Hey hey,

I’m in film school and a part of making my thesis film involves writing a theory paper that goes along with it. My film is about two Queer autistic women falling in love. For my paper I want to use Queer Marxist theory, preferably ML, that talks about the revolutionary and liberatory potential of Queer love. How Queer love, and love in general, is oppressed through the capitalist Queerphobic patriarchy as a means of control. To discourage us from forming communities and to not feel responsible for the well-beings of other. My cishet professor told me that Marxism is only class reductionism, he specially said, “class can’t explain misogyny”, which we Queer communists of course know is ridiculous.

I’ll admit I don’t know much about Queer Marxist theory or theorists, and just Googling it doesn’t really yield any results except one random trot on tumblr. Do any of y’all have any good recommendations?

  • cfgaussian
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    10 months ago

    Class analysis very much so explains misogyny, Engels laid it out well over a hundred years ago how the patriarchal nuclear family has its origins in class society. It’s about the exploitation of domestic and reproductive labor which in turn reinforces and props up the exploitation of the worker in general. There have been numerous Marxist authors who have written about this since, perhaps not as many of them with a focus specifically on queer oppression as this is a newer topic, but in principle the same arguments apply as to how class based oppression intersects with gender based oppression.

    Much of the framework of Marxist feminism is directly transferrable imo.

    • starkillerfish (she)
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      10 months ago

      Leslie Feinberg is great. Beyond Pink and Blue also has some relevant queer marxist essays.

  • bunbun
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    10 months ago

    For a modern example - Cuba’s family code today is one of the most progressive on the planet. It’s legitimately hard to believe, especially with how broadly it defines “family”- https://nacla.org/cubas-new-family-code-window-political-ecosystem

    For a more historical view - USSR decriminalized homosexuality in 1922. Later in 1934 “sodomy” was outlawed again. Here’s a letter from a british gay commie to Stalin arguing against this change, I think it’s right up your alley: https://www.marxist.com/letter-to-stalin-can-a-homosexual-be-in-the-communist-party.htm

  • mayo_cider [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    I haven’t read enough theory to provide any sources, but I’d suggest approaching the subject from the opposite direction, how capitalism is borne from lovelessness

    Capitalism grows from individualism and looking for ways to step on the weaker, and misogyny is one of the easiest avenues for that

    Class explains misogyny easily, for the ruling class it’s an easy way to shift the blame, and for the working class it provides a shadow boxing target that shifts the ire from the ruling class to an apparently weaker group inside the working class

    Teaching academic language to cishet professors was a mistake

  • vehicom
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    10 months ago

    My sister does a lot of this stuff - I’ll pull up some resources tomorrow, remind me if i forget. I was at their club meeting where we went over this exact stuff.

    What comes to mind that i’ve read super recently is Glitch Feminism by Legacy Russell. I’ll throw in a quote here and would recommend - though not super sure it would be super applicable to your paper so i’ll go find some actual resources tomorrow.

    Here’s a quote from the book that summarizes it, but i’ll update this tomorrow(it’s like 2 am rn)

    The construct of gender binary is, and has always been, precarious. Aggressively contingent, it is an immaterial invention that in its toxic virality has infected our social and cultural narratives. To exist within a binary system one must assume that our selves are unchangeable, that how we are read in the world must be chosen for us, rather than for us to define—and choose—for ourselves. To be at the intersection of female-identifying, queer, and Black is to find oneself at an integral apex. Each of these components is a key technology in and of itself. Alone and together, “female,” “queer,” “Black” as a survival strategy demand the creation of their individual machinery, that innovates, builds, resists. With physical movement often restricted, female-identifying people, queer people, Black people invent ways to create space through rupture. Here, in that disruption, with our collective congregation at that trippy and trip-wired crossroad of gender, race, and sexuality, one finds the power of the glitch.

    “We use “body” to give material form to an idea that has no form, an assemblage that is abstract. The concept of a body houses within it social, political, and cultural discourses, which change based on where the body is situated and how it is read. When we gender a body, we are making assumptions about the body’s function, its sociopolitical condition, its fixity. When the body is determined as a male or female individual, the body performs gender as its score, guided by a set of rules and requirements that validate and verify the humanity of that individual. A body that pushes back at the application of pronouns, or remains indecipherable within binary assignment, is a body that refuses to perform the score. This nonperformance is a glitch. This glitch is a form of refusal.”

    “Within glitch feminism, glitch is celebrated as a vehicle of refusal, a strategy of nonperformance. This glitch aims to make abstract again that which has been forced into an uncomfortable and ill-defined material: the body. In glitch feminism, we look at the notion of glitch-as-error with its genesis in the realm of the machinic and the digital and consider how it can be reapplied to inform the way we see the AFK world, shaping how we might participate in it toward greater agency for and by ourselves. Deploying the Internet as a creative material, glitch feminism looks first through the lens of artists who, in their work and research, offer solutions to this troubled material of the body. The process of becoming material surfaces tensions, prompting us to inquire: Who defines the material of the body? Who gives it value—and why?

  • Toenails02
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    10 months ago

    I have a book on my shelf called Transgender Marxism by Elle O’Rourke and Jules Joanne Gleeson. I have not read it yet, but I have heard great things.