Chapter 06 - Sexual Transgression and Capitalist Development

Section Notes¶

Proletarianization and Urbanization¶

• Peasant life: no clear division between work and home, little gendered division of labor, dependent on long-term heterosexual marriage, not directly market-dependent

  • Paternal authority based in tradition, interpersonal obligation, violence

  • Highly constrained sexual freedom

• Wage labor lessened immediate dependence on family; domestic life separated from production

  • Gender segregation in waged work

• Urbanization staggered through 18th-20th century

  • Global South, US Black people urbanized later than Europe

Sex in the Great Towns¶

• Urban conditions changed proletarian sex life

  • Sometimes forego family life altogether

  • Yearning for autonomy, pleasure

• Gender-variants excluded from working class

  • Ability to survive through illicit labor

• Femme, queer sexual liberation

• Proliferation of sexual & gender diversity seen as threat to order

  • Moral panics

  • Criminalization, punishment for sodomy

  • Cross-class same-sex relations common

Reconstruction and Black Love¶

• Romantic bonds (heterogenous, unrecognized, nontraditional) throughout slavery and reconstruction

  • Far more than white counterparts

  • No documentation of gay relationships

• Pushback from government agents, preachers, police, and respectable Black people

  • Legal marriage mandate to access church and federal services

  • Ultimately cultural reformation imposed by marriage requirement for Jim Crow land tenancy

On Charles Fourier¶

• Early 19th century: linked anti-capitalism to sexual freedom

• 3 main contributions:

  1. Horrors of poverty were result of growing market economy, need to abolish and establish social minimum

  2. Advocated for social, economic, and sexual rights of women

  3. Solution to horrors of market and monogamy: commune called “phalanx” of around 1600 people in “phalanstery” building

     • Collectivize reproductive labor

     • Share a manufacturing specialty

• “Sexual minimum” along with social minimum

• Thought humans are naturally polyamorous, bisexual, and erotically joyful

• Engels accused Fourier of utopian socialism

Quotes¶

“These new urban conditions together created dramatic changes in proletarian sexual life. Newly independent wage workers—first young white men, and later others as proletarianization deepened—could forgo family life altogether, making unexpected and unconventional choices about who to live with, who to have sex with, and who to love.” (pp. 99)