Eros Against Empire: The Sexual Politics of Anti-Imperialism

This paper argues that Western queer political struggles since the 1960s have been united in their commitment to an eroticization of everyday life. This political horizon has been articulated in numerous ways over the past decades, but in each iteration Eros is posited as a possibility that can only be realized through the negation of the contemporaneous imperial world system. This paper considers three case studies: the gay liberationism of the late sixties, the black lesbian feminist movement of the seventies, and the AIDS activism of the eighties. It traces how each of these movements were given rise to from a particular imperial ordering of the capitalist world system, and how they developed a sexual politics that placed sexual liberation, eroticization, and promiscuity at the heart of its post-imperial and post-capitalist reordering. First, I demonstrate that the post-war Fordist mode of production was predicated upon a reconsolidation of the private nuclear household within the US and an attendant enforcement of rigid sexual and gender norms. This highly rationalized regime of accumulation greatly expanded the state’s punitive apparatus to repress homosexual, and often racialized, proletarian populations in cities, in turn giving rise to a politicized gay constituency in the form of the Gay Liberation Front. I trace how the gay liberationists formulated a vision of sexual liberation that was continuous with the anti-colonial and anti-capitalist struggles spawning the globe. I then turn to the black lesbian feminist movement, which emerged during a phase of transition — between the break-up of Fordism and the neoliberal reorganization of the world economy. The black lesbian feminists, I argue, contested the nationalist epistemologies of the US nation-state by articulating their identities as constituted through multiple determinations, whilst also anticipating neoliberalism’s commodification of difference. I uncover their indebtedness to a long history of 20th century anti-imperialist theorizing that regarded class, racial, and gendered differentiations within the imperial core as produced through imperialist expansion. Erotics, for the black lesbian feminists, entailed the dissolution of those boundaries and differences engendered by the imperialist world order. Lastly, I turn to the AIDS activists of the 1980s. I argue that the AIDS crisis was mobilized by elites as an alibi to impose the structural adjustments of an incipient neoliberal regime of accumulation — in particular, privatization, gentrification and urban development, and financialization — that eroded spaces of queer sociality within cities like New York and San Francisco. Against the destruction of these lifeworlds and against the privatization of sexual life, the AIDS activists insisted upon promiscuity and erotics (not domesticity and sexual conservatism) as the solution to the AIDS pandemic. I conclude by drawing out the commonalities among these movements’ articulations of Eros. I argue that they posit Eros as a reconfiguration of social relations towards human flourishing, bodily autonomy, pleasure and desire, and sociality — rather than towards accumulation, profit, and atomization — that would only be possible through a radical transformation of the existing socio-political status quo.