ABSTRACT
The idea that sexuality, politics, and economics are connected is not new. In the early nineteenth century the writings and practices of Utopian socialists, such as Owen and Fourier, articulated economic justice and sexual liberation in their revolutionary principles and strategies. A few decades later Engels (1884) explored the subtle articulation between sex and economics in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, which socialist feminists like Emma Goldman and Alexandra Kollontai would later build on. At the same time the groundbreaking works of Darwin and Sigmund Freud laid the foundations for the development of a science of ‘sex’, establishing the notion of a sex drive and deeply influenced further theorizing and research. These developments also coincided with the ‘invention’ of homosexuality (see Chapter 4). A few decades later, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Central European intellectuals and activists created the SexPol Association, interweaving Marxism and psychoanalysis to advance radical propositions about sexuality, economics, and power.1 In the late 1940s, Simone de Beauvoir’s critique of ‘anatomy as destiny’ (1953 [orig. 1949]) opened the path for conceptualizing ‘man’ and ‘woman’ not as separate biological entities but as contingent, cultural constructs. By the 1960s, the ideas emerging from SexPol reached the counterculture through the writings of Wilhelm Reich (1971, 1973b) and Herbert Marcuse (1966). Young feminists were now reading de Beauvoir and revisiting Marx, Engels, and Freud to more fully understand male control over women’s sexuality, the political dimensions of the private sphere, and the meaning of bodies as potential foundations of political entitlements (Firestone 1970, Greer 1970, Millet 1979, Mitchell 1974, Rubin 1975).
