Sexuality and Queer Political Economy with Dr Nicola Smith
In the first of a series of interviews on embodied inequality, International Political Economy Working Group (IPEG) convenor Dr Ben Richardson (University of Warwick, UK) interviews Dr Nicola Smith (University of Birmingham, UK) about her book Capitalism’s Sexual History, published in 2020 with Oxford University Press, and its themes of gender, sexuality, queerness and embodiment.
You can either read the transcript or listen to the audio file embedded below.
Ben:
In IPE we are trained to think about the international relations and the class relations of global capitalism, and to increasing extent, gender relations and race relations too. But I think it’s fair to say that the sexual relations of capitalism, which you explore in your recent book, are not really a central line of enquiry. So could you start by telling us how it was that you came to this particular research area?
Nicola:
I hope it’s OK to offer a super quick academic autobiography here. So I was first introduced to IPE when I did my MA and then my PhD, but I wasn’t in any way looking at gender and sexuality. This very much reflected the training I had, which was that IPE was a field that was primarily interested in interactions between these two kind of weirdly elusive and abstract entities called ‘states’ and ‘markets’. And so IPE was for me then very much a gender and sexuality free zone. But outside of my PhD, the stuff that interested me the most politically was gender and sexuality and it was when the brilliant feminist IR scholar Laura Shepherd joined my department and encouraged me to read the incredible work of feminist scholars that I started to learn then that gender and sexuality had long been political economy issues for feminists. So it was reading the work of people like Spike Peterson, Shirin Rai, Anna Agathangelou and so many others that really brought to life for me how embodied social hierarchies such as gender, race and sexuality are what makes the stuff of the global political economy. So learning about the vital insights and contributions of feminist political economists was absolutely the most important thing that led me to this particular research area, even in the most basic terms of thinking about something called ‘capitalism’ rather than ‘states’ and ‘markets’.
At the same time, albeit quite separately – at least in my own thinking – I started to learn about queer theory, which hasn’t routinely focused on debates about global capitalism, but it was also centrally concerned with embodied social relations, just like feminist political economy, and especially sexuality, including questions about heteronormativity and marriage, and so on. So that was the second strand. Then the third strand, the final strand, was that I started to get more into sex work studies. And sex work is really interesting because while it’s often studied as a kind of sociological or criminological issue, first and foremost, it also raises really important questions that are political economy questions, not least because of widespread assumptions and assertions that sex not only isn’t a form of work, but that it can’t be a form of work. In other words, that sexual practices are not, but also cannot be, economic practices. And yet, when we think about marriage, that is so clearly an economic site as well as a sexual site. Indeed, it’s one of our most enduring and pervasive economic and sexual institutions. So I was interested in how the moral condemnation of sex work diverts attention away from the constitutive role that marriage has historically played and continues to play in subjugating women in particular, economically and otherwise. So those are the different kind of strands that I wanted to weave together, and that ultimately became the book Capitalism’s Sexual History.
Ben:
Can I pick up on this conversation that you were bringing together between IPE, and feminist IPE in particular, on the one hand, and queer theory, on the other? You talk in the book about this burgeoning field of queer political economy, so could you tell us a little bit more about the contours of that? How you mapped it out and what kind of insights it opened up for you that you couldn’t find in either of those literatures on their own?
Nicola:
So the central aim of the book is to explore how capitalism’s history is itself a history of sexuality and I was interested in this because economic and sexual relations are so often assumed to be not just separable but antithetical, with the realms of economy and sexuality imagined to be these spheres that aren’t just distinct but must be kept apart from each other. And this dichotomy, that animates popular and political debates, also often plays out in the academic literature. So as you know, as you so rightly noticed about IPE, sexuality continues to be routinely erased. You just have to take a glance at any random IPE textbook or core module to see this. You know feminists remark wryly about the fabled ‘Week on Gender’. But sexuality doesn’t even get a week, it doesn’t even get a mention a lot of the time in IPE. So there’s this kind of writing out of sexuality from IPE; it hasn’t even been written in really.
Conversely, queer theory has often, if by no means always, overlooked the study of capitalism and this has even led to calls for a ‘post-queer agenda’ on the grounds that queer theory doesn’t centre questions of economic justice and can’t do so because it wasn’t built to do so. And these kinds of claims can be overstated, not least because there’s already incredibly significant, vital work being done by people working on queer theory in IPE, and vice versa. But it’s nevertheless fair to say that queer questions, including those surrounding sexuality, have often been placed on the constitutive outside of IPE. So it’s IPE as if queer theory doesn’t matter, or IPE as if sexuality doesn’t matter. This is a problem because, as feminist political economists have been arguing for decades, the economic is the intimate, the political is the personal, and the sexual division of labour is a big part of how labour is organised under capitalism. So what I wanted to do with the book was to kind of better connect, or do more to connect, the study of capitalism with sexuality by bringing more closely into dialogue IPE and queer theory as the two fields that lay claim to the study of capitalism and sexuality, respectively.
So in more practical terms, I try to advance this queer political economy agenda, not trying to offer a blueprint for others, more trying to contribute to the wider development of this terrain of debate. In particular the kind of queer political economy that I try to advance approaches queer theory not as the study of fluidity – and that’s a really, really important agenda – but the agenda that I tried to pursue is to approach queer theory as a historical project. Drawing inspiration here from Lisa Downing and Robert Gillett who point to how proto-queer theory was itself a historical project and this historical work is something that queer scholars can meaningfully and fruitfully engage in.
More specifically, I use genealogy as the overarching methodology by examining, or setting out to examine, how the past inhabits the present and how the power relations we might take for granted now are not – and quoting Mrinalini Sinha – they’re not ‘natural and thus without a history’, they are historically contingent, they don’t rest on secure foundations and they never have done. So instead of offering the history of capitalism the book’s instead trying to offer a history of capitalism by looking in particular at how capitalism and sexuality have constituted each other in ways that are highly complex, contingent, contradictory and always, always contested. I try to anchor this analysis in the really specific site of sex work in Britain by tracing a history of the discourses of sex work starting in England in the Middle Ages, all the way up until the present day, to try to show how the division between economy and sexuality that we take for granted today has been historically produced; it’s not just a natural fact. So ultimately, to bring this to conclusion, I try to show how the writing out of sexuality from the analysis of capitalism that IPE so often continues to do isn’t just an oversight in the literature, it is also woven into the very fabric of capitalism itself.
Ben:
Thanks. So to get to the upshot of this approach and kind of line of argument for the book, one thing I thought you did that was really good was to expose the underlying interests in this move; to say it wasn’t just by chance, you know, it was done with purpose. On my reading at least, the purpose of this sort of forcible separation of sexuality from the economic sphere was as a means of securing unpaid reproductive labour. And the way you weave in heterosexual and homosexual relations and sex work and marriage into this story is really fascinating. And so I was wondering, though how difficult you found it to relate these topics to the kinds of maybe more typical or traditional distributive cross-border questions that we see in much IPE literature. Was it the case that you really had to trawl through legislation and archival materials to make the links here, to show the interest that would be served and how this fed into processes of capital accumulation? Or was it the case that once you started on this, it just kind of exploded out and it was in a way sort of difficult to keep it in certain parameters?
Nicola:
So I’m glad to be asked this question because so often when we talk about academic writing, it’s focused on the content of the book and we don’t necessarily think about or talk so much in academia about the process of writing academic books. So it’s great to have a moment to kind of reflect on that process and the book took – I thought it was going to take a couple of years – it took over a decade to complete, and it didn’t really start to take shape until I realised that I’m not a planner, I’m a jigsaw puzzler. My process involves collecting so many jigsaw puzzle pieces from all sorts of different sources, including different academic fields, and then trying to work out how they kind of fit together. So the book didn’t start out with a discrete thesis, but instead the thesis emerged out of the process of researching and writing the book. It kind of materialised and with this kind of approach there has to be an anchor to make it manageable. So that’s why I’m so drawn to genealogy as it allows me to join the dots of these very disparate themes, including the kinds of ones that you’ve pointed to, but also having a sense of a focus. And that’s also why I had my focus on a specific case, and in this case it was sex work in Britain.
So that’s kind of the mechanics of how the thesis emerged. In terms of the actual thesis itself, I really like the way that you’ve distilled it in your question, and I think you said that sexuality has been forcibly separated from the economic sphere as a means of securing unpaid reproductive labour?
Ben:
I tried to boil it down as best I could!
Nicola:
Yeah, I absolutely think it has. There has been a forcible separation, often involving violent state intervention and we continue to see this – violent state intervention. And I think as well, an important element has been not just the kind of repressive power, but also productive power to use Foucault’s distinction, including the production of normative sexuality – the naturalisation of marriage, and so on. So the book sort of argues, in a way, that the one is kind of the flip side of the other, i.e. the marking out and repression of commercial sex as deviant on the one hand, is bound up with the discursive production not only of sex work, but of normative sexuality [on the other hand], and both work to enable capitalism to extract women’s unpaid and low-paid reproductive labour in the ways that you’ve described. I could go on, but I’m worried that I’ve taken too long to answer your question!
Ben:
No, that’s fine, thank you! Let’s go back to methodology now because you’ve spoken about the importance of genealogy in this piece of work, your book, but in other work you’ve done you did interviews, and you’ve reflected on this in a piece in Johnna Montgomerie’s edited book on critical research methods. I really enjoyed reading this because it was just so candid and there you talk about interviewing sex workers and [how] at times you felt it was advantageous to be an embodied researcher, in the sense that you could make connections through the language of being and having bodies – I think you said it gave you a sort of common ground, and a way to break the ice as it were – but at other times it was problematic and left you wanting to retreat into academia’s sort of disembodied world. So I wonder if your experience of drawing on queer political economy both as an approach and in terms of its methodology, has it changed how you think about embodiment in your scholarship at all?
Nicola:
Yeah, thanks. So that was a piece I wrote back in 2013 and I was trying to work through what it might mean to be a feminist researcher and, also, drawing on queer theory, in practical terms of how we actually do our research. And I’m still trying to work this through and I do not have it all worked out. But I do think my approach has changed overtime, as you say, and I’m sure that it will continue to change over time. In that piece I think what I was worried about, or was reflecting on was, how I guess as academics who do interviews we might talk about embodied knowledge, but this often doesn’t involve any kind of sustained reflection on our own embodiment, even if we do include some kind of reflection on our own positionality. This is such an important issue in sex work studies, for example, because sex worker activists have rightly been challenging how academics might, in effect, try to extract data from sex workers via interviews and other methods in ways that can be very objectifying of sex workers and there’s a really long history here.
One of the things that really impacted on me as a researcher was reading stuff back from, say, the 18th century and into the 19th century and properly processing for the first time that it wasn’t just statistics that were being developed to identify and discipline populations at the time. It was testimonials from sex workers being gathered and scrutinised in efforts to try to uncover the nature of their sexuality, and indeed, the very truth about sex. And this goes on and on into our contemporary moment. John Scott talks about how sex workers have been produced as ‘objectified subjects’, including through scientific endeavours to learn about their individual and intimate lives. So I find it really valuable and instructive when feminists and other researchers reflect really openly about these kind of issues, including when they do interviews. At the same time though, I think how my own approach has changed is that I’ve learned that we don’t just, as social scientists, have to be analysing individuals or groups or populations. We can flip the gaze to analyse dominant discourses so they can be the objects of scrutiny, they can be the object of analysis. So the personal as political is absolutely central to my work, but I think at the time that I wrote that piece, I think I was equating the personal with experiential accounts rather than fully understanding that the very notion of a private realm or personal space has been historically produced and is a political machinery, as many feminists have long argued and queer scholars doing historical work.
So for example, it wasn’t until I read Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch that I was really able to make sense of the institution of motherhood and what it might mean to be a mother and how my own experiences might have been formed by that. It was reading that sort of very political historical analysis that helped me to make more sense of that. So to go back to your question, I think I’ve realised ultimately that there are multiple different ways that scholars can think and write about embodiment; it’s a site of contestation and just as there isn’t just one feminist theory of the body or queer theory of the body there also isn’t one feminist or queer method that’s better or more worthy than others. There’s space to have these multiple different approaches to the study of gender and sexuality.
Ben:
I’d like to ask now about teaching and what queer political economy and debates about embodiment can bring here. So in 2015, the National Union of Students, the NUS, estimated that there were at least 175,000 university students identifying as lesbian, gay or bisexual; and more if trans students were included. In their survey they found, among other things, that there were persistent levels of homophobia and transphobia on UK campuses, and that a great majority of LGBT respondents to their survey wanted to see LGBT perspectives and authors more systematically included in the curriculum where possible. So I guess there are a lot of echoes here with the claims and arguments made in the decolonise our curriculum movement and related campaigns. So I was wondering if you think that this is something that queer political economy could help address, and if so, whether you have any advice on pedagogical techniques or topics that listeners might want to take up in the classroom?
Nicola:
Yeah, I think that queer theory does have so much to offer IPE; the study of IPE not only in research but in the classroom as well. And there’s so much really important work being done on queer pedagogies that are really exciting and challenging for IPE as a field. As always with queer theory, there are multiple different strands, and it’s again a terrain of debate in pedagogical terms as well as in terms of theories. But one thing that I get from queer pedagogy is that it’s not about trying to impart knowledge about something called sexuality to students, but instead it’s about asking some tricky questions about what gets to be counted as knowledge? What gets left out of that? What are the effects of those silences and exclusions, including their material effects, on economic justice if we think about it in queer political economy terms? So in IPE, we might ask what gets to be counted as an IPE question? What’s not being counted as an IPE question? And what does that then do, both for the field itself and for power relations more widely?
I really like the way that G.D. Shlasko puts it: that queering the classroom means kind of shifting our thinking as instructors from asking ourselves things like ‘what information should I impart to my students now?’ and instead asking ‘what questions should we be asking each other in the classroom? After we explore those questions, what will we have left out? And then what other questions do we then need to ask?’ And so it’s really important to recognise, of course, that this kind of agenda is not unique to queer studies. It’s an agenda that queer studies shares with feminist, postcolonial, decolonial and other traditions, and indeed draws from and forms part of those traditions. Just as an example, for my final year students at the start of the year one thing that I ask them to do is to reflect on what they’ve learned already on their IPE degrees and to what extent, and in what ways, has gender and sexuality and also race and disability figured in that. And if they haven’t figured, then why might that be and what has that meant for them.
More broadly, queering the classroom also means asking as instructors, and with our students, questions about the material conditions under which knowledge in IPE is being produced. Matt Brim writes about this kind of issue in Poor Queer Studies: you know, how do the material and intellectual resources available in universities work to neglect and exclude students who don’t possess structural advantages in terms of sexuality, as you so rightly pointed to, but also in terms of class, race, disability, gender and so on. So I think a queer political economy pedagogy would be trying to ask these kinds of questions.
Ben:
Thank you, that’s really helpful. I have to say, as well, I guess the way I framed that question was in such a way that it made it seem like queer political economy was of most relevance to students who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, but actually, reading your book, it was really manifest how it’s relevant to everybody, because whatever your sexuality, whatever your kind of relationship status, it has something to say about how that relates to the economy so I thought that was worth…
Nicola:
…Yeah, no I didn’t think your question, sorry…
Ben:
[Laughing] No, it was more a kind of sudden realisation, because, I mean, obviously one of the reasons I wanted to speak to you is because this is new to me and I’m now feeding it through even as we speak. So yeah, thanks. So for people like me who are new to these ideas and are interested in bringing them into our work as teachers or as researchers, then could I just finally ask – alongside your own book, of course – are there any other resources that you think would be really useful, you know, as an introduction and an entry point into this?
Nicola:
Yeah, I’m always worried that I’m going to leave people out who are really important so I’ll just have the caveat, you know, that queer and feminist theory are collective projects, there’s so many voices contributing. But as illustrative examples or starting points as you said, work I’d really recommend would be Spike Peterson’s work on the family, Anna Agathangelou’s work on queerness and neoliberal capitalism, Rahul Rao’s work on homocapitalism, Jasbir Puar’s work on debility and global capitalism, Suzanne Bergeron and Jyoti Puri’s work on sexuality, class and governance, and also Ellie Gore’s work on queer oppression in the global economy. And that’s just to give a flavour really. But I can definitely say that it’s really worth it for anyone interested in IPE to read around queer scholarship on capitalism, both within and outside of IPE, because as feminist scholars have so long been arguing, capitalism is constituted by, and constitutive of, sexuality, as well as gender and race. They’re all bound up with each other, and it’s fascinating and politically important and valuable for IPE scholars to more fully embrace these entanglements.
Image from 'The Marriage A-la-Mode: The Toilette' by William Hogarth (1697-1764) in London National Gallery. Creative Commons licence CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 via Jean Louis Mazieres.