KEVIN FLOYD (2009). THE REIFICATION OF DESIRE: TOWARD A QUEER MARXISM. MINNEAPOLIS AND LONDON: UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS. ISBN: 978-0-8166-4395-0 (HB); 978-0-8166-4396-7 (PB).

During the last decade, queer studies has become increasingly engaged with the critical analysis of class and capital. As gay men and lesbians have achieved new levels of media visibility and legislative equality in the West, scholars and activists have traced the emergence of a new homonormativity, a rerouting of the queer agenda into a politics based on consumption and privatised rights that willingly colludes with the wider dynamics of contemporary neoliberalism. Fifteen years ago, these critical developments could hardly have been foreseen within the queer academy. The initial wave of queer texts that broke across the shores of Anglophone universities in the mid-1990s – dominated by the foundational work of Judith Butler and Eve Kosofky Sedgwick, and by the take up of Foucault’s The History of Sexuality – set Marxists and queer theorists defiantly at odds. The problem with queer theory, Marxists proclaimed, was that its deconstructive impulse seemed constitutionally unable to take account of the basic forces of material production. The problem with Marxist theory, queer advocates countered, lay in its wilful myopia around issues of sexual identity, something mistakenly treated as epiphenomenal and irrelevant to the project of historical materialism. Such heterosexist presumptions, the argument ran, could only be critiqued from a position exterior to Marxism itself.