ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a less explicit sexual current within matters economic. It argues that the structure of the commodity displays striking homologies with that of the two main sexual types of modern western culture, heterosexual and homosexual, and that the gift bears all the hallmarks of queer materiality. As Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry argue, the opposition between gifts and commodities that anthropology helped to construct derives in part, from the fact that the ideology of the gift has been constructed in anti-thesis to market exchange. Jean Baudrillard argues that the structure of the logic of commodity is at the heart of structure of the sign in capitalism and that they are supportive of each other. Having identified the importance of sign-value, Baudrillard goes on to scrutinise the structure of the sign itself. Indeed in the Mirror of Production Baudrillard points to productionist ideas that have colonised consciousness in Lacanian-style mirror in which one imagine as a productive imago.
