1AC—Legalize Queerness
Aff
1ac
The 1969 Stonewall riots demonstrated the criminalization of queer practices. Forty
years later, bodies are still thrown out of private spaces and beaten in the public eye
merely for being a reminder that “normalcy” is a façade.
Eric Stanley 11. “Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex,” ‘Introduction: Fugitive Flesh: Gender SelfDetermination, Queer Abolition, and Trans Resistance.’ Eric A. Stanley & Nat Smith. 2011. 1-2. <APY>
Bright lights shattered the dark anonymity of the dance floor. The flicker warned of the danger of the
coming raid. Well experienced, people stopped dancing, changed clothing, removed or applied makeup, and
got ready. The police entered, began examining everyone’s IDs, and lined up the trans/gender-non-conforming folks
to be “checked” by an officer in the restroom to ensure that they were wearing the legally mandated
three pieces of “gender appropriate clothing.” Simultaneously the cops started roughing up people, dragging
them out front to the awaiting paddy wag on. In other words, it was a regular June night out on the
town for trans and queer folks in 1969 New York City. As the legend goes, that night the cops did not
receive their payoff or they wanted to remind the patrons of their precarious existence. In the shadows of New
York nightlife, the Stonewall Inn, like most other “gay bars,” was owned and run by the mafia, which tended
to have the connections within local government and the vice squad to know who to bribe in order to keep the bar
raids at a minimum and the cash flowing. As the first few captured queers were forced into the paddy wagon, people hanging
around outside the bar began throwing pocket change at the arresting officers; then the bottles started flying and then the bricks. With the
majority of the patrons now outside the bar, a crowd of angry trans/queer folks had gathered and forced
the police to retreat back into the Stonewall. As their collective fury grew, a few people uprooted a
parking meter and used it as a battering ram in hopes of knocking down the bar’s door and escalating
the physical confrontation with the cops. A tactical team was called to rescue the vice squad now barricaded inside the Stonewall. They
eventually arrived, and the street battle raged for two more nights. In a blast of radical collectivity, trans/gender-nonconforming folks, queers of color, butches, drag queens, hair-fairies, homeless street youth, sex
workers, and others took up arms and fought back against the generations of oppression that they
were forced to survive. Forty years later, on a similarly muggy June night in 2009, history repeated
itself. At the Rainbow Lounge, a newly opened gay bar in Fort Worth, Texas, the police staged a raid, verbally
harassing patrons, calling them “faggots” and beating a number of customers. One patron was slammed
against the floor, sending him to the hospital with brain injuries, while seven others were arrested. These
instances of brutal force and the administrative surveillance that trans and queer folks face today are
not significantly less prevalent nor less traumatic than those experienced by the Stonewall rioters of 1969,
however the ways this violence is currently understood is quite different. While community vigils and
public forums were held in the wake of the Rainbow Lounge raid, the immediate response was not to
fight back, nor has there been much attempt to understand the raid in the broader context of the systematic
violence trans and queer people face under the relentless force of the prison industrial complex (PIC).
The laws of straight society criminalize queer survival tactics. Abolitionism excludes
queer sex work from the realm of legitimacy for not fitting within the coordinates of
heteronormative gender roles. Queer youth are forced to live by illegal means – their
sexual desires are abused as they sell their bodies to the same individuals who vilify
them publicly.
Eric Stanley 11. “Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex,” ‘Introduction: Fugitive Flesh: Gender SelfDetermination, Queer Abolition, and Trans Resistance.’ Eric A. Stanley & Nat Smith. 2011. 45-46. <APY>
The threat of incarceration and police harassment was exacerbated by the economic marginalization
that left gay and transgender street youth with few options for survival but street prostitution. References to
the necessity of prostitution appear even on the poetry page of Vanguard’s eponymous magazine,
punctuating the lyric poems about unrequited love and other themes typical of teenage poetry. On its “Night Songs”
page, the magazine’s first issue contains a poem called “The Hustler,” in which a young gay hustler touchingly
explores the tension between his desire for love from other men, and the economic necessity that he
commodify that desire in acts of prostitution: I’ll go to bed for twenty, All night for just ten more. Now
don’t get the idea That I am just a whore. For if I didn’t sell my love, Where else would it go? I have no
one to give it to; No one who’d care to know. “The Hustler” marks with melancholy a particular
intersection of homophobia and economic marginalization often articulated by Van guard youth in their more overtly
political writing on sex work, which often denounced the businessmen who refused to hire drag queens
and effeminate boys in their offices and stores during the day but who benefited from the presence of
cheap, easily available hustlers on the streets at night, and who would then turn around once again in
the morning to complain about the “filth” on the streets where they were trying to operate legitimate businesses. We see
this argument made quite forcefully in a Vanguard flyer: We protest being called “queer,” “pillhead,” and being placed in the position of being
outlaws and parasites when we are offered no alternative to this existence…. We
demand justice and immediate corrections
of the fact that most of the money made in the area is made by the exploitation of youth by so-called
normal adults who make a fast buck off situations everyone calls degenerate, perverted and sick. Here we
see that Vanguard, unlike the homophile movement from which it sprung, framed their position as sexual outsiders in
terms of class struggle and economic justice. The group’s centralization of the sex worker as the typical
Vanguard youth produced a strong sense of identity among group members not only as homosexual and
transsexual, but also as economically marginalized by their sexuality. This outlook helped to produce a
radical class analysis of public space, of sex work, and of queerness itself that is reflected in Vanguard’s
demonstrations and publications.
Not only is this shadow prostitution dangerous for trans* and queer folks’ well-being,
but their labor is subject to tight surveillance by the law. This creates a positive
feedback loop of underground activity that perpetuates the hazards of being queer in
a straight society.
Lori A. Saffin 11. “Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex,” ‘Identities Under Siege: Violence Against
Transpersons of Color.’ Eric A. Stanley & Nat Smith. 2011. 151-152. <APY>
As in the cases of Jessica Mercado, Shelby Tracey Tom, and Donathyn Rodgers, economic need and
limited avenues of support propels many transgender persons of color into sex work. With few sources
of social support compounded by economic inequality, sex work becomes, perhaps, the only means for
survival. This not only puts queers of color at high risk for violence, such as exploitation, rape, robbery,
and physical threats, but also endangers their health from increased exposure to HIV and STIs.
Economic and class position influences a sex worker’s ability to screen out undesirable clients and to
refuse dangerous services. Sex workers with little class privilege working in low-status positions are
generally afforded the least respect and are considered the most “deserving” of abuse by clients, the
police, and the public.48 Queers of color—specifcally transgender women—who are poor and who work as sex workers are under
constant surveillance from police and frequently subject to ongoing harassment and violence. Viviane Namaste interviews several
transgender and transsexual sex workers to explore some of the additional healthcare and social service
concerns required for this specific population that is often rendered invisible.49 One of her first
assertions is that many transgender persons obtained their hormones on the streets through an
underground market. Some transgender individuals obtained multiple prescriptions and then sold the hormones to interested persons.
Many transpersons in her study found it extremely difficult to find a doctor who was willing to prescribe
hormones. This creates a situation in which transgender persons buy their hormones on the street even
though they would like to secure them through a doctor and have their health monitored. Research in the
field of HIV/AIDS education has suggested that in the context of American inner-city trans communities, transgender persons may
share needles with their lovers and friends in order to inject their hormones. This practice puts
transpersons at an increased risk of contracting HIV as well as other health complications. Namaste
recounts stories of police harassment, intimidation, and verbal abuse against transpersons. She maintains that verbal
abuse consisted of uniformed police officers yelling “faggot” and “queers” at sex trade workers in areas
known for TS/TG prostitution. In addition to such insults, police officers would harass the prostitutes in a variety
of ways. Participants reported that police officers would stand right next to them on the street corner
where they were working, thus preventing any client from approaching. Officers would also follow
prostitutes down the street in their cars, keeping pace with them as they walked. Some officers would
also take Polaroid photographs of prostitutes, telling them that they would keep their picture on file.50
Prohibitionism leaves queer sex workers with no legal recourse for abuses – queer
individuals don’t dare trust the law as it is perceived as a mechanism for queer
destruction.
Lori A. Saffin 11. “Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex,” ‘Identities Under Siege: Violence Against
Transpersons of Color.’ Eric A. Stanley & Nat Smith. 2011. 152. <APY>
In the United States, almost all
forms of sex work are currently illegal, but prostitution remains widely
practiced throughout the country. Expensive attempts to control commercial sex through prohibition have
been extremely inefficient in curbing the practice. And, as we can see from the queer community’s
apathetic response to Jessica’s murder and the absence of any response to Tracey and Donathyn’s murders, the
demonization of sex work effects the mobilization efforts following a hate crime and blames the victim
for the violence perpetrated against them. By claiming that sex work is simply “immoral,” social systems
that force many queers of color into sex work for mere survival and that maintain inequalities based on
race, class, gender, and sexuality are erased. Similarly, the criminalization of sex work forces many queers of
color to remain silent about violence committed against them for fear of legal indictment. LGBT persons
of color often feel isolated and vulnerable because of the ongoing violent relationship between their
communities and police departments due to racism, community policing in poor areas, and anti-gay violence
at the hands of law enforcement. Criminalization thus leaves sex workers more vulnerable and subject
to greater exploitation, violence, and harm.
As queer youth find themselves trapped in a legal system that condemns their being,
they are increasingly alienated from their own bodies, minds, and desires – this
constitutes a life in capture.
Eric Stevens 11, ‘Fugitive Flesh: Gender Self-Determination, Queer Abolition, and Trans Resistance,’ “Captive Genders: Trans
Embodiment and the Prison-Industrial Complex.” Pgs. 7-8 <APY>
Many trans/queer youth learn how to survive in a hostile world. Often the informal economy becomes
the only option for them to make money. Selling drugs, sex work, shoplifting, and scamming are among
the few avenues that might ensure they have something to eat and a place to sleep at night. Routinely
turned away from shelters because of their gender presentation, abused in residential living situations
or foster care, and even harassed in “gay neighborhoods” (as they are assumed to drive down property
values or scare off business), they are reminded that they are alone. Habitually picked up for truancy,
loitering, or soliciting, many trans/queer people spend their youth shuttling between the anonymity of
the streets and the hyper-surveillance of the juvenile justice system. With case managers too
overloaded to care, or too transphobic to want to care, they slip through the holes left by others.
Picked up—locked up—placed in a home—escape—survive—picked up again. The cycle builds a cage,
and the hope for anything else disappears with the crushing reality that their identities form the
parameters of possibility.10 With few options and aging-out of what little resources there are for “youth,” many trans/queer
adults are in no better a situation. Employers routinely don’t hire “queeny” gay men, trans women who
“cannot pass,” butches who seem “too hard,” or anyone else who is read to be “bad for business.”
Along with the barriers to employment, most jobs that are open to folks who have been homeless or
incarcerated are minimum-wage and thus provide little more than continuing poverty and fleeting
stability. Back to where they began—on the streets, hustling to make it, now older—they are often
given even longer sentences. While this cycle of poverty and incarceration speaks to more current experiences, the discursive
drives building their motors are nothing new. Inheriting a long history of being made suspect,
trans/queer people, via the medicalization of trans identities and homosexuality, have been and continue
to be institutionalized, forcibly medicated, sterilized, operated on, shocked, and made into objects of
study and experimentation. Similarly, the historical illegality of gender trespassing and of queerness have
taught many trans/queer folks that their lives will be intimately bound with the legal system.
This captivity transforms queer life into life vulnerable to extermination. The queer
body becomes a concept that must be assimilated or destroyed for the “common
sense” morality of straight supremacy.
Eric Stanley 11. “Near Life, Queer Death Overkill and Ontological Capture.” ‘Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison
Industrial Complex.’ Pgs. 1-9 <APY>
“Dirty faggot!” Or simply, “Look,
a Gay!” These words launch a bottle from a passing car window, the target my awaiting body. In
other moments they articulate the sterilizing glares and violent fantasies that desire, and threaten to enact, my
corporal undoing. Besieged, I feel in the fleshiness of the everyday like a kind of near life or a death-in-
waiting. Catastrophically, this imminent threat constitutes for the queer that which is the sign of vitality itself.
What then becomes of the possibility of queer life, if queerness is produced always and only through the
negativity of forced death and at the threshold of obliteration? Or as Achille Mbembe has provocatively asked, in the
making of a kind of corporality that is constituted in the social as empty of meaning beyond the anonymity
of bone, “But what does it mean to do violence to what is nothing? ”' In another time and place, “‘Dirty nigger!’ Or
simply, ‘Look, a Negro!’ ” (“Sale négre! ou simplement: Tiens, un négre! ”) opened Frantz Fanon’s chapter 5 of Black Skin, White Masks, “The
Lived Experience of the Black” (“L’expérience vécue du Noir”), infamously mistranslated as “The Fact of Blackness.” I start with “Dirty faggot!”
against a logic of flattened substitution and toward a political commitment to non-mimetic friction. After all, the racialized phenomenology of
blackness under colonization that Fanon illustrates may be productive to read against and with a continuum of antiqueer violence in the United
States. The scopic and the work of the visual must figure with such a reading of race, gender, and sexuality. It
is argued, and rightfully
so, that the instability of queerness obscures it from the epidermalization that anchors (most) bodies of
color in the fields of the visual. When thinking about the difference between anti-Semitism and racism, which for Fanon was a
question of the visuality of oppression, he similarly suggests, “the Jew can be unknown in his Jewishness.”’ Here it may be
useful to reread Fanon through an understanding of passing and the visual that reminds us that Jews can sometimes not be unknown in their
Jewishness. Similarly I ask why antiqueer violence, more often than not, is correctly levied against queers. In other words, the
productive
discourse that wishes to suggest that queer bodies are no different might miss moments of signification
where queer bodies do in fact signify differently. This is not to suggest that there is an always locatable,
transhistorical queer body, but the fiercely flexible semiotics of queerness might help us build a way of
knowing antiqueer violence that can provisionally withstand the weight of generality.4 Indeed, not all who
might identify under the name queer experience the same relationship to violence. For sure, the
overwhelming numbers of trans/queer people who are murdered in the United States are of color.’
Similarly, trans/gender nonconforming people, people living with HIV/ AIDS and/or other ability issues,
undocumented and imprisoned trans/ queer people, sex workers, and working-class queers, among
others, experience a disproportionate amount of structural violence. In turn, this structural violence more
often than not predisposes them to a greater amount of interpersonal violence. Yet many lesbian, gay,
bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) folks in the United States who have access to normative power may in their
daily lives know very little about either structural or personal violence. The long history and magnified
present of gay assimilation illustrates these varying degrees of possibility and power available to some
at the expense of others. In contrast, I am marking queer as the horizon where identity crumbles and vitality
is worked otherwise. To this end, queer might be a productive placeholder to name a nonidentity where
force is made to live. This is not to suggest that the negativity of queer and methodologies of violence define the end of queer worlding
or that the parameters of opposition are sedimented as such.‘ On the contrary, the very fact that queers do endure is
evidence, as Fred Moten has beautifully argued about the history of blackness in relation to slavery, that “objects can and do
resist.”7 I start here, in reference to Fanon’s text, because he continues to offer us among the most compelling analyses of structural
abjection, (non)recognition, and psychic/corporal violence. “Look, a Negro!” violently freezes Fanon in a timeless place as a black object,
overdetermined from without, as a signifier with no meaning of its own making. In a similar way, the “dirty faggot” of my opening places
queerness in the anonymity of history and shocks it into the embodied practice of feeling queer in a particular place, body, and time. This
meditation will attempt to understand how the queer approximates the cutting violence that marks the edges of subjectivity itself. Race
and
gender figure the contours of my thinking on the work of violence in the gathering up of queer remains. Here the
force of violence that interests me is not introduced after the formation of something that might be
called queer. I am using the term queer to precisely index the collision of difference and violence. In other
words, queer is being summoned to labor as the moment when bodies, non-normative sexuality/genders,
and force materialize the impossibility of subjectivity. Against an identity that assumes a prior unity,
queer disrupts this coherence and also might function as a collective of negativity, void of a subject but
named as object, retroactively visible through the hope of a radical politics to come.
The process of overkill attacks the individual to symbolize the extermination of the
whole. Straight supremacists are protected by law to delete the past, present, and
future of queer folk. Your ballot has to answer the question, “what does it mean to do
violence to what is nothing?”
Stanley 11; Eric A Stanley (PhD History of Consciousness @ UC Santa Cruz; visiting faculty in Critical Studies @ San Francisco Art Institute;
director of Homotopia and Criminal Queers, coeditor of Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex; former
homeless youth in Richmond VA.). "Near Life, Queer Death Overkill and Ontological Capture."Social Text 29.2 107 (2011): 1-19
Overkill is a term used to indicate such excessive violence that it pushes a body beyond death. Overkill
is often determined by the postmortem removal of body parts, as with the partial decapitation in the
case of Lauryn Paige and the dissection of Rashawn Brazell. The temporality of violence, the biological
time when the heart stops pushing and pulling blood, yet the killing is not finished, suggests the aim is
not simply the end of a specific life, but the ending of all queer life. This is the time of queer death,
when the utility of violence gives way to the pleasure in the other’s mortality. If queers, along with others,
approximate nothing, then the task of ending, of killing, that which is nothing must go beyond normative
times of life and death. In other words, if Lauryn was dead after the first few stab wounds to the throat, then
what do the remaining fifty wounds signify? The legal theory that is offered to nullify the practice of
overkill often functions under the name of the trans- or gay- panic defense. Both of these defense strategies
argue that the murderer became so enraged after the “discovery” of either genitalia or someone’s
sexuality they were forced to protect themselves from the threat of queerness. Estanislao Martinez of Fresno,
California, used the trans- panic defense and received a four- year prison sentence after admittedly stabbing J. Robles, a Latina transwoman, at
least twenty times with a pair of scissors. Importantly, this
defense is often used, as in the cases of Robles and Paige, after the
murderer has engaged in some kind of sex with the victim. The logic of the trans- panic defense as an
explanation for overkill, in its gory semiotics, offers us a way of understanding queers as the nothing of
Mbembe’s query. Overkill names the technologies necessary to do away with that which is already gone.
Queers then are the specters of life whose threat is so unimaginable that one is “forced,” not simply to
murder, but to push them backward out of time, out of History, and into that which comes before.27 In
thinking the overkill of Paige and Brazell, I return to Mbembe’s query, “But what does it mean to do violence to what is
nothing?”28 This question in its elegant brutality repeats with each case I offer. By resituating this
question in the positive, the “something” that is more often than not translated as the human is made
to appear. Of interest here, the category of the human assumes generality, yet can only be activated through
the specificity of historical and politically located intersections. To this end, the human, the “something” of this
query, within the context of the liberal democracy, names rights- bearing subjects, or those who can stand as subjects
before the law. The human, then, makes the nothing not only possible but necessary. Following this logic,
the work of death, of the death that is already nothing, not quite human, binds the categorical
(mis)recognition of humanity. The human, then, resides in the space of life and under the domain of
rights, whereas the queer inhabits the place of compromised personhood and the zone of death. As
perpetual and axiomatic threat to the human, the queer is the negated double of the subject of liberal democracy. Understanding the nothing
as the unavoidable shadow of the human serves to counter the arguments that suggest overkill and antiqueer violence at large are a
pathological break and that the severe nature of these killings signals something extreme. In contrast, overkill is precisely not outside of, but is
that which constitutes liberal democracy as such. Overkill
then is the proper expression to the riddle of the queer
nothingness. Put another way, the spectacular material- semiotics of overkill should not be read as (only)
individual pathology; these vicious acts must indict the very social worlds of which they are
ambassadors. Overkill is what it means, what it must mean, to do violence to what is nothing.
Prostitution by gender and sexual minorities should not be prohibited in the United
States.
The criminalization of prostitution promotes a singular interpretation of gender and
sexuality; we can simultaneously re-frame gender issues and challenge the
heterosexist stigma against sexual freedom by endorsing a qualified sex-positive
queer feminism that can locate sites of resistance and contexts where sex work can be
an empowering activity for gender and sexual minorities.
Showden 12.
Carisa R. Showden (Dept. of Pol. Sci., Univ. of North Carolina @ Greensboro) “Theorising maybe: A
feminist/queer theory convergence.” Feminist Theory 2012 13:3 published by Sage. Pages 13-15 //dtac
Sex radicals assert that criminalising
prostitution restricts women’s sexual freedom by contributing to the
stigma surrounding prostitution specifically and sex more generally. Many further argue that sex has multiple
meanings depending upon the context in which it is engaged, but that legal and regulatory schemes flatten
nuance, thereby promoting a singular meaning of sex for all citizens.28 And while I, too, would insist that sex acts can
have multiple meanings, the interpretive limits imposed by the historically and culturally specific contexts in which they
take place must always be borne in mind. We need to take seriously the sex radical critiques of existing juridical limits on sexual
activities and cultural norms of ‘good womanhood’. But we should also remember, as legal scholar Jane Scoular writes, that sex work should
be viewed with ambivalence: ‘It is an activity which challenges the boundaries of heterosexist, married, monogamy but
may also be an activity which reinforces the dominant norms of heterosexuality and femininity’ (2004: 348).
Because sex and sex work have many meanings, but those meanings and the ability to deploy them are restricted by
the material conditions under which prostitutes labour (and clients and outsiders come to understand sexuality), the sex radicalism
perspective needs to be amended to fit more clearly within a Foucauldian power frame. Note the convergence of feminist and
queer epistemologies here. On the queer hand, sex does not have to reveal anything about one’s core identity, and sex is a
mode of transgression. But on the feminist hand, sex is about power, subordination is part of sex, and sometimes that
subordination is problematic. Because of its affinities with both queer theory and feminism, this ‘sex-positive queer
feminism’ is feminism as ‘maybe’: a qualified endorsement of sexual practices as politically resistant but fully
within the definition of feminism as a theory of subordination and hegemonic heterosexuality. This theory can provide located,
specific, non-universal norms of sexual resistance by excavating specific sites of sexual and political
practice in order to see how subordination works in the particular location under study and what might count as
resistance within these contexts given differentiated practices, conceptual frameworks, and material
resources. These excavations need not assume in advance that because the practice involves
commercialisation, or sexual interactions, or men, that it will be bad or good for women. By remaining agnostic on
this question, sex-positive queer feminism might be better able to locate resources that can facilitate resistance
without assuming that equality or non-subordination is universally required for it.
Prostitutions are multiple and public policy should reflect such nuance – a sex-positive
queer feminist approach is an epistemic shift: not all prostitution is bad and the state
should regulate the conditions of potentially dangerous commodification.
Showden 12.
Carisa R. Showden (Dept. of Pol. Sci., Univ. of North Carolina @ Greensboro) “Theorising maybe: A
feminist/queer theory convergence.” Feminist Theory 13:3 (2012), published by Sage. Pages 15-16
//dtac
One way to think about sex-positive
queer feminist norms is that they are multiple and therefore must be balanced. To
balance them one must consider the various constraints on subjects in practice. If what is required to realise particular norms (antisubordination or sexual autonomy or economic stability) is different practices in similar institutions, and if
the norms most needed for resistance are also variable, then one resulting argument is that some situations of prostitution are
more ethically defensible than others. A sex-positive queer feminism then leads us to think about sex
generally and prostitution specifically as multiple; rather than ‘prostitution’ we are led to think about
‘prostitutions’. This is problematic, perhaps, from a legal perspective, which, as I noted above, might be one reason why Halley and others
argue that MacKinnon’s work ‘won’ the legal feminist sex wars. But politics and policy can be (slightly) more nuanced and
context-sensitive. Here sex-positive queer feminism needs to be (warily) more governance-oriented. It
needs to infuse prostitution policy with a different ethics – to take the norms it brings to queer theory and make them
work for women, to fight the subordination produced by stigmatising ‘deviant’ sex as well as the subordination
produced by poverty and coercion into sex. The epistemological shift I am endorsing matters ethically for
public policy debates, even recognising the inconsistent relationship between a policy’s goals and its actual material effects, as these
debates create frameworks of understanding and subjectification. This convergentist epistemology is neither
precisely (dominance) feminist nor queer. While feminism and queer theory ‘know’ sexuality differently – it either is or it is not heterosexual,
subordinating, and the source of women’s social ills – they also know sexuality the same: it is through either the rejection of sex or the
embracing of sexual acts in all their manifestations that we will be led to the new frontier of gender relations. In Elisa Glick’s formulation, queer
theory says we can ‘fuck our way to freedom’ (2000: 22) and, it seems, dominance feminism says we can not-fuck our way there. So there is an
epistemological break between them, but a break premised on an ontological agreement: sex, sexuality, sex acts are the be-all and end-all of
liberation or resistance. Or at least ‘good’ sex (however defined) is the personal practice leading to political change. But what if it is not?
What if sexuality and sexual modalities can intervene in the consciousness of the people fucking, but this
consciousness raising has really quite mediated and distorted effects on the larger institutional contexts within
which these sexual actors live, work, and play? A more nuanced reading of sexuality, and one that accepts
neither epistemological framework of sex precisely as dominance and queer theorists have served it up so far, might make more
modest claims for its theory. Yes, rights to sexual pleasure and sexual knowledge are essential to one’s health
and well-being and (following Cornwall, Correˆa, and Jolly, 2008) are fundamental to a human rights framework, but the
specific sex acts that people engage in are not, in and of themselves, essentially revelatory or politically
engaged. Too much focus on specific acts puts all the effort into self-styling and personal empowerment, and not enough into securing more
general collective rights to sexuality without stigma.29 Decentring sex as the central activity of identity formation and political status does not
make it unimportant; it simply means that sex does not occupy the vanguard position in identity construction, political subordination, or
political resistance. This version of ‘sex-positive’ feminism is in some ways more ‘sex negative’ than dominance feminism: it is less positive that
sex is capable of producing subjectivity, at least in whole. If sex is not all that and then some, there
are still arguments to be had
about how and why to regulate sex acts; but taking the onus off the sex part of prostitution, for example, as either dooming
women to oppression or freeing them to reinvent themselves and the sexual order, might just open up spaces to see other aspects of
prostitution: the material effects of legalisation or criminalisation on the prostitutes themselves. If, ironically, ‘sex-positive’
queer
feminism can take some of the ‘special’ out of sex and make it one significant form of human interaction among
others, then perhaps policy makers can be guided by a sense that is both more and less ‘free market’. More in that
not all commodified sex is necessarily bad; less in arguing that regulating conditions of commodification is
the role of good government.
Ignoring voices of womin who enjoy sex work and do not face violence is counterproductive to developing a nuanced epistemology of sex that removes the stigma of
non-reproductive sex and challenges their anti-feminist discourse of feminine
victimhood.
Showden 12.
Carisa R. Showden (Dept. of Pol. Sci., Univ. of North Carolina @ Greensboro) “Theorising maybe: A
feminist/queer theory convergence.” Feminist Theory 2012 13:3 published by Sage. Pages 16-17 //dtac
This is the point at which my interlocutors have asked for a more forceful normative defence: why
should feminists shift to a sexpositive queer approach such as the one I have outlined here, particularly in thinking about prostitution? I would say first, as Kimberly
D. Krawiec convincingly argues, both commodification and coercion objections to prostitution – based on the
‘special status’ of sex – help feed its continued marginal legal status, and it is this marginal status that
benefits everyone except the women supposedly protected by the ‘tolerated, but not embraced’ sex
market (2010: 1743).30 Further, surveys of sex workers across types of prostitution venues reveal that some prostitutes
experience sex work much as abolitionists have described it, but many do not.31 Given that many
people, including some sex workers, do not in fact experience sex acts as significantly tied to their identity,
it seems somehow wrong – anti-feminist, in fact – to insist on public policies premised on precisely this
assumption. Given also the normative power of the law, sex work’s illegality contributes to a view of women as
either ‘good girls’ or ‘bad girls’ based on promiscuity. Finally, a discursive shift that describes sex as
sometimes good and sometimes bad, but insists on attention to women’s knowledge of sex from their own
experiences of it, might eventually promote a legal regime that takes women’s knowledge with similar
seriousness, perhaps even eventually leading to changes in how rape claims are taken up by judges and
law enforcement officers. Listening to how the woman claiming rape frames the encounter could become more central while
beginning to marginalise currently hegemonic narratives about what indicates that a woman ‘wanted it’. Discourse matters in the
construction of subjectivity and consciousness, of jurists no less than the rest of us. Even if the effects of theory on law and
policy are highly mediated, a more nuanced theory of sex is needed for its own sake in addition to policy
purposes. With its more modest ‘epistemology of sex’, sex-positive queer feminism provides a way of contesting
that it is the sex itself that is the problem with prostitution, arguing instead that it is when sex is
combined with economic coercion, or violent pimps, or desire only to feed a drug addiction, for
example, that prostitution is a problem. This shift in conceptions of power – where dominance is one, but not the
primary, modality, and the production of subjectivities and normative assessment and material weight of any acts one engages in is multivalent
– reflects a
complex reality more accurately. One can begin to articulate the domination that exists in,
for example, human trafficking without conflating human trafficking with prostitution (thereby ignoring
forms of human trafficking that aren’t for purposes of sex trafficking) or prostitution with trafficking
(thereby ignoring forms of prostitution that are more like sex work and less like forced labour or rape).
Here, though, is the epistemological break – within feminism – that simply cannot be bridged. Radical feminists say that sex ought
not be commodified, because their epistemology of sex is an epistemology of the self. The commission
of sex acts cannot be separated from self-hood; therefore, commodified sex is slavery. In this view, a
‘better’ marketplace of sexual transaction is, literally, inconceivable. But what sex-positive queer
feminism knows about sex it gets by looking at the world through lenses of both feminism’s definitional minima and queer theory’s
power plays: that sex can be a site of domination, but that it can also be a site of productive, opaque, and
diffuse power relations. Given this, then, a sexpositive queer feminism would know that sex ought not be commodified under
particular circumstances. On this view, sex does not say anything essential about women, but practices of commodified sex under certain
conditions are indictments of unequal structural opportunities. The
point of sex-positive queer feminist norms is to help
activists challenge the conditions producing political subordination, not to challenge women for
having sex. And the only way to get to that challenge is to stop putting so much identity-bearing
weight on sex acts.
We debaters and judges are implicated in producing heteronormativity – our
production and treatment of knowledge affects the policies we implement and the
society they create – your ballot should re-map communication scholarship and
demystify heteronormativity in academia.
Yep 3.; Gust, Karen Lovaas, and John Elia, Journal of Homosexual Studies, Vol. 45, No. 2/3/4, pp. 47-48
<APY>
Communication scholars, like researchers in other areas of academic study, are profoundly involved and deeply
implicated in current systems of power as they produce and disseminate knowledge. In his power/knowledge
matrix, Foucault reminds us that knowledge and truth are closely interconnected. He writes, Each society has its
regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes
function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false
statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in
the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true. (Foucault,
1980, p. 131) In other words, communication scholars are inextricably involved in current regimes of power and
knowledge. As such, communication scholars are profoundly implicated in the maintenance of the
homo/heterosexual binary, the fundamental conceptual pair that organizes modern Western discourses of sexuality. In the
academy and elsewhere, institutional heterosexuality, through the process of normalization, becomes
heteronormative. Heteronormativity produces “the equation ‘heterosexual experience = human
experience’” and “renders all other forms of human sexual expression pathological, deviant, invisible,
unintelligible, or written out of existence” (Yep, 2002, p. 167). More simply put, heteronormativity is violent and
harmful to a range of people across the spectrum of sexualities, including those who live within its borders. Aware of
the mobility of power relations, queer/quare theorists from a variety of disciplines have provided analytical tools
to create new openings and possibilities of change and transformation. Such scholars are not interested in speaking
for others, providing definitive solutions, proclaiming transhistorical generalizations, declaring transcultural knowledge, or making universal
pronouncements. These queer/quare theorists and
activists are invested in “detaching the power of truth from
the forms of hegemony, social, economic and cultural, within which it operates at the present time” (Foucault,
1980, p. 133). Committed to the celebration of human differences and dedicated to the interrogation of the normalizing technologies of power,
these interdisciplinary scholars and community activists scrutinize the homo/heterosexual binary as the foundation
of current discourses of sexuality, and critically examine heteronormativity. As a communication teacher and
scholar who travels across academic disciplinary boundaries, I invite communication scholars across the spectrum of
social locations to join these theorists and practitioners in this radical project to expand, stretch,
reorient, and re-map the conceptual landscape of the field of communication. I urge communication teachers and
scholars to interrogate and unpack the homo/heterosexual binary, disentangle and demystify the power of heteronormativity
in our scholarship, pedagogy, and cultural politics, and to create and produce historically specific and embodied racialized
knowledges of the human sexual subject.
We are never outside of politics – infusing legal scholarship with a queer pedagogy is
crucial to combat the heteronormativity inside and out of the debate space and
academia generally.
Stewart 7. [Trae Stewart, University of Central Florida, "Vying for an
Unsustainable/Inappropriate(d)/organic queer space in higher education", Trae Stewart is an Assistant
Professor in the College of Education at the University of Central Florida. His primary areas of research
include ser-vice-learning and queer issues in education. Dr. Stewart received his PHD in International &
Intercultural Education from the University of Southern, 2007]
Such queer additions to higher education, identified by simply enumerating or listing them, are
commendable, especially given the relatively short period of time in which they have been
accomplished. It appears through these examples that gaining entrance into a professionally recognized space that would allow for the
continued growth of the field was key. After all, the shadowy margins of society and the dark recesses of the closet had become cramped and,
therefore, restricted grofwth. Furthermore, queer scholars
and practitioners recognized the inherent oppression
that accompanied such ghettoization and saw legitimacy via. visibility within an accepted educational
space. Theoretically, exploration, dialogue, contestation, connections, empowerment, and ultimately acceptance would manifest. But first,
we had to be in the space. In other "Words, queer phenomena's quantifiable increase and thus movement
toward legitimacy in higher education came through its quasi-institutionalization. So, where are we
developmentally? According to Daly (1990), "Development is qualitave [italics added] improvement or the unfolding of potentiality” (p. In
addition, how has our growth, which according to Daly transpires in part through assimilation, affected our development? Halperin (2 003) has
suspicions over the speed at which queer studies, and queer theory in particular, has been absorbed into institutions of knowledge. This
wariness is born out of concern for a potentially hidden agenda behind academia's quick embrace of an
antiassimilationist field, which in just the last two decades has openly criticized heteronormativity and all of
its manifestations within higher education. A critical, contextualized examination of the growth at the large metro- politan
research university where I work, for example, shows that courses explicitly devoted to queer studies are present.
but remain underrepresented. There might be 10 courses across the university that are taught with relative frequency. However,
to find these courses. one needs a map to navigate the multilayered spaces of catalog texts, registration
offices, and departmental permissions forms. Courses are disconnected from one another. finding homes in different
departments and colleges, including education, social work, English. religion, philosophy, and sociology. If a student endures the journey and
manages to locate a course. his or her opportunities are further limited as the courses are often restricted to disciplinary majors or are upperlevel seminars available only to honors students. No course that exclusively covers queer topics is offered as an elective in university's general
education diversity requirement. Such disentanglements complicate the organization of a unified queer studies program. thereby limiting its
potentiality (i.e., qualitative-based development). Questionable motives
behind seemingly equitable practices lie
outside of the classroom as well. In 2005, alter two decades of debate, sexual orientation was finally added to my university's
nondiscrimination clause. However. this change in policy was realized behind closed doors. Although some might argue that this was a
protective move by a sensitive, social justice- minded administrator. an equal number of voices offer a more covert. understanding of the
secrecy of these actions. Whether the move was based in sincerity. or political savvy, the understood message was that actions were taken to
decrease "unnecessarv" attention to the issue. In these
examples, occupied spaces within academia have signified the
existence of queer studies and have proven necessary for its growth and development. Paradoxically,
the same spaces have been simultaneously used to limit, conceal, erase, and deny (Brown. 2000), reinforcing
the notion that spaces are never neutral, but are concurrently the materializations and sources of
power. They are physical representations of cultural. political, ethical, and aesthetic beliefs and serve significant roles in social and
institutional processes (Soja, 1996). Renowned critical geographer David Harvey (1990) explains that the link between space and
representation is reflexive; activities that occur in a space define that space, whereas the space itself
permits, limits, and controls the activities that manifest therein. Educational institutions, which are
symbiotically related to the society in which they are situated, selectively appropriate space to those
subjects that will maintain the identity of the institution and norms of the community. If we extend this
metaphor to the classroom, fireproof doors, cement Walls, and glass windows do not create a hermetically sealed pedagogical environment.
The institutional mission, academic discipline, curricular design, pedagogical techniques, community
culture, and student worldviews control and limit what activities take place, which in turn affect the
information shared and knowledge constructed (Skelton, 1997). The suffocation of identity through voluntary acceptance of
institutionalized, homogeneous space has been well noted (Martindale 1997; McNaron, 1997; Tierney & Dilley, 1998) and. in my opinion.
unfortunately applies to the growth and development of queer curricula and innovative pedagogies in
higher education. As the number of courses, openly nonheterosexual colleagues, critical curricula. and innovative pedagogies increase,
their meaning and potentiality decrease. Transaction costs paid for access to an allowed institutional space, in the form of identity surrender,
threaten to recloset queer studies, and leave us donning concealing masks and performing under
hegemonic direction for survival. In what becomes a simulated space (Baudrillard, 1984). a once antiassimilationist field risks
becoming a meaningless simulacra of its former self. With this said, queer phenomena in higher education appears to
face a "queer dilemma" (Gamson, 2003) —the struggle for its very existence could ultimately be the cause of its sell’-destruction.
Queer studies has Found in its attempts thus far to construct and maintain identity within academia that categories are "exclusionary"
(Seidman. 1993) "stumbling blocks" (Butler, 1991) controlled in part by the appropriation of space and the presumption that identity is defined
by w iere we are (Hetherington, 1998). Perhaps.
the continued development of the Queer in higher education will
not rest on a willingness to be sustained under institutional, disciplinary, or pedagogical expectations, but rather on an ongoing
refusal of placement in spaces wherein subjectivity, agency, and reinvention are lost. To rebuff such
expectations would render the field an "inappropriate(d) other" (Minh-Ha, 1991) and restore queer studies to its epistemological foundations
The success of this model relies on queer scholars and educators, who have found comfort in their ivory
towers, to renew their radical potential (Halperin, 2003) by repositioning their pedagogies and curricula.
Queer scholars and educators might seek to create/utilize organic, and to avoid the aforementioned
paradox, heterotopic curricular and pedagogical spaces (Foucault, 1984). Organic spaces and pedagogies intrinsically resist
institutional control by complicating expectations of tixity. Specifically, organic pedagogies allow For creativity and inventiveness, flatten power
hierarchies between teachers and students. embrace more reflective methods, and blur the lines between persona/political, simulated/real,
and center/margin. Narrative teaching, online learning, action-research, place based education. and social justice—and activist-oriented
pedagogies all offer‘ potential in this regard. Interrelated, organic spaces extend beyond classroom walls and institutional borders in efforts to
contextualize learning and to demonstrate how place is reflexively linked to meaning making and associated outcomes. However such Spaces,
their Very nature, Cannot be defined easily in advance and are prone to variance. To identify existing, and opportunities For additional, spaces
with fluid barriers, Paulston and Leibman (1994) suggest that "social maps
may help to present and decode immediate
and practical answers to the perceived locations and relationships of Persons, Objects, and perceptions
in the Social milieu" (P. 215) Regardless, crossing ontological borders will require queer scholars and
educators to work with queer public intellectuals uncontrolled by the institutionalized academic
spaces of higher education. Community activists. independent scholars, and queer individuals whose
biographies have simultaneously shaped. and been shaped by. the historical milieus of their
communities, lie outside of academia often because organization and cultural expectations undermine
the role that they may play, and thus the impact that their work may make. Educators in collaboration with their
students and community partners might seek knowledge development in organic spaces like private homes, community parks, libraries. and
online chat: rooms. In summary, queer
approaches and considerations must continue to grow, yet. resist:
sustainability within a still limiting system by remaining flexible and inclusive of all educational
possibilities. In the spirit of this argument, I have tenaciously resisted providing a concrete example of what shape this queer, and
admittedly radical, approach to higher education would take. After all, to offer such guidance would essentialize, label,
and bind this model to one particular reality, thus proving antithetical to the points presented.
Furthermore, acknowledging my placement within higher education as a scholar and gay man complicates the reading of my perspectives. For
this reason alone, I cannot presume to be able to name the goal for which a multidisciplinary field of inquiry should be aiming , nor can I
abandon the processes that will move us one step closer to the "queer ideals of education" (Kuniashiro, 2005). which seek to deliberatively
disrupt hegemony. unsettle complacency, and push toward social justice (Halperin, 2003). I acknowledge that these educational pursuits will
seem abnormal, deviant, and suspicious. In other words, our curricula and pedagogies will be Queer and, in my opinion, exactly what they are
supposed to be.
Legalization checks the violent aspects of hetero-patriarchal prostitution
Reisenwitz 14.
Cathy Reisenwitz (Editor in Chief of Sex and the State; Writer & Political Commentator published in
Forbes, VICE Motherboard, the Chicago Tribune, Reason, Talking Points Memo, Bitcoin Magazine, the
Washington Examiner, the Daily Caller, the AFF Free the Future blog, the Individualist Feminist, Thoughts
on Liberty, Doublethink magazine and Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist). “Why It's Time to Legalize
Prostitution,” 15 August 2014, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/15/why-it-s-time-tolegalize-prostitution.html //dtac
Evidence shows that it would protect sex workers, reduce violence, cut down on sex trafficking, and
more. There’s no good reason not to. A prostitute has a 45 percent to 75 percent chance of experiencing
workplace violence at some point, according to recent research , and a 32 percent to 55 percent likelihood that she or he was
victimized the past year. Worker safety, along with concerns about exploitation and objectification, are behind
much of the continued support for keeping prostitution illegal. But there’s a movement afoot to challenge conventional
wisdom about prohibition. Or, rather, to incorporate what we already know about black markets into our thinking about sex workers and their
rights. As
with the drug trade, much of the violence associated with sex work is exacerbated by its
illegality. Violent people are more likely to prey on sex workers, confident that they won’t be reported
to police. This leaves workers dependent on pimps and madams for protection, which often leads to
more violence. And then there’s abuse from police. In Ireland, where prostitution is still criminalized, one study estimates
that 30 percent of the abuse that sex workers report comes from police. Some estimate that police actually abuse American sex workers more
often than clients do. Illegality also forces sex work outdoors.
Craigslist and Backpage should be havens for
workers to connect with and vet clients from the safety of their homes. Instead, cops monitor such sites
to ensnare workers and their clients. Sex workers traded safety tips and rated clients on My Redbook
until the FBI seized the site, destroying the data and forcing sex workers onto other sites, or the streets.
After Germany and New Zealand legalized sex work, violence against sex workers decreased, while workers’ quality of life
improved. There, occupational health and safety laws protect sex workers. And the ability to screen clients
and take credit card numbers has reduced violence. “It’s been just fantastic, really,” said Catherine
Healey, national coordinator for the New Zealand Prostitutes’ Collective. Some worry about legalized sex work
leading to more widespread sexually transmitted infections. But in reality, after testing began post-legalization in Germany,
researchers discovered no difference in sexually transmitted infection rates between sex workers and the
general population. In fact, the data are pretty clearly in favor of legalizing sex work to improve public
health. The World Health Organization recommended that countries decriminalize sex work. According to a recent WHO
report, “Violence against sex workers is associated with inconsistent condom use or lack of condom use, and with increased risk of STI and HIV
infection. Violence also prevents sex workers from accessing HIV information and services.” It’s not just the WHO. Editors of the top medical
journal The Lancet wrote that there is “no alternative” to decriminalizing sex work in order to protect sex workers from HIV. In 1980, Rhode
Island effectively legalized prostitution by accident when lawmakers deemed the state statute on prostitution to be overly broad. They
accidentally removed the section defining the act itself as a crime while attempting to revise it, though lawmakers didn’t realize the error until
2003. Over the next six years new cases of gonorrhea among women statewide declined by 39 percent. Interestingly, reported rapes also
declined by 31 percent. As
far as worker exploitation goes, working conditions in black markets are nearly
always worse. In Germany, sex workers get to avail themselves of the same social-welfare infrastructure
as all other German workers. Perhaps it makes sense that a country that has always taken workers’ rights seriously would choose
that it should no longer exempt sex workers. There, they are represented by a union and are afforded full police
protection when something goes wrong. Another huge impetus behind the movement to legalize sex work is the current focus
on ending the scourge of sex trafficking. People are waking up to the fact that laws against sex work actually help
human traffickers. This is why the U.N. Human Rights Council published a report from the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women which
criticizes anti-trafficking measures which restrict sex workers. According to the report, “The criminalization of clients has
not reduced trafficking or sex work, but has increased sex workers’ vulnerability to violence, harmed HIV
responses, and infringed on sex workers’ rights.” Furthermore, it said, “Anti-trafficking discussions on demand have
historically been stymied by anti-prostitution efforts to eradicate the sex work sector by criminalizing clients, despite protests from sex workers’
rights groups and growing evidence that such approaches do not work.”
2ac cap cards
We’re impact-turning their reformism bad arguments – we must queer capitalism in
order to understand its diverse forms and break apart its consolidated hegemony.
Gibson-Graham 99.
J.K. Gibson-Graham (Prof. Geography @ Univ. Massachusetts, Amherst and Monash Univ.). “Queer(y)ing
Capitalism In and Out of the Classroom”
Of course, destabilising
images of capitalist dominance is a big project, and I could not do it by myself. Nor could I
do it without queer theory, that incredibly dynamic matrix of contemporary theory whose practitioners are not only theorising about
queers but who are also making social theory `queer’. This latter project can be seen to involve not (or not merely)
constituting a minority population based on same-sex desire, set in opposition to a heterosexual norm, but calling
into question the very idea of norms and normality, calling attention to the violence entailed by
normalising impulses, including the impulse to theorise a social site as subsumed to a hegemonic order
[7]. What if we were to ‘queer’ capitalist hegemony and break apart some of its consolidating
associations? We could start by reimagining the body of capitalism, that hard and masculine body that penetrates noncapitalism but is not itself susceptible to penetration (this image conveys some of the heterosexism that structures contemporary social
theory). One
key ‘coming together’ (a Christmas effect that participates in consolidating a capitalist monolith) is the familiar
association of capitalism with commodification and `the market’. This association, in which all three terms
ultimately signify ‘capitalism,’ constitutes the body of capitalism as dominant and expansive (at least in the space of
commodity transactions). But how might we re-envision that body as more open and permeable, as having
orifices through which non-capitalism might enter? We might argue, as many have done, that many different
relations of production—including slavery and independent commodity production and collective or communal relations—are
compatible with production for a market. What violence do we do to these when we normalise all
commodity production as capitalist commodity production? Surely the market is a mobile and
membranous orifice into which can be inserted all kinds of non-capitalist commodities, whose queer
presences challenge the pre-eminence of capitalism and the discourses of its hegemony. Queering our
pedagogy means making differences visible and calling normative impulses and forms of social closure
into question. This is something that geographic researchers are increasingly doing with respect to a wide range of social and cultural sites
and processes, not excluding the `economic’ , where differences among industries, enterprises, economic subjects, cities and regions, national
and world economies are often highlighted and explored. The
fact that one sameness—their capitalist nature—tends to
unify all these forms of difference offers a challenge to us as teachers. Can we, with our students, generate
different representations of the economic world, ones in which non-capitalist class relations and forms
of economy are prevalent and wide- spread? [8] If we can, what might be the impact of these representations? Might they not
help to make anti-capitalist activism seem less quixotic and more realistic? Might they contribute to a non-capitalist politics of economic
invention? For queer theorists unwilling to accept that it is a `heterosexual’ world in which queers may gain a toehold but will still be ultimately
marginal or minoritised, various
forms of queerness are everywhere to be found. The domain of the ‘normal’
retreats to the social and theoretical horizon. Likewise, for economic theorists and teachers who wish to
counter the normalising effects of discourses of capitalist hegemony, economic discourse may be
hegemonised by representations of capitalist dominance, but the economic world is already queer.
ªWe’re here, we’re not capitalist, get used to it!
Totalizing capitalism slays alt solvency; alternative market formations exist and avoid
the impact.
Gibson-Graham 96.
J.K. Gibson-Graham (Prof. Geography @ Univ. Massachusetts, Amherst and Monash Univ.). The End of
Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy, p. 195)
One of our goals as Marxists has been to produce
a knowledge of capitalism. Yet as “that which is known,” Capitalism
has become the intimate enemy. We have uncloaked the ideologically-clothed, obscure monster, but we have
installed a naked and visible monster in its place. In return for our labors of creation, the monster has robbed us of all force.
We hear – and find it easy to believe – that the left is in disarray. Part of what produces the disarray of the left is the
vision of what the left is arrayed against. When capitalism is represented as a unified system coextensive with the
nation or even the world, when it is portrayed as crowding out all other economic forms, when it is allowed to
define entire societies, it becomes something that can only be defeated and replaced by a mass
collective movement (or by a process of systemic dissolution that such a movement might assist). The revolutionary task of
replacing capitalism now seems outmoded and unrealistic, yet we do not seem to have an alternative
conception of class transformation to take its place. The old political economic “systems” and “structures” that call forth a
vision of revolution as systemic replacement still seem to be dominant in the Marxist political imagination. The New World Order is
often represented as political fragmentation founded upon economic unification. In this vision the economy
appears as the last stronghold of unity and singularity in a world of diversity and plurality. But why can’t the
economy be fragmented too? If we theorized it as fragmented in the United States, we could being to see a
huge state sector (incorporating a variety of forms of appropriation of surplus labor), a very large sector of selfemployed and family-based producers (most noncapitalist), a huge household sector (again, quite various in
terms of forms of exploitation, with some households moving towards communal or collective
appropriation and others operating in a traditional mode in which one adult appropriates surplus labor from another). None of
these things is easy to see. If capitalism takes up the available social space, there’s no room for anything
else. If capitalism cannot coexist, there’s no possibility of anything else. If capitalism functions as a unity, it cannot be
partially or locally replaced. My intent is to help create the discursive conception under which socialist or
other noncapitalist construction becomes “realistic” present activity rather than a ludicrous or utopian goal. To
achieve this I must smash Capitalism and see it in a thousand pieces. I must make its unity a fantasy,
visible as a denial of diversity and change.
And we complicate utility – their impact framing echoes logics of production and
gender subordination
Winnubst 6.
Shannon Winnubst (Asst. Prof. Women’s Studies).“Queering Freedom,” 2006 Pp. 162-163
Utility writes itself into our bodies in this culture of advanced capitalist phallicized whiteness in the very
temporalities we inhabit. And the effects across the social map of power are abundant, expressing the distinct registers of oppression.
When we hear that damning phrase “Make yourself useful!” the conscience of phallicized whiteness
stings. We are judged nothing but guilty by this Protestant demand. There is nothing to do with that guilt, nowhere to go
with it. And so we, the subjects of power in this culture of phallicized whiteness, project that guilt across
bodies of lesser power, changing the phrase accordingly: “Make yourself useful, boyyy . . . ” A southern
twang, the mean trace of slavery’s history, lingers in that damning last word, which is always implied if
not spoken in the command itself. It pulls the command out of the sky of abstractions and slams it squarely on the ground. This
ain’t about no lofty ideals—this is about bodies. Bodies of control and bodies to be controlled. Bodies
of discipline and bodies in need of discipline. Bodies of power and bodies that obey. Bodies and histories. That simple, far from
innocent “boyyy” cuts the demand straight into its fundamental register—the old but hauntingly familiar voice of the patronizing white
overseer that never seems to die. Whether
spoken sternly by a parent to a child, frankly by a boss to an
employee, reprimandingly by a teacher to a student, or jokingly by a friend to a companion, it is the
same voice speaking and the “boyyy” is at the end of every sentence. This command of utility, whenever
and however spoken, is about bodies—black, brown, white, yellow; queer, female, trans, disabled, poor;
Jewish, Catholic, Muslim, Hindu. It is about bodies and the ways that utility seeps into them through
their social mappings of power.
Their alt is historical analysis but Access DA – we’ve thought about this long enough,
the queer has no time to sit and think when every day is an encounter with death.
Bersani 10.
Leo Bersani (Prof. French @ UC, Berkeley). “Is the Rectum a Grave? And other essays,” Pp. 5-6,
University of Chicago Press
All of this is, as I say, familiar ground, and I mention these few disparate items more or less at random simply as a reminder of where our
analytical inquiry starts, and to suggest that, given the nature of that starting point, analysis, while
necessary, may also be an
indefensible luxury. I share Watney’s interpretive interests, but it is also important to say that, morally, the only necessary
response to all of this is rage. “AIDS,” Watney writes, “is effectively being used as a pretext throughout the West
to ‘justify’ calls for increasing legislation and regulation of those who are considered to be socially
unacceptable” (p. 3). And the unacceptable ones in the AIDS crisis are, of course, male homosexuals and IV
drug users (many of the latter, are, as we know, poor blacks and Hispanics). Is it unjust to suggest that News of the World
readers and the gun- toting British vicar are representative examples of the “general public’s” response to AIDS? Are there more
decent heterosexuals around, heterosexuals who don’t awaken a passionate yearning not to share the
same planet with them? Of course there are, but—and this is particularly true of England and the United States—power is
in the hands of those who give every sign of being able to sympathize more with the murderous “moral”
fury of the good vicar than with the agony of a terminal KS patient. It was, after all, the Justice
Department of the United States that issued a legal opinion stating that employers could fire employees
with AIDS if they had so much as the suspicion that the virus could be spread to other workers,
regardless of medical evidence. It was the American Secretary of Health and Human Services who recently urged Congress to defer
action on a bill that would ban discrimination against people infected with HIV, and who also argued against the need for a federal law
guaranteeing the confi dentiality of HIV antibody test results.
No solvency – concrete alternatives are key
Kilman 4.
Kilman (Prof. Economics @ Pace Univ.) 5 September 2004, “Alternatives to Capitalism: What Happens
After the Revolution?” – brackets and ellipses in original
I. Concretizing the Vision of a New Human Society We live at a moment in which it is harder than ever to articulate a liberatory alternative to
capitalism. As we all know, the
collapse of state-capitalist regimes that called themselves “Communist,” as well as
given rise to a widespread acceptance of Margaret Thatcher’s
TINA – the belief that “there is no alternative.” Yet the difficulty in articulating a liberatory alternative is not mostly the product
the widespread failures of social democracy to remake society, have
of these events. It is an inheritance from the past. To what extent has such an alternative ever been articulated? There has been a lot of
progress – in theory and especially in practice – on the problem of forms of organization – but
new organizational forms by
themselves are not yet an alternative. A great many leftists, even revolutionaries, did of course regard nationalized property and
the State Plan, under the control of the “vanguard” Party, as socialism, or at least as the basis for a transition to socialism. But even before
events refuted this notion, it represented, at best, an evasion of the problem. It was largely a matter of leftists with authoritarian personalities
subordinating themselves and others to institutions and power with a blind faith that substituted for thought. How such institutions and such
power would result in human liberation was never made clear. Vague
references to “transition” were used to wave the
problem away. Yet as Marxist-Humanism has stressed for more than a decade, the anti-Stalinist left is also partly responsible for
the crisis in thought. It, too, failed to articulate a liberatory alternative, offering in place of private- and state-capitalism little
more than what Hegel (Science of Logic, Miller trans., pp. 841-42) called “the empty negative … a presumed absolute”: The impatience that
insists merely on getting beyond the determinate … and finding itself immediately in the absolute, has before it as cognition nothing but the
empty negative, the abstract infinite; in other words, a presumed absolute, that is presumed because it is not posited, not grasped; grasped it
can only be through the mediation of cognition … . The question that confronts us nowadays is whether we can do better. Is it possible to make
the vision of a new human society more concrete and determinate than it now is, through the mediation of cognition? According to a longstanding view in the movement, it is not possible. The character of the new society can only be concretized by practice alone, in the course of
trying to remake society. Yet if this is true, we are faced with a vicious circle from which there seems to be no escape, because acceptance of
TINA is creating barriers in practice. In
the perceived absence of an alternative, practical struggles have proven to
be self-limiting at best. They stop short of even trying to remake society totally – and for good reason. As Bertell Ollman has noted
(Introduction to Market Socialism: The Debate among Socialists, Routledge, 1998, p. 1), “People who believe [that there is no alternative] will
put up with almost any degree of suffering. Why
bother to struggle for a change that cannot be? … people [need to]
have a good reason for choosing one path into the future rather than another.” Thus the reason of the masses is
posing a new challenge to the movement from theory. When masses of people require reasons before they act, a new human society
surely cannot arise through spontaneous action alone. And exposing the ills of existing society does not
provide sufficient reason for action when what is at issue is the very possibility of an alternative. If the movement from theory is to
respond adequately to the challenge arising from below, it is necessary to abandon the presupposition – and it seems to me to be no more than
a presupposition – that
the vision of the new society cannot be concretized through the mediation of
cognition. We need to take seriously Raya Dunayevskaya’s (Power of Negativity [PON], p. 184) claim in her Hegel Society of America paper
that “There is no trap in thought. Though it is finite, it breaks through the barriers of the given, reaches out, if not to infinity, surely beyond the
historic moment” (RD, PON, p. 184). This, too, is a presupposition that can be “proved” or “disproved” only in the light of the results it yields. In
the meantime, the challenges from below require us to proceed on its basis.