Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System

"Christopher Chitty was a graduate student and activist at UC-Santa Cruz who committed suicide in 2015. The project that Chitty left behind, entitled SEXUAL HEGEMONY, reveals how the policing of male homosexuality happened in conjunction with the establishment of capitalist economies across Europe and the U.S. Writing against a thesis of modernization in which sexual freedom advances alongside the development of commodity production and state formation, Chitty instead shows how the rise of capitalism hasembedded a bourgeois sexual hegemony into property relations, economic crises, and political institutions. Drawing on queer theory, Marxism, Foucault, Gramsci, and world-systems-analysis, Chitty demonstrates that male same-sex intimacy and sex have systematically been constructed as problematic for bourgeois polities. The book begins with an introduction by Christopher Nealon that situates Chitty's work among new scholarship bringing Marxism into conversation with queer theory, and that speculates on some of the Marxist feminist texts that might have helped extend Chitty's limited analysis of lesbian and other non-male queer sexualities. Chitty's own work begins by considering Michel Foucault's idea that sexuality arises from the discourse of sexual science. Instead, Chitty argues that sexuality came into being as a result of the contradiction between the forces and relations of production inherent in the development of capitalism. The book's chapters proceed in chronological order, tracking the politicization of male homosexuality in Florence, Amsterdam, London, Paris, and New York. Chitty considers the secular offices of the late medieval and early modern Mediterranean world, which employed a sliding scale of penalties to regulate a flourishing cultureof sodomy in Florence. Then he considers Atlantic seafaring culture of London and Amsterdam of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and public urinal design in Paris of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although unfinished, SEXUAL HEGEMONY is theoretically bold. It will make an important contribution to Marxist queer theory, early modern studies, and studies of sexuality"--
In Sexual Hegemony Christopher Chitty traces the five-hundred year history of capitalist sexual relations by excavating the class dynamics of the bourgeoisie's attempts to regulate homosexuality. Tracking the politicization of male homosexuality in Renaissance Florence, Amsterdam, Paris, and London between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as twentieth-century New York City, Chitty shows how sexuality became a crucial dimension of the accumulation of capital and a technique of bourgeois rule. Whether policing male sodomy during the Medici rule in Florence or accusing the French aristocracy of monstrous sexuality in the wake of the French Revolution, the bourgeoisie weaponized both sexual constraint and sexual freedom in order to produce and control a reliable and regimented labor class and subordinate it to civil society and the state. Only by grasping sexuality as a field of social contention and the site of class conflict, Chitty contends, can we embark on a politics that destroys sexuality as a tool and an effect of power and open a front against the forces that keep us unfree.
Christopher Chitty traces the 500 year history of capitalist sexual relations, showing how sexuality became a crucial dimension of the accumulation of capital and a technique of bourgeois rule.