social ontology.’’ As an aspect of social ontology, affective needs feature in the reproduction of social life and are folded into cultural norms. Capitalism produces unmet human needs that are embedded in values and identities and incorporated into relations of labor in and outside the market place. Drawing upon workers’ narratives, this essay examines sex and labor in the social ontology of the maquiladoras on the U.S.-Mexican border. Although sexual identity has eluded studies of labor relations in maquiladoras, these workers’ narratives illustrate its powerful role in and outside the factory, in workers’ exploitation and in labor organizing.

Key Words: Queer Theory, Marxism, Sexuality, Sexual Identity, Maquiladoras, Value

Human beings make history, though not necessarily under conditions of our own choosing, and we do so by meeting the needs of what Marx referred to as our ‘‘species-being.’’ Expanding upon Marx, some feminist social theorists have recently called this way of seeing human history ‘‘social ontology’’ (Bakker and Gil 2004). The phrase ‘‘social ontology’’ is a gloss on the Marxist concept of social reproduction.2 It stresses that survival of the human species depends on social relations that span political economy and juridical and cultural forms that foster the security of the world’s population. Ontology in the philosophical sense involves the study of the nature of existence. The notion of ‘‘social ontology’’ acknowledges that human species-being is a social and historical process involving human agency. A social ontology identifies how social reproduction and change take place across social structures and human relations * /in work that becomes labor in the marketplace, in the work of domestic care, in state and disciplinary regimes, and in forms of value that organize human agency.

1. Portions of this essay appearin Richardson, D., J. McLaughlin, and M. Casey. 2006. Intersections in Feminist and Queer Theory: Sexualities, Cultures and Identities. London: Palgrave. 2. For further discussion of social ontology, see Bakker and Gil (2004, especially pt. 1). ISSN 0893-5696 print/1475-8059 online/06/030387-09 – 2006 Association for Economic and Social Analysis DOI: 10.1080/08935690600748074

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As human beings we work and desire, we have needs and sensations * /a ll at the same time. But modern Western culture has been shaped by paradigms that separate these activities and capacities. This is itself a historical consequence. Over the course of capitalism’s development, desire and labor, need and sensation have been isolated from one another in the prevailing ways of making sense of the self and society. This division was not simply a philosophical event, but a historical effect consolidated some time in the nineteenth century and not coincidentally at the dawn of consumer capitalism. It is manifest in the splits between Marxism and queer theory. Marxism offers us conceptual tools to make visible and explain the persistent fundamental social relation of capitalism, the accumulation of profit primarily through the reaping of surplus labor in the working day. Marxist concepts also help us to trace the material connections that bind the production of value in political economy to cultural value and consciousness. However, across its history, and with few exceptions (Alexandra Kollantai and Herbert Marcuse come to mind), Marxism has all but ignored sexuality. I would like to say that capitalism’s increasing colonization of the body and sensation have made it less possible for Marxists to do so but, in fact, Marxists are more embattled than ever, and those who are thinking critically about sexuality are few and far between. Queer theory’s critical force has been in the domain of culture study, in elaborating the dynamics of gender and sexuality as normative value systems and exposing their incoherences. However, the queer theory that blossomed in the overdeveloped world during the nineties, and mostly in the academy, is no longer the culture industry’s newest fashion. The study of sexuality it provoked is being absorbed into cultural studies broadly understood and is pursuing new directions. The most politically interesting work provoked by queer theory as cultural studies addresses sexuality in relation to its racialized imperial history and the changing relations of labor throughout the modern period and under neoliberal capitalism’s new bargain with the state. For example, the late Lionel Cantu’s essay ‘‘De Ambiente’’ invites us to think about the impact of migration (driven by neoliberal capitalism’s structural adjustment policies) and the Mexican government’s development of the tourism industry on the commodification of Mexican ‘‘gay’’ culture and space. Roderick Ferguson’s Aberrations in Black (2003) examines the consolidation of a racialized, heteronormative patriarchy in the twentieth century within Marxism, sociology, and revolutionary nationalist movements. And Kevin Floyd’s forthcoming Reifying Desire analyzes the split between critiques of capital and sexuality, approaching the historical reasons for this dichotomy by way of a critical engagement with the concept of reification. As a contribution to this collective undertaking, I want to consider value as a hinge concept that binds Marxism and the new sexuality studies. Under capitalism we do not retain control of very much of our human potential. As Marx points out, to survive within the minimum standard, the worker is forced to give up ‘‘time for education, for intellectual development . . . for the free play of his bodily and mental activity, even the rest time of Sunday’’ (1959, 264). Human needs are outlawed when workers’ health and safety are ignored because they are not cost effective, when the workday is lengthened, lunch hours shortened, bathroom breaks cut, overtime required, or when the socially necessary labor that takes place outside the workplace is normalized as family care and invisible as labor. Needs are also

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outlawed through the ways of seeing we employ, the values that form consciousness and subjectivity: when people lose sight of the social relationships that make possible the goods they consume, and when our human capacities as affective, sensuous, social beings are fractured. This fracturing registers in the ways our affective capacities come to be named in terms of legitimate and illegitimate ‘‘experiences.’’ Outlawed affective needs are not just the identities and desires that the dominant culture shames * /being called gay, lesbian, dyke, queer. They are also those unspeakable particular sensations and affects that do not fall easily into any categories. The human potential for sensation and affect which comprises what we call ‘‘experience’’ is always much richer than established culture captures. What is left over consists of particularities and potentials that a culture’s languages, stories, and practices do not, cannot, name. This outlawing of human potential is one of the sites of struggle between capital and labor. Many unmet needs lie outside capitalism and cannot be assimilated into it without abolishing the fundamental social relationships of exploitation it depends on. This domain of outlawed need must be reckoned with continually because it poses a constant potential threat to capitalist interests. It is the monstrous outside to capitalism that haunts it. Affective needs that are organized into what gets called ‘‘sexuality’’ are only one aspect of much broader affective and sensate relations that feature in everyday life. They are crucial to social reproduction and to the work of organizing against the violence of capitalist relations. Social reproduction under capitalism takes place through the making, exchange, and consumption of commodities. Quite a lot of cultural studies work on sexuality has focused on the consumption aspect * /on the queering of consumer practices and cultures. This is symptomatic of a truce between corporate owners and social movements organized around same-sex identities, a truce that welcomes gay (or gaytolerant or transgendered) consumers and professionals in return for acquiescence and accommodation (see Hennessy 2000; Quiroga 2000, chap. 1). There is, of course, a material relationship between the achievement of consumer (and civic) rights in the one-third world and the production of commodities by the vast labor pool of workers in the two-thirds world. If this relation is in part a structural one between visibility and invisibility, critical work on sexuality has taught us that visibility in itself may not be a sufficient metaphor to redress it. It is important to remember that capitalism does not require any particular cultural values to assemble its labor force and accumulate surplus value. It carves out a modernizing path that is fundamentally amoral, pursuing profit by tracking down surplus labor however and wherever it can. This may mean taking advantage of traditional cultural forms or symbolic values that civil society has upheld or melting them away so that new subjects and new norms come to be. Marx understands labor power to include these cultural forms. Labor power consists of both a physical dimension and another part that he calls ‘‘the living personality’’ * /what we might refer to now as subjectivity. In order for the worker to sell his labor power, Marx says, he must have it at his disposal: ‘‘he must be the free proprietor of his own labour-capacity, hence of his person’’ (271). For Marx, when the worker and the capitalist meet in the market, they enter into relations with each other ‘‘on an equal footing as owners of commodities . . . both are therefore equal in the eyes of the

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law’’ (271). But as Marx knows, equality in the eyes of the law masks the propertied interests of the state. As he argues in ‘‘On the Jewish Question’’ (1972), the state’s universal ‘‘man’’ presupposes particular social relations: the distinctions of birth, rank, education, occupation, and, we might add, gender, race, and sexuality. The state is premised on the social inequalities these distinctions regulate and helps to reproduce them even though it does not politically acknowledge this * /or not without a fight. The universal version of ‘‘equality’’ established by the state is an imaginary sovereignty that divests ‘‘man’’ of his ‘‘real individual life and fills him with an unreal universality’’ (220). The major inequality in civil society is the difference that private property establishes between individuals. One function of the dominant cultural values through which human needs and desires are made meaningful is to mediate this difference * /to represent inequality as equality, exploitation as free enterprise. The ‘‘real individuality’’ of our particular living personalities that accompanies labor power does so through the normative, symbolic meanings that are a sort of second skin. Seemingly not necessary to one’s ability to assemble wiring, sew sleeves, wait tables, or vacuum floors, this second skin is an extra. It is supplemental in the sense that it is both necessary and a bonus, an aspect of a worker’s subjectivity that can be managed and disciplined in ways that will potentially increase the value of the labor power the capitalist purchases. Sutured to the particularities of our human capacities, it is also at risk of being out of our hands. The modern state’s myth of possessive individualism applies to all citizens but, in fact, has a limited address. Some individuals do not have full possession of themselves. Free market exchange relies on and takes advantage of the political and cultural dispossession of certain subjects. The dispossessed are the subjects of surplus labor, or what we might more accurately call feminized labor. When the marks of femininity accompany the exchange of labor power for a wage, they offer a tacit promise to the buyer that the supervision of the physical life and living personality of the bearer of this labor power is out of her hands. And so they may be managed through regimes of surveillance and disciplinary technologies. To be subjected as feminine is to forfeit full claim to one’s capacities, to let them loose from one’s possession. This loose second skin lowers the cost of the labor power it accompanies and so enhances the value added to whatever commodities it produces. There are many practices that capital makes use of to maintain this second skin of labor power, ensuring that it is continually available to lower the value of labor power. Sexual harassment is one. Sexual harassment is allowed precisely because of the assumption that the feminized subject is to some degree out of her own hands, there for the taking, her body available to be surveyed, taken up, put down. The second skin of femininity is inscribed with many signs and enshrouds all manner of ‘‘women.’’ It is embedded in the discourses of sexuality that attach normative value to the human capacities for sensation and pleasure. It traverses justifications for the value of labor outside the workplace as well * /in the street, the bedroom, and the kitchen. It can also be the glue that binds corporate and state impunity. Historical materialism recognizes that the economic relations basic to capitalism rely upon culture, including ideologies of gender, and ‘‘economies of desire’’ are cultural forms that mediate and are incorporated into the production of value. One of



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the challenges in building a social movement against capitalism now is to intervene in these mediations where exchange value and culture value, labor and desire meet, and to forge through that intervention alternative social relations. In many areas of Latin America today, the best-organized opposition to neoliberal capitalism originates in the rural areas, spreads to the cities, and is led by landless peasants. On Mexico’s northern border this opposition is taking shape in the activities of assembly plant workers who are meeting together, and at times with peasants from the south, to build national and international alliances. Out of the immense challenges of massive unmet need, the resources of traditional knowledge, and the legacy of radical intellectual thought, they are developing what might be called a social ontology, forms of political education that hold rich lessons for critical teachers from el otro lado . If the corporate sectors in the United States have realized that there is more value in incorporating queers who will work for them, since that at least creates the possibility of an alternative market, capital’s trajectory in Mexico is not quite that or not yet. Many treatments of neoliberalism’s impact make use of a North-South paradigm to measure the emergence of ‘‘new’’ families and life styles in the service economy of the North against a feminized industrial workforce in the South, freed from the constraints of domestic production yet still bound by traditional heterogendered norms at work and by the reproductive labor of daughter, wife, and mother at home. However, changes in the gendered division of labor in the maquila workforce invite us to rethink the concept of the ‘‘feminization of labor.’’ From its inception in 1965 through the next decade, the overwhelming majority of unskilled production workers in the maquiladoras were women; few women were employed as technical, administrative, or managerial staff. Based on publicity from the Asian export processing zones, managers coming to Mexico took for granted that they would be hiring women as the unskilled labor force. Women were valued because they were construed as more docile toward authority. They were also seen as a temporary workforce whose primary interests lay in family and home. The ‘‘femininity’’ that was recruited had to do with a set of meanings that were dislodging femininity from being restricted to the home and traditional family production and reconstituting it as a set of characteristics that could ostensibly apply to men or women: dexterous, docile, tolerant, and cheap (Salzinger 2003, 37). While women comprised the majority of the total labor force in the maquilas, the proportion of women workers has varied between plants in different industrial sectors (Pearson 1995, 140). In the first decades of the maquiladora program, women were concentrated in electronics, clothing, shrimp and other food processing, toymaking, and coupon sorting, and they comprised up to 90 percent of the total labor force (139). Men were the preferred labor force in firms making transportation equipment, leather and synthetic goods, wood and metal furniture, and photographic, sporting, and paper goods (140). In those sectors where labor costs were the major portion of manufacturing costs, women workers predominated. Clothing and electronics are still the largest industries, and they are the sectors where women’s employment is concentrated. Now, however, the proportions are changing. The majority of maquiladora workers are still women, but almost half are men. The gradual changeover began in the eighties when the demand for maquila workers in cities like Jua ´rez increased, but the market of women willing to work in the factories was

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saturated. Ultimately, the demand for cheap labor made adjustments in the demographics of the workforce inevitable (Salzinger 2003, 43). By the nineties, women workers had already proved to be less ‘‘docile,’’ as their involvement in strikes and work stoppages indicates, but, at the same time, the standard profile of the maquiladora worker had been set. Men were being hired, but the profile of ‘‘feminine’’ expectations continued to define the preferred worker. This ‘‘feminine’’ ideal was in part an imaginary phantom and in part a standard of value by which cheap, disposable labor could be extracted. Increasingly, the feminine worker was coming to be defined as the unskilled, fast-turnover, part-time worker * /and this disposable sector of the workforce was where women were positioned, while more skilled positions, promotions, and job security were being made available to men (Wright). Considering the presence of what we only approximately can name ‘‘homosexual and lesbian’’ workers in the maquilas underscores several aspects of this profile: the ways capital accumulates profit by both transgressing and deploying the norms of civil society; the need for a more dialectical understanding of the erosion and intensification of heterogender values across North and South; and the role of sexuality in suturing two registers of value: value added to commodities through unpaid or surplus labor, and value as symbolic meaning. It is on the last of these that I will focus the remainder of my remarks. Yvon, a former organizer in the maquilas in Reynosa, confirms that inside the factory there is no space for questioning nonheteronorms or making gay identities a point of organization because ‘‘there aren’t people who would help.’’ He indicates where surplus value meets symbolic value in the space of production. ‘‘This is a point about behavior,’’ he says, ‘‘about people who are paying attention to the person; it’s like the human side is being lost. The questions who are you? how are you? are not so important as what you produce with your hands.’’ Yvon recognizes that in the end, capital cares more about the accumulation of profit than about the particularities of human individuals, about gay or straight, man or woman. And yet, the accumulation process takes place within certain limits which include the cultural dimension of social life that the worker brings with her, including the organization of affective needs into sexuality. In the maquiladora communities of the north, in a workforce dominated by women over the past four decades, workers have brought their particular second skins of sexual identity to work with them and same-sex relationships have of course occurred. Any generalizations about sexual identities in the maquilas, however, have to acknowledge that assumptions and practices about non-normative sexuality are unevenly shared, sometimes don’t travel very far, and are inflected by varied local historical influences. Practices and concepts that may be commonplace in northern border towns do not necessarily hold in Mexico City or the Yucatań, and cultural variations between mestizo and indigenous groups are considerable. The reification of sexuality that was one of the conditions for the emergence of homoand heterosexual identities around the turn of the twentieth century in Europe and the United States also took hold in urban centers in Mexico in the early twentieth century as the state defined previously untaxonomized sectors and behaviors to regulate the national body, but they were reified along a different trajectory than the


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ones many North American and European theorists have charted.3 The bonds between sexuality and gender remained more integrated through the rules of traditional machista patriarchal culture, and sexual identity has not been as successfully displaced from family alliances along the same paths of scientific and clinical discourse as in the North.4 One former worker, Mariana, says she saw changes in the maquila workforce over the several generations she worked there. By the nineties, she says,


the culture inside the maquilas was changing. There was the biggest invasion of maquilas to the border cities during this decade and they really needed workers. It was then that the informal filters that kept gay men out started to relax. Of course there was no official policy against hiring gays, but informally this was the practice. They would even write it in the comments on the application. But by the nineties the maquilas needed all the workers they could get, and gay men started appearing as operators on the line along with the women. By then the lesbians were more open, too. Yvon theorizes that gay men in the nineties became what we might think of as the ‘‘new women’’ of the maquilas. Gay men who are ‘‘out’’ have typically few options for work but, during these years, they entered the maquilas and were welcomed. As he puts it, ‘‘The more dependent you are on the work the more you are going to be here, and gay men cannot risk having work outside. So they inverted the role and exchanged women for gays.’’ Gay men have not replaced women as the preferred workforce in the maquilas, but Yvon’s insight about their feminized place bears further reflection. Yvon also reports that gay men are being recruited into management positions. When I ask him how he understands this, he responds that of course it is a matter of class. ‘‘There is a saying,’’ he says, ‘‘that goes, ‘How they see you they treat you.’ This has a lot to do with class. But it also has to do with the question of identity. One thing can’t be 3. In Mexico, naming the male homosexual meant pointing to the passive partner as the visible homosexual and it was this subject who was expelled from the national fabric as ‘‘waste.’’ The lesbian, already effaced as woman under the law, slipped through the cracks of official prescriptions, though she was named as marimacha or mamflor when women transgressed prescribed codes for gender or desire. ‘‘Homosexuality‘‘ in Mexican culture is a term that does not fit all practitioners of same-sex behaviors and desires; it hovers between a performative practice and an identity, and men move around in this space more than most labels suggest. As Max Mejia put it, ‘‘machista fights against homosexuality in theory but accepts it in practice; rejects it in public but invokes it in private; despises it in daylight and procures it under cover of darkness’’ (2000, 49). ‘‘Outing’’ and ‘‘the closet’’ function differently in Mexico and Latin America generally as same-sex identity circulates through public and private discourses in which silence, secrecy, and masking enfold normative sexuality in an ambiente still affected by patriarchal family ideologies and the value placed on being fathers of children * /along with the virtual absence of any critical public discourse about gender and sexual identity. 4. In Mexico, homosexual relations between adults over eighteen are not criminalized, but strictly legal rights are of no avail to individual homosexuals in the hands of notoriously corrupt politicians. Police have sweeping powers to arrest anyone who behaves using language that contravenes public decency, and the federal labor code (Article 47 #8) still permits employers to dismiss workers for having committed ‘‘immoral acts’’ on the work site regardless of their competence and fulfillment of their work obligations (Lumsden 1991, 53, 75).

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separated from the other. It would be,’’ he sums up, ‘‘like eating cheese without cheese. Without the flavor of cheese it tastes like milk.’’ Yvon’s oblique comment points to the intersection of symbolic and surplus value where sexual identity as cultural value is sutured to the engendering of surplus value in the relations of production. Being homosexual or lesbian as an operator in the maquilas is to be feminized in a qualitatively different way than being gay or lesbian in management. This place where surplus value meets sexual value can also be a potential wedge in class relations, initiated by those workers who disclose, in what has been offered as the way things are, an alternative story of how they can be. Organizers in the maquilas who implicitly question heteronorms, who are gay- or lesbian-identified (and they are many) and who explicitly question the workers’ exploitation, face enormous challenges. Mariana reports, ‘‘The company would tell the workers, ‘The only reason she is organizing is to have all of you women as her lovers.’’’ Many women who become organizers so disrupt normative heterosexual machista culture that they are threatened by their husbands and accused of being lesbians, yet they face few options outside the economic support a heteronormative identity offers. Yvon says that after some of the other organizers began making comments openly about his gay sexuality, his credibility was so undermined that he had to leave the group he was working with. ‘‘It’s like the waves of the sea,’’ he says, extending his arms. ‘‘One has to walk like this. If you go against the current you are going to drown. But there is always the chance that a wave is going to break and you might catch it.’’ Organizing in the maquilas founders on homophobia compounded by the preoccupation with survival, the insecurity of work, and paralysis bred of fear and need. Nonetheless, some are making waves, working the places where sexuality and surplus value meet. They bear on their second skins the tattoos of capital’s monstrous dark side, putting into circulation the threat of an organized social majority. Organizers * / which is to say, teachers of a certain sort * /are agents of social ontology. Moving two steps forward, one step back, they activate critical consciousness, retrieve good sense from common sense, and mobilize actors who know themselves to be a monstrous collective. In el norte when the next wave crests, this critical consciousness can buoy us up. If we refuse to be mystified by identities and rights and insist on the basic value of meeting human needs, we just might catch it.

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. 1972. On the Jewish question. In The Marx-Engels reader , ed. R. Tucker. New York: Norton. Mejia, M. 2000. Mexican pink. In Different rainbows , ed. P. Drucker, 43  /55. New York: Gay Men’s Press. Pearson, R. 1995. Male bias and women’s work in Mexico’s border industries. In Male bias in development , ed. D. Elson. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Prieur, A. 1998. Mema?s house, Mexico City: On transvestites, queers and machos . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Quiroga, J. 2000. Tropics of desire: Interventions for queer Latino America . New York: New York University Press. Salzinger, L. 2003. Genders in production: Making workers in Mexico’s global factories . Berkeley: University of California Press.

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