Youth School 2004

Outline - Marxism and sexual identity

Paul Mepschen — August 24 - evening

Essentialism ß-à social construction

Essentialism

sociobiology

natural

eternal

some Freudian explanations (development of sexual deviancy in early youth)

Social construction

feminist Marxism

Foucault

Queer theory/postmodernism

Marxist ideas about sexual identity and oppression

No unilinear history --- Peter Drucker: combined and uneven social construction (Different Rainbows, 2000).

Industrial capitalism, the pre-industrial family, wage-labour, the development of the homosexual subject / a homosexual identity.

Bourgeois ideology – conservative/Victorian. Foucault’s ideas (policing, medical research, the homosexual as a social category).

Reasons for bourgeois anxiety – crisis of the family as a characteristic of capitalism – contradiction. Role of the family in the reproduction of labour.

Capitalism develops

Before the war.

After the war – long wave of capitalist expansion. Youth culture, gendered and sexual revolt. Sexual revolution. Development of the modern gay and lesbian movement.

Concluding

Why and how we fight for sexual liberation.