Abstract
Efforts to create a ‘queer Marxism’, at least by that name, date back a mere 15 years, to the publication of Kevin Floyd's The Reification of Desire (2009). The great majority of queer Marxism publications in the intervening years have been by US academics or academics in other English-speaking rich countries, focusing more often than not on US examples (Drucker, 2021). In keeping with the anti-imperialist tradition in Marxism and the ‘transnational turn’ in queer studies, there have, however, been attempts by queer Marxists for years to challenge and correct this Eurocentrism in actually existing queer Marxism.
Together with his previous book Queer Marxism in Two Chinas, Petrus Liu's The Specter of Materialism makes a major and invaluable contribution to creating a truly global queer Marxism. Unlike other queer Marxists who have attempted this from within Western imperialist countries (like me, in Drucker, 2015), Liu can draw in his work on wide-ranging knowledge, impressive research, and personal familiarity with a large and key part of the non-Western world: the Chinese lands of the People's Republic (including Hong Kong) and Taiwan (where he hails from himself). The results of his labors should occupy a central place from now on in queer Marxist studies – and in studies of geopolitics generally.
As Liu points out, there is no way to make sense of the world today without seeing China as a key player. Yet again and again, Westerners talk and write about the world in a way that occludes China's centrality. For example, for 35 years now and still today, they write about the ‘post-Cold War’ world. Yet by contrast with a view of history hinging on the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, a truly global view should reflect the reality that the People's Republic never collapsed and that (the power of the Chinese Communist Party has never been seriously shaken. As Russia went through its precipitous decline in the 1990s, China continued its steady, rapid rise. And while Russia acquiesced in NATO's expansion and its own retreat, China paralleled its incorporation into the neoliberal global order with constant resistance to Western attempts to hem it in. So as Liu points out, the Cold War in Asia never definitively ended. He notes that relations between the People's Republic and Taiwan, for example, have all along been ‘overdetermined by a Cold War structure of feeling’ (107) – intensified today by ‘unprecedented hostility between China and the United States’, part of an exacerbation of global tensions that I have explored elsewhere (Drucker, 2022: 161).
Similarly, Western studies of gender and sexuality ignore the Chinese-speaking one-sixth of humanity. As long as this remains the case, there can be no question of a global feminism or of global queer perspectives. Queer studies need to move beyond a Eurocentric understanding of ‘homosexuality as we understand it today’ – whose origin was the object of so much early queer theory – to a comprehensive vision of global queers in all their diversity. ‘While 1990s queer theorists cautioned us not to apply queer theory to non-Western cultures, for today's queer theorists there is no more urgent task’, Liu writes (33) ‘Geopolitics … is constitutive of this understanding of queer’ (27). I have made this argument myself (in Drucker, 2023: 76–79).
Queer materialism
Queer Marxists have a lot to learn from Liu about China's central place in the spheres of geopolitics, economics, gender and sexuality. At the same time, queer Marxists will enthusiastically welcome his insistence that queer studies need to be far more materialist. As he writes, ‘being queer is no longer queer enough’ (21). Queer radicalism needs to engage with resistance to racism, oppressive reproductive technologies, security regimes, austerity, ableism, and homonationalism, fortunately, concerns that many queer scholars today share. The ‘starting point of a materialist analysis is the agency of the oppressed’ (8).
In particular, making the oppressed the subjects of history requires that we ‘transform the material conditions that authorize certain individuals to speak, act, or write in socially legible ways’ (8). Building on his work in Queer Marxism in Two Chinas, Liu focuses more on this book on labor and capital. In this respect, Liu joins forces with other queer Marxists who have been trying to make and deepen these links for the past decade and a half.
Toward a global queer vision
Liu in fact writes, ‘This book was written in dialogue with the exciting and rapidly growing body of literature on queer anticapitalism, which includes the works of Kevin Floyd, Alan Sears, Jules Gleeson, Holly Lewis, and Peter Drucker’ (16). I am gratified to be included in the dialogue with him. At the same time, Liu seeks to move beyond us by analyzing ‘capital as a dispossessive logic on a global scale’ (17). He has my heartfelt support in this badly needed endeavor. This was in fact a central aim of my book Warped, published almost a decade ago.
In all due modesty, despite the minor place that my work has in his book, I would suggest that Liu could have read it more attentively. After a quick but accurate summary of the account in my Warped of the role of capitalism in shaping European and North American sexualities, he writes, ‘By contrast, as capitalism failed to develop in the feudal societies of Asia – which Drucker defines as those “in whose sexual regimes class and status trumped gender and kinship” – the basic historical conditions for lesbian/gay communities remained absent’ (70). This is a misreading. There is only one Asian society I describe (following Perry Anderson) as ‘feudal’ (and therefore particularly propitious for the rise of capitalism): Japan. Among other Asian societies, I analyze precolonial India as one where gender and kinship were central to its Indigenous sexual regimes, and China – together with ancient Rome, the classical Arab caliphates, and feudal societies – as ones ‘in whose sexual regimes class and status trumped gender and kinship’ (Drucker, 2015: 78, 85–86, 84).
This is not the place to discuss whether my characterizations of these different societies were right or wrong – not the focus of Liu's book. My point is that a truly global queer vision needs to go beyond the dominant Eurocentrism of queer studies and beyond Liu's China-centered account – indispensable as it is – to embrace in-depth analyses of the social and sexual formations of the incredible wealth and diversity of the world's regions. This will necessarily be a long-term, collective effort drawing on many contributions, especially from Latin America, Africa, and Asia, on the way to ‘new ways of imagining queer futures and transformative politics’ (163). In this collective effort, scholars like me in imperialist countries need to be prepared to take a back seat. When we do try to go beyond US-centric and Eurocentric perspectives and move toward a truly global vision, though, our efforts too should be taken into account.
Chinese genders, Chinese sexualities
That said, queer Asian voices are essential in any account of queer Asia, and Liu's writings on queer China supply a major piece of the puzzle. He insightfully analyzes the ways in which China's transition to capitalism has created ‘new classes of gender and sexuality – such as dagongmei (female migrant laborers in China's export-oriented sunbelt), money boys (rural-to-urban sex works), and high-suzhi (quality) transnational queers … as part of the new politics of human value’ (14). ‘The vulnerability of women as a group is amplified by China's neoliberal transformations’, he notes (44). This is the backdrop to his fascinating and illuminating presentation of debates on gender among Chinese feminists today. Ultimately, he concludes, despite the richness of the debates, pressure from the regime has reduced discussions of gender to a reaffirmation of the Communist Party's traditional claim to have granted women equality, ‘while more transformative and queer understandings of sex/gender remain occluded from view’ (160).
In the realm of sexuality, similarly, ‘[d]ispossessed, displaced, and having literally nothing to sell except their bodies … rural sex workers perform a new form of proletarianized labor’ (45). At the same time, ‘Chinese gay men and lesbians [increasingly] seek higher education abroad’ – another option offered by the new Chinese capitalism – ‘in order to escape compulsory heterosexuality and procreative familialism’ (46). Although neoliberalism in China enlarged spaces for LGBTQ communities, Liu notes that compared with Hong Kong and Taiwan, China ‘appears to be significantly behind in the advancement of queer rights’ (104). In recent years, I have analyzed this sexual divergence between Taiwan and the People's Republic as one example of a global clash between ‘homonationalism’ (as defined by Jasbir Puar) and ‘heteronationalism’ (Drucker, 2023: 78).
On a more positive note, one of the most inspiring parts of The Specter of Materialism for me is Liu's account of the gender and sexual politics of the brilliant Chinese revolutionary writer Lu Xun. (My enthusiasm for Lu Xun's work goes back to a Chinese history course I took from Jonathan Spence in the 1970s, though I don’t remember Spence's mentioning Lu Xun's gender and sexual radicalism.) While the Maoist leadership of the Chinese Communist Party celebrated Lu Xun's work, and particularly his depictions of cruelty and violence against women, Liu uncovers a sexually subversive side of it that came as a revelation to me. I had no idea, for instance, that Lu Xun's radical commitment to gender equality led him to consistently use the honorific ‘elder brother’ (xiong) in his letters in addressing his female partner (93). It is no wonder that contemporary Chinese queer scholars have been reclaiming Lu Xun from Maoist orthodoxy.
What is China?
Understanding a capitalist world in which China is central requires understanding what China is. In this respect, Liu provides many formulations with which I wholeheartedly concur – and others that I find dubious. I believe that he is absolutely right to state that ‘capital meets, subsumes, and reconfigures preexisting temporalities – relations of production and property, gendered hierarchies, and kinship – without creating a homogeneous world’ (11). I believe that this describes what has happened in China over the past several decades, notably beginning under Deng Xiaoping. This is in the last analysis of the explanation of the ‘mounting social inequality … reckless developmentalism justifying human rights abuses, onslaughts against the environment, suppression of freedoms of speech and assembly, and belligerence toward Taiwan, Hong Kong and Xinjiang’ that Liu describes (42).
I am less convinced by Liu's statement that China has ‘displace[d] the United States as the center of global capitalism’ (1), given that the United States with about one-quarter of China's population still by any measure has the world's largest capitalist economy (even though the United States is indeed dependent on Chinese investment and imports). Ultimately Liu declines ‘to adjudicate on these claims whether China is socialist or capitalist, neocolonial or liberationist’, even after saying that this is ‘a question of utmost importance that is haunting the international Left’ (7).
I agree that this is a question of utmost importance, and think that queer anticapitalists should take clear positions on it and debate their different positions in a comradely way. For my part, I think that the global spread of Chinese investments on every continent, and the rapid rise of Chinese military power particularly in its own region, justify defining it as one of the world's main capitalist and imperialist powers – though, ‘Paradoxically, Chinese capitalism owes much of its resilience to the anti-capitalist revolution that forged [its] state and ruling party’ (Drucker, 2022). Politically, this means for me that anticapitalists should consistently oppose all of the contending imperialist powers: US (still the main one), European, Japanese, Russian, and Chinese. And in the realm of sexual politics, I believe that we should oppose the increasingly heteronationalist policies of the Chinese state as well as Western homonationalism, in defense of a vision of global queer liberation that transcends them both.
