Eros and Alienation: Capitalism and the Making of Gendered Sexualities

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Eros and Alienation delves into the underexplored relationship between alienated labour and sexuality. Our deeply human drive to shape the world around us and fulfil ourselves thro ugh labour is subverted by capitalist alienation, leaving us to find fulfilment elsewhere. As a result, our erotic drives become the central focus for transformation and life-making, but are themselves restricted and fuelled by whatever energy is left after completing the monetised or social reproductive work required to survive. This alienation encounters ongoing resistance, as life-making activity can never be fully separated from the person who labours. Alan Sears explores the ways this alienation frames the processes of gender and sexual formation, showing how the organisation of work contributes to the development of a dominant regime of gendered sexualities, defined by a binary gender mapping of desire as heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual. About the Author Alan Sears is Professor of Sociology at Toronto Metropolitan University. He has been writing about queer Marxism for activist and scholarly audiences since the mid-1980s. He is an activist and author of several books including The Next New Left: A History of the Future. Alan resides in Toronto, Ontario. What People Are Saying "Sears takes social reproduction feminism and queer Marxism in exciting new directions as he historicises penetration and orgasms. He expands the concept of alienated labour to all life-making and founds a queer ecology, foregrounding colonised, racialised and disabled voices." Peter Drucker, author of Warped: Gay Normality and Queer Anti-Capitalism "Alan Sears meticulously outlines how capitalism shapes human intimacy. Eros and Alienation offers a sweeping, original analysis that challenges how we think about sexuality, life-making, and building a better world." Holly Lewis, author of The Politics of Everybody: Feminism, Queer Theory, and Marxism at the Intersection "With careful attention to our embodied, historically evolving, socially imbricated, and ecologically situated ways of laboring and seeking fulfillment in the midst of capitalist alienation, Sears’ de-reifying tour de force moves with revolutionary passion towards the liberation of our erotic lives." Aaron Jaffe, author of Social Reproduction Theory and the Socialist Horizon: Work, Power and Political Strategy 'Eros and Alienation brings into focus how profoundly the alienating logic of capitalism shapes needs and desires, labor and well being. Expanding on Queer Marxism and Social Reproduction Theory, Alan Sears lucidly explains how capitalist alienation constrains human capacities, undermines the ecology of intimacy, and limits agency for alternative world-making. This call for an eco-socialism of life-sustaining practice will transform how you think about sexual liberation, queer politics, and love." Rosemary Hennessy, author of In the Company of Radical Women Writers "Alan Sears offers a compelling argument on the pervasive alienation of capitalist society that truncates and distorts our capacities for creative expression, love and human flourishing. He maps erotics as a terrain of struggle, both captured by profit and the state, as well as a means of resistance and collective emancipation. Sears shows the vitality and necessity of queer Marxism, deftly synthesized with Black feminism, family abolitionism, social reproduction theory, utopian speculation, and critical theory. This book is a powerful tool towards the reclaiming of ourselves as sexual beings in a revolutionary transformation of society." M. E. O’Brien, author of Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care "A major contribution to queering and extending Marxism. This broad ranging exploration makes clear how the alienating racial capitalist exploitation of unwaged and waged labour is also the de-eroticization of bodies making them productive for capital. The permanent sexual and gender revolution that Sears calls for is based on expanding eroticization of bodies; working against productivity for capital; for queer and trans life-making; and expanding sexual time and control over our bodies and lives." Gary Kinsman, author of The Regulation of Desire: Queer Histories, Queer Struggles Table of Contents Acknowledgements1. Introduction: Eros and Alienation2. Alienation and the Making of Sexualities3. Sexualities at Work4. Market Model Sexualities5. The State and Sexual Hegemony6. Sexuality and Ecology7. Utopia and Sexual Revolutions Show more