ABSTRACT
One of the most remarkable features of the history of sexual identities is the lack of any consensus over how to understand precisely what sexuality is. What is the materiality of sexuality? Is it libidinal desire? Bodies and pleasures? Discourses? Culture-ideology? How do presuppositions about the materiality of sex affect how we understand sexual identity and how we craft a sexual politics? As I mentioned in the previous chapter, histories of sexuality invariably do not allow us to know sexuality as part of a social system in which humans produce what they require to meet their needs. And yet there is now a fairly substantial archive of scholarship on sexuality and sexual identity that sees them as material. I want to review some of this work in order to consider several currently reigning ways of thinking about the material of sex in relation to other ways of understanding it that have been marginalized or suppressed. This review will also highlight the pervasive ideological mandate to disconnect sexuality from capitalist production.
