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Rethinking Marxism: A Journal

of Economics, Culture & Society
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Returning to Reproduction
Queerly: Sex, Labor, Need
Rosemary Hennessy
Published online: 22 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: Rosemary Hennessy (2006) Returning to Reproduction Queerly:

Sex, Labor, Need, Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society, 18:3,
387-395, DOI: 10.1080/08935690600748074

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 RETHINKING MARXISM VOLUME 18 NUMBER 3 (JULY 2006)

Returning to Reproduction Queerly: Sex,

Labor, Need1

Rosemary Hennessy

Historical materialism’s critique of capitalism and queer critiques of the material

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history of sexuality find a fruitful intersection in the concept of social reproduction.

The making of history involves the reproduction of social life*/what Marx referred to
as ’’species-being’’ or what might be called ‘‘social ontology.’’ As an aspect of social
ontology, affective needs feature in the reproduction of social life and are folded into
cultural norms. Capitalism produces unmet human needs that are embedded in values
and identities and incorporated into relations of labor in and outside the market-
place. Drawing upon workers’ narratives, this essay examines sex and labor in the
social ontology of the maquiladoras on the U.S.-Mexican border. Although sexual
identity has eluded studies of labor relations in maquiladoras, these workers’
narratives illustrate its powerful role in and outside the factory, in workers’
exploitation and in labor organizing.

Key Words: Queer Theory, Marxism, Sexuality, Sexual Identity, Maquiladoras, Value

Human beings make history, though not necessarily under conditions of our own
choosing, and we do so by meeting the needs of what Marx referred to as our
‘‘species-being.’’ Expanding upon Marx, some feminist social theorists have recently
called this way of seeing human history ‘‘social ontology’’ (Bakker and Gil 2004). The
phrase ‘‘social ontology’’ is a gloss on the Marxist concept of social reproduction.2 It
stresses that survival of the human species depends on social relations that span
political economy and juridical and cultural forms that foster the security of the
world’s population. Ontology in the philosophical sense involves the study of the
nature of existence. The notion of ‘‘social ontology’’ acknowledges that human
species-being is a social and historical process involving human agency. A social
ontology identifies how social reproduction and change take place across social
structures and human relations*/in work that becomes labor in the marketplace, in
the work of domestic care, in state and disciplinary regimes, and in forms of value
that organize human agency.

1. Portions of this essay appear in Richardson, D., J. McLaughlin, and M. Casey. 2006. Intersections
in Feminist and Queer Theory: Sexualities, Cultures and Identities. London: Palgrave.
2. For further discussion of social ontology, see Bakker and Gil (2004, especially pt. 1).

ISSN 0893-5696 print/1475-8059 online/06/030387-09

– 2006 Association for Economic and Social Analysis
DOI: 10.1080/08935690600748074
 388 HENNESSY

As human beings we work and desire, we have needs and sensations*/all at the
same time. But modern Western culture has been shaped by paradigms that separate
these activities and capacities. This is itself a historical consequence. Over the course
of capitalism’s development, desire and labor, need and sensation have been isolated
from one another in the prevailing ways of making sense of the self and society. This
division was not simply a philosophical event, but a historical effect consolidated
some time in the nineteenth century and not coincidentally at the dawn of consumer
capitalism. It is manifest in the splits between Marxism and queer theory.
Marxism offers us conceptual tools to make visible and explain the persistent
fundamental social relation of capitalism, the accumulation of profit primarily
through the reaping of surplus labor in the working day. Marxist concepts also help us
to trace the material connections that bind the production of value in political
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economy to cultural value and consciousness. However, across its history, and with
few exceptions (Alexandra Kollantai and Herbert Marcuse come to mind), Marxism has
all but ignored sexuality. I would like to say that capitalism’s increasing colonization
of the body and sensation have made it less possible for Marxists to do so but, in fact,
Marxists are more embattled than ever, and those who are thinking critically about
sexuality are few and far between.
Queer theory’s critical force has been in the domain of culture study, in elaborating
the dynamics of gender and sexuality as normative value systems and exposing their
incoherences. However, the queer theory that blossomed in the overdeveloped world
during the nineties, and mostly in the academy, is no longer the culture industry’s
newest fashion. The study of sexuality it provoked is being absorbed into cultural
studies broadly understood and is pursuing new directions. The most politically
interesting work provoked by queer theory as cultural studies addresses sexuality in
relation to its racialized imperial history and the changing relations of labor
throughout the modern period and under neoliberal capitalism’s new bargain with
the state. For example, the late Lionel Cantu’s essay ‘‘De Ambiente’’ invites us to
think about the impact of migration (driven by neoliberal capitalism’s structural
adjustment policies) and the Mexican government’s development of the tourism
industry on the commodification of Mexican ‘‘gay’’ culture and space. Roderick
Ferguson’s Aberrations in Black (2003) examines the consolidation of a racialized,
heteronormative patriarchy in the twentieth century within Marxism, sociology, and
revolutionary nationalist movements. And Kevin Floyd’s forthcoming Reifying Desire
analyzes the split between critiques of capital and sexuality, approaching the
historical reasons for this dichotomy by way of a critical engagement with the
concept of reification. As a contribution to this collective undertaking, I want to
consider value as a hinge concept that binds Marxism and the new sexuality studies.
Under capitalism we do not retain control of very much of our human potential. As
Marx points out, to survive within the minimum standard, the worker is forced to give
up ‘‘time for education, for intellectual development . . . for the free play of his bodily
and mental activity, even the rest time of Sunday’’ (1959, 264). Human needs are
outlawed when workers’ health and safety are ignored because they are not cost
effective, when the workday is lengthened, lunch hours shortened, bathroom breaks
cut, overtime required, or when the socially necessary labor that takes place outside
the workplace is normalized as family care and invisible as labor. Needs are also
 MARXIAN SEXUAL POLITICS 389

outlawed through the ways of seeing we employ, the values that form consciousness
and subjectivity: when people lose sight of the social relationships that make possible
the goods they consume, and when our human capacities as affective, sensuous,
social beings are fractured. This fracturing registers in the ways our affective
capacities come to be named in terms of legitimate and illegitimate ‘‘experiences.’’
Outlawed affective needs are not just the identities and desires that the dominant
culture shames*/being called gay, lesbian, dyke, queer. They are also those
unspeakable particular sensations and affects that do not fall easily into any
categories. The human potential for sensation and affect which comprises what we
call ‘‘experience’’ is always much richer than established culture captures. What is
left over consists of particularities and potentials that a culture’s languages, stories,
and practices do not, cannot, name.
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This outlawing of human potential is one of the sites of struggle between capital
and labor. Many unmet needs lie outside capitalism and cannot be assimilated into it
without abolishing the fundamental social relationships of exploitation it depends on.
This domain of outlawed need must be reckoned with continually because it poses a
constant potential threat to capitalist interests. It is the monstrous outside to
capitalism that haunts it. Affective needs that are organized into what gets called
‘‘sexuality’’ are only one aspect of much broader affective and sensate relations that
feature in everyday life. They are crucial to social reproduction and to the work of
organizing against the violence of capitalist relations.
Social reproduction under capitalism takes place through the making, exchange,
and consumption of commodities. Quite a lot of cultural studies work on sexuality has
focused on the consumption aspect*/on the queering of consumer practices and
cultures. This is symptomatic of a truce between corporate owners and social
movements organized around same-sex identities, a truce that welcomes gay (or gay-
tolerant or transgendered) consumers and professionals in return for acquiescence
and accommodation (see Hennessy 2000; Quiroga 2000, chap. 1). There is, of course,
a material relationship between the achievement of consumer (and civic) rights in the
one-third world and the production of commodities by the vast labor pool of workers
in the two-thirds world. If this relation is in part a structural one between visibility
and invisibility, critical work on sexuality has taught us that visibility in itself may not
be a sufficient metaphor to redress it.
It is important to remember that capitalism does not require any particular cultural
values to assemble its labor force and accumulate surplus value. It carves out a
modernizing path that is fundamentally amoral, pursuing profit by tracking down
surplus labor however and wherever it can. This may mean taking advantage of
traditional cultural forms or symbolic values that civil society has upheld or melting
them away so that new subjects and new norms come to be.
Marx understands labor power to include these cultural forms. Labor power consists
of both a physical dimension and another part that he calls ‘‘the living personali-
ty’’*/what we might refer to now as subjectivity. In order for the worker to sell his
labor power, Marx says, he must have it at his disposal: ‘‘he must be the free proprietor
of his own labour-capacity, hence of his person’’ (271). For Marx, when the worker and
the capitalist meet in the market, they enter into relations with each other ‘‘on an
equal footing as owners of commodities . . . both are therefore equal in the eyes of the
 390 HENNESSY

law’’ (271). But as Marx knows, equality in the eyes of the law masks the propertied
interests of the state. As he argues in ‘‘On the Jewish Question’’ (1972), the state’s
universal ‘‘man’’ presupposes particular social relations: the distinctions of birth,
rank, education, occupation, and, we might add, gender, race, and sexuality. The state
is premised on the social inequalities these distinctions regulate and helps to
reproduce them even though it does not politically acknowledge this*/or not without
a fight. The universal version of ‘‘equality’’ established by the state is an imaginary
sovereignty that divests ‘‘man’’ of his ‘‘real individual life and fills him with an unreal
universality’’ (220). The major inequality in civil society is the difference that private
property establishes between individuals. One function of the dominant cultural
values through which human needs and desires are made meaningful is to mediate this
difference*/to represent inequality as equality, exploitation as free enterprise.
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The ‘‘real individuality’’ of our particular living personalities that accompanies

labor power does so through the normative, symbolic meanings that are a sort of
second skin. Seemingly not necessary to one’s ability to assemble wiring, sew sleeves,
wait tables, or vacuum floors, this second skin is an extra. It is supplemental in the
sense that it is both necessary and a bonus, an aspect of a worker’s subjectivity that
can be managed and disciplined in ways that will potentially increase the value of the
labor power the capitalist purchases. Sutured to the particularities of our human
capacities, it is also at risk of being out of our hands.
The modern state’s myth of possessive individualism applies to all citizens but, in
fact, has a limited address. Some individuals do not have full possession of
themselves. Free market exchange relies on and takes advantage of the political
and cultural dispossession of certain subjects. The dispossessed are the subjects
of surplus labor, or what we might more accurately call feminized labor. When the
marks of femininity accompany the exchange of labor power for a wage, they offer a
tacit promise to the buyer that the supervision of the physical life and living
personality of the bearer of this labor power is out of her hands. And so they may be
managed through regimes of surveillance and disciplinary technologies. To be
subjected as feminine is to forfeit full claim to one’s capacities, to let them loose
from one’s possession. This loose second skin lowers the cost of the labor power it
accompanies and so enhances the value added to whatever commodities it produces.
There are many practices that capital makes use of to maintain this second skin
of labor power, ensuring that it is continually available to lower the value of
labor power. Sexual harassment is one. Sexual harassment is allowed precisely
because of the assumption that the feminized subject is to some degree out of her
own hands, there for the taking, her body available to be surveyed, taken up, put
down.
The second skin of femininity is inscribed with many signs and enshrouds all manner
of ‘‘women.’’ It is embedded in the discourses of sexuality that attach normative
value to the human capacities for sensation and pleasure. It traverses justifications
for the value of labor outside the workplace as well*/in the street, the bedroom, and
the kitchen. It can also be the glue that binds corporate and state impunity.
Historical materialism recognizes that the economic relations basic to capitalism
rely upon culture, including ideologies of gender, and ‘‘economies of desire’’ are
cultural forms that mediate and are incorporated into the production of value. One of
 MARXIAN SEXUAL POLITICS 391

the challenges in building a social movement against capitalism now is to intervene in

these mediations where exchange value and culture value, labor and desire meet, and
to forge through that intervention alternative social relations. In many areas of Latin
America today, the best-organized opposition to neoliberal capitalism originates in the
rural areas, spreads to the cities, and is led by landless peasants. On Mexico’s northern
border this opposition is taking shape in the activities of assembly plant workers who
are meeting together, and at times with peasants from the south, to build national and
international alliances. Out of the immense challenges of massive unmet need, the
resources of traditional knowledge, and the legacy of radical intellectual thought,
they are developing what might be called a social ontology, forms of political
education that hold rich lessons for critical teachers from el otro lado .
If the corporate sectors in the United States have realized that there is more value
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in incorporating queers who will work for them, since that at least creates the
possibility of an alternative market, capital’s trajectory in Mexico is not quite that or
not yet. Many treatments of neoliberalism’s impact make use of a North-South
paradigm to measure the emergence of ‘‘new’’ families and life styles in the service
economy of the North against a feminized industrial workforce in the South, freed
from the constraints of domestic production yet still bound by traditional hetero-
gendered norms at work and by the reproductive labor of daughter, wife, and mother
at home. However, changes in the gendered division of labor in the maquila workforce
invite us to rethink the concept of the ‘‘feminization of labor.’’ From its inception in
1965 through the next decade, the overwhelming majority of unskilled production
workers in the maquiladoras were women; few women were employed as technical,
administrative, or managerial staff. Based on publicity from the Asian export
processing zones, managers coming to Mexico took for granted that they would be
hiring women as the unskilled labor force. Women were valued because they were
construed as more docile toward authority. They were also seen as a temporary
workforce whose primary interests lay in family and home. The ‘‘femininity’’ that was
recruited had to do with a set of meanings that were dislodging femininity from being
restricted to the home and traditional family production and reconstituting it as a set
of characteristics that could ostensibly apply to men or women: dexterous, docile,
tolerant, and cheap (Salzinger 2003, 37).
While women comprised the majority of the total labor force in the maquilas, the
proportion of women workers has varied between plants in different industrial sectors
(Pearson 1995, 140). In the first decades of the maquiladora program, women were
concentrated in electronics, clothing, shrimp and other food processing, toymaking,
and coupon sorting, and they comprised up to 90 percent of the total labor force
(139). Men were the preferred labor force in firms making transportation equipment,
leather and synthetic goods, wood and metal furniture, and photographic, sporting,
and paper goods (140). In those sectors where labor costs were the major portion of
manufacturing costs, women workers predominated. Clothing and electronics are still
the largest industries, and they are the sectors where women’s employment is
concentrated. Now, however, the proportions are changing. The majority of
maquiladora workers are still women, but almost half are men. The gradual
changeover began in the eighties when the demand for maquila workers in cities
like Juárez increased, but the market of women willing to work in the factories was
 392 HENNESSY

saturated. Ultimately, the demand for cheap labor made adjustments in the
demographics of the workforce inevitable (Salzinger 2003, 43). By the nineties,
women workers had already proved to be less ‘‘docile,’’ as their involvement in
strikes and work stoppages indicates, but, at the same time, the standard profile of
the maquiladora worker had been set. Men were being hired, but the profile of
‘‘feminine’’ expectations continued to define the preferred worker. This ‘‘feminine’’
ideal was in part an imaginary phantom and in part a standard of value by which
cheap, disposable labor could be extracted. Increasingly, the feminine worker was
coming to be defined as the unskilled, fast-turnover, part-time worker*/and this
disposable sector of the workforce was where women were positioned, while more
skilled positions, promotions, and job security were being made available to men
(Wright).
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Considering the presence of what we only approximately can name ‘‘homosexual

and lesbian’’ workers in the maquilas underscores several aspects of this profile: the
ways capital accumulates profit by both transgressing and deploying the norms of civil
society; the need for a more dialectical understanding of the erosion and
intensification of heterogender values across North and South; and the role of
sexuality in suturing two registers of value: value added to commodities through
unpaid or surplus labor, and value as symbolic meaning. It is on the last of these that I
will focus the remainder of my remarks.
Yvon, a former organizer in the maquilas in Reynosa, confirms that inside the
factory there is no space for questioning nonheteronorms or making gay identities a
point of organization because ‘‘there aren’t people who would help.’’ He indicates
where surplus value meets symbolic value in the space of production. ‘‘This is a point
about behavior,’’ he says, ‘‘about people who are paying attention to the person; it’s
like the human side is being lost. The questions who are you? how are you? are not so
important as what you produce with your hands.’’ Yvon recognizes that in the end,
capital cares more about the accumulation of profit than about the particularities of
human individuals, about gay or straight, man or woman. And yet, the accumulation
process takes place within certain limits which include the cultural dimension of
social life that the worker brings with her, including the organization of affective
needs into sexuality.
In the maquiladora communities of the north, in a workforce dominated by women
over the past four decades, workers have brought their particular second skins of
sexual identity to work with them and same-sex relationships have of course
occurred. Any generalizations about sexual identities in the maquilas, however,
have to acknowledge that assumptions and practices about non-normative sexuality
are unevenly shared, sometimes don’t travel very far, and are inflected by varied
local historical influences. Practices and concepts that may be commonplace in
northern border towns do not necessarily hold in Mexico City or the Yucatán, and
cultural variations between mestizo and indigenous groups are considerable. The
reification of sexuality that was one of the conditions for the emergence of homo-
and heterosexual identities around the turn of the twentieth century in Europe and
the United States also took hold in urban centers in Mexico in the early twentieth
century as the state defined previously untaxonomized sectors and behaviors to
regulate the national body, but they were reified along a different trajectory than the
 MARXIAN SEXUAL POLITICS 393

ones many North American and European theorists have charted.3 The bonds between
sexuality and gender remained more integrated through the rules of traditional
machista patriarchal culture, and sexual identity has not been as successfully
displaced from family alliances along the same paths of scientific and clinical
discourse as in the North.4
One former worker, Mariana, says she saw changes in the maquila workforce over
the several generations she worked there. By the nineties, she says,

the culture inside the maquilas was changing. There was the biggest invasion
of maquilas to the border cities during this decade and they really needed
workers. It was then that the informal filters that kept gay men out started
to relax. Of course there was no official policy against hiring gays, but
informally this was the practice. They would even write it in the comments
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on the application. But by the nineties the maquilas needed all the workers
they could get, and gay men started appearing as operators on the line along
with the women. By then the lesbians were more open, too.

Yvon theorizes that gay men in the nineties became what we might think of as the
‘‘new women’’ of the maquilas. Gay men who are ‘‘out’’ have typically few options
for work but, during these years, they entered the maquilas and were welcomed. As
he puts it, ‘‘The more dependent you are on the work the more you are going to be
here, and gay men cannot risk having work outside. So they inverted the role and
exchanged women for gays.’’
Gay men have not replaced women as the preferred workforce in the maquilas, but
Yvon’s insight about their feminized place bears further reflection. Yvon also reports
that gay men are being recruited into management positions. When I ask him how he
understands this, he responds that of course it is a matter of class. ‘‘There is a
saying,’’ he says, ‘‘that goes, ‘How they see you they treat you.’ This has a lot to do
with class. But it also has to do with the question of identity. One thing can’t be

3. In Mexico, naming the male homosexual meant pointing to the passive partner as the visible
homosexual and it was this subject who was expelled from the national fabric as ‘‘waste.’’ The
lesbian, already effaced as woman under the law, slipped through the cracks of official
prescriptions, though she was named as marimacha or mamflor when women transgressed
prescribed codes for gender or desire. ‘‘Homosexuality‘‘ in Mexican culture is a term that does
not fit all practitioners of same-sex behaviors and desires; it hovers between a performative
practice and an identity, and men move around in this space more than most labels suggest. As
Max Mejia put it, ‘‘machista fights against homosexuality in theory but accepts it in practice;
rejects it in public but invokes it in private; despises it in daylight and procures it under cover of
darkness’’ (2000, 49). ‘‘Outing’’ and ‘‘the closet’’ function differently in Mexico and Latin
America generally as same-sex identity circulates through public and private discourses in which
silence, secrecy, and masking enfold normative sexuality in an ambiente still affected by
patriarchal family ideologies and the value placed on being fathers of children*/along with the
virtual absence of any critical public discourse about gender and sexual identity.
4. In Mexico, homosexual relations between adults over eighteen are not criminalized, but
strictly legal rights are of no avail to individual homosexuals in the hands of notoriously corrupt
politicians. Police have sweeping powers to arrest anyone who behaves using language that
contravenes public decency, and the federal labor code (Article 47 #8) still permits employers to
dismiss workers for having committed ‘‘immoral acts’’ on the work site regardless of their
competence and fulfillment of their work obligations (Lumsden 1991, 53, 75).
 394 HENNESSY

separated from the other. It would be,’’ he sums up, ‘‘like eating cheese without
cheese. Without the flavor of cheese it tastes like milk.’’ Yvon’s oblique comment
points to the intersection of symbolic and surplus value where sexual identity as
cultural value is sutured to the engendering of surplus value in the relations of
production. Being homosexual or lesbian as an operator in the maquilas is to be
feminized in a qualitatively different way than being gay or lesbian in management.
This place where surplus value meets sexual value can also be a potential wedge in
class relations, initiated by those workers who disclose, in what has been offered as
the way things are, an alternative story of how they can be. Organizers in the
maquilas who implicitly question heteronorms, who are gay- or lesbian-identified
(and they are many) and who explicitly question the workers’ exploitation, face
enormous challenges. Mariana reports, ‘‘The company would tell the workers, ‘The
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only reason she is organizing is to have all of you women as her lovers.’’’ Many women
who become organizers so disrupt normative heterosexual machista culture that they
are threatened by their husbands and accused of being lesbians, yet they face few
options outside the economic support a heteronormative identity offers. Yvon says
that after some of the other organizers began making comments openly about his gay
sexuality, his credibility was so undermined that he had to leave the group he was
working with. ‘‘It’s like the waves of the sea,’’ he says, extending his arms. ‘‘One has
to walk like this. If you go against the current you are going to drown. But there is
always the chance that a wave is going to break and you might catch it.’’
Organizing in the maquilas founders on homophobia compounded by the pre-
occupation with survival, the insecurity of work, and paralysis bred of fear and need.
Nonetheless, some are making waves, working the places where sexuality and surplus
value meet. They bear on their second skins the tattoos of capital’s monstrous dark
side, putting into circulation the threat of an organized social majority. Organizers*/
which is to say, teachers of a certain sort*/are agents of social ontology. Moving two
steps forward, one step back, they activate critical consciousness, retrieve good
sense from common sense, and mobilize actors who know themselves to be a
monstrous collective. In el norte when the next wave crests, this critical conscious-
ness can buoy us up. If we refuse to be mystified by identities and rights and insist on
the basic value of meeting human needs, we just might catch it.

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