ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews 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. It highlights the pervasive ideological mandate to disconnect sexuality from capitalist production. Marxists themselves have been among the prime promoters of the fragmented thinking that has separated sexuality from social production. Queer theory presented itself in the late eighties as an emphatically post-Marxist critique of sexual identity politics. Cultural materialist queer theory at times acknowledges the work of materialist feminists. Capitalism as a mode of producing the means for survival is tellingly absent in post-Marxist cultural materialist analysis. The history of gay, lesbian, and queer identities is entangled in changes to the economies of patriarchal households that have accompanied the growth of capitalist consumption and an expanding middle class.
