Capitalisms and Gay Identities by Stephen Valocchi — book review
This book is a cultural materialist analysis of how the meaning of being gay has changed: the identity taking up different focuses and definitions and practices in response to the economic and political changes of the last hundred years. What gay people do and how these activities are understood to signify gayness, what gayness means and what it is seen to mean, shifts in the interplay between LGBT people’s lives and the two way demands of economic, political and social restructuring. Indeed, what gay people are and have been is a political nexus. In a methodology not dissimilar to Foucault’s description of the construction of the homosexual in the 19th century, Valocchi plots a course for the construction of what it means to be gay today — a course directed by the winds of administrative and state power and by changes in the form of capitalism: through monopoly, reform, crisis, disaster and neo-liberal — there’s a homosexual for each one of these.
It’s a fundamental principle of Marxist analysis that the cultural formations of a society are underpinned by its economic base. When economic practices change, all the structures built on top of them have to follow, sometimes scrambling to regain a footing, and come out (pun intentional) altered. Through the 20th century, the particular practices that gay identity cohered around vacillated, landing on one definition and then another as times changed and different focuses of understanding were foregrounded: gender inversion or arrested development? Professional, white, middle class men privileged a particular medico-scientific definition of being gay — same sex object choice — and made that central to homosexual identity. All that follows coalesces around this fixation. This fixation by those who made it was a response to, embedded in and and structured by, changes to capitalism over the course of the 20th century.
A major strand of the book is how our current understandings of, and cultural discourse surrounding, what it means to be gay were largely formed by the white, middle-class men who had the economic power and independence to found and lead those LGBT organisations which became successful in standing as representative of the gay community. This gave a particular flavour to the meaning of being gay and the social movement for LGBT liberation a particular set of representatives. Other understandings of what it meant to be gay were available in other communities: Black, Latino, Trans, working class etc. etc., but these gained no traction due to the economic marginalisation of these groups.
While Valocchi explicates a convincing causal path, reflecting how one definition became so paramount as to feel natural and inescapable — that homosexual people are people who have sex with others of the same sex — he too, unfortunately, is at an equal loss for alternative essential definitions as to the ultimate meaning of gay or lesbian and doesn’t venture into how the other communities or classes noted might have developed a different understanding of the meaning of being homosexual. This space is the vacuum of the book, the alternative course of history. It’s like taking the meaning of being gay from one nightclub without having been to another. I am gasping for the air of the alternatives that were overlooked, the less vanilla.
Would different communities have changed merely the intersection with the basic category or would they have changed the understanding of what being gay means fundamentally — or eradicated it as a stable and coherent formation of exclusion and inclusion totally? Perhaps I can’t even go there: a white (though working class) guy already subsumed by the standard definition, I cannot think my way to alterity, even though I wear a dress and enter those other clubs. In plotting the rise to power of the corporatisation of the homosexual, this book hasn’t itself gone into those marginalised community organisations to explore what other definitions of being ourselves — and how we might have been differently homosexual — are available.
But to ask what other category could create a common gay and lesbian identity that is not underpinned by a shared, same sex object choice is not the purpose of this book; this book looks at what has happened in the mainstream historical context, what formations and political activity flocked around that definition and the social repercussions of that. It is a his story. This is a well informed, long researched and studious examination that itself demonstrates how cultural materialism and a wider political and social context is missing from a lot of recent social movement studies. As a cultural materialist myself, I appreciate Valocchi’s dense plotting here, his large scale and his spot welding of the cultural meanings of being gay to the political and economic changes over the course of time. All identities are moulded in the thick of the social and political moment, they do not come from the outside, there is no outside. We swim in the treacle of history and its hard to get to a different club if we were not born there — that’s the wholesale intractability of capitalism for ya.
Originally published at http://idqinternational.wordpress.com on June 17, 2020.