ABSTRACT
Cultural studies has been seen as one of the "hot spots" of academic progressivism, a discursive and institutional magnet for leftists and queers of all sorts — feminists, Marxists, theorists of popular culture, race, and sexuality. Cultural materialists maintain that culture may be historical and political, but it is not shaped by capitalism's division of labour in any determinate way. Sexual identity has become one of the prime channels of cultural studies' "headlong rush toward the pleasures and differences of postmodernism". In the mid-eighties, the post-Marxists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe published the book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, which has had a wide influence on culture theorists, including sexuality scholars. The concept of overdetermination is also central to Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff's neo-Marxist critique of economic determinism. In some respects, the understanding of overdetermination shares some features with Raymond Williams's theories. For Marx, the commodity is the linchpin of capitalist production.
