ABSTRACT
Advancing a Marxist theorization of the contradictory relationship of sexuality and capitalist political economy, this chapter presents a story of China’s reality TV show Super Girl which gave birth to a unique lesbian heyday in Shanghai during the early millennium.1 This Marxist approach, as indicated in this introduction, moves beyond an Althusserian notion of containment by political economy – which frames the marketization of culture as an ideological structure of control in line with the prevailing hegemony – and reveals how a turn to intersectionality within sexuality studies is infused with this Althusserian legacy by perceiving intersecting cultural and economic realms as intersecting, ideological structures of control. A leading strand of Marxist geography observes that ‘[p]recisely because capitalism is expansionary and imperialistic, cultural life in more and more areas gets brought within the grasp of the cash nexus and the logic of capital circulation’ (Harvey, 1989, p. 344). Thus, culture becomes locked into an operation of exploitation because ‘it sells’ (Mitchell, 1995, p. 110). In a poststructuralist queer critique of ‘a liberal framework’ of work within geographies of sexuality (which depicts homosexual space as opposing and transgressing heterosexual space) an intersectional analysis that is attentive to ‘constellations of power across the heterosexual/homosexual divide’ is proposed (Oswin, 2008, pp. 89-90). However, in such an intersectional approach, there is slippage into another dichotomy – for example, between the ‘colonizing impulses’ of a ‘queer white patriarch’ of the capitalist gay market and the ‘anti-colonial efforts’ of queer ethnic minorities (Nast, 2002, p. 899). The danger, I caution, of an Althusserian current in Marxist geography and poststructuralist
theory lies in bypassing the potential of human agency to consume and construct culture produced by the capitalist market for themselves. The Marxism applied in this chapter challenges the simplistic premise that oppositional culture is limited by its expression in the commodified form, and attunes to both universal and specific material realities and capitalist closures and openings.
