Taking on the Right
Historical Materialism Fifteenth Annual Conference – Call For Papers
School of Oriental and African Studies, Central London, 8-11 November 2018
www.historicalmaterialism.org
All queries to: historicalmaterialism@soas.ac.uk
Call for Papers: Historical Materialism Sexuality and Political Economy Network
Combatting the Right: Sexual Violence, Discrimination and Oppression and Left Responses
www.historicalmaterialism.org
All queries to: historicalmaterialism@soas.ac.uk
Abstract submissions:
https://conference.historicalmaterialism.org/index.php/hmlondon/hm15
Deadline: 1 June 2018
The resurgence of the right has brought a renewed politics of sexuality that has left sectional interests fighting battles they thought they had won. Trans people face renewed prejudice and discrimination from the right and also attacks from feminists who would claim to be left and defending women’s rights. Women find inequality remains persistent and whilst #MeToo has thrown a light on harassment, political leaders like Trump thrive on using women as sex objects, whilst the epidemic of rape and sexual violence is unabated. Gay men, lesbians and sexually dissident identities find themselves bisected by a homonormativity that promises (grudging) inclusion within homo-nationalist and capitalist marketised societies, or condemnation and hostility should they wish to express their queerness in non-conforming ways. Both in law and in politics, nebulous appeals to decency and obscenity ensure judicial and policing discretion that leaves sexual dissidents vulnerable to arbitrary yet targeted attacks.
These issues, points of contestation in the West, do not begin to represent the naked violence, suppression and exploitation visited upon sexual and gender nonconformists in parts of Africa, the Indian sub-continent, the East and Russia. Systematic state sponsored prejudice and violence, overt discrimination, harassment and hostility and trafficking are prevalent and overt features and facts of life.
Behind these points of struggle and contestation, persistent inequalities and prejudices prevail: religious organisations that refuse even the strictures of human rights law; a conventional culture that views free sexual expression and discourse as dangerous and risk laden, to be preserved in private families or expressed in limited bio-medical risk averse sex education; protectionist discourses that ironically render young people vulnerable by pushing sexuality to subterranean levels and promoting ignorance and innocence.
Indicative themes might include:
• The scope and limits to Queer Social Reproduction Theory
• The political economy of sex work
• Building a Trans Marxism and resisting anti-trans attacks
• Resisting the Right on both sexual oppression and desexualisation
• Resisting attacks on women’s reproductive rights and sexual freedom
• Contradictions within the far right in imperialist countries between femo- and homonationalism on the one hand and heterosexism on the other.
• Global ‘Political homophobia’ or ‘heteronationalism’ and ‘Western’ homonationalism – a vicious circle.
• Campaigns against ‘pinkwashing’
• Marxism, empirical studies and the fight against scientific pathologies
• Debates between queer Marxist-humanism and queer anti-humanism.
• Marxist analyses of queer poverty, queer anti-racist struggle, the daily struggles of queer people of colour, and intersectional inequalities.
• Apologies, Redress and struggles against sexual oppressions around the globe
• Analysing queer issues through readings of Capital and Marx’s work?
• What would gay communism look like?
Whilst all and any papers that elucidate the relationship between sexuality (and gender) and political economy (Marxist and radical theory and politics) are welcome, papers that explore these violence’s and how to combat and confront them, developing cohesive left strategies, tactics, solidarity and politics, both decoding the current struggles and developing coherent responses, are particularly welcome
