A Classic of Queer Marxism

Alan Sears

The Regulation of Desire:
Queer Histories, Queer Struggles
By Gary Kinsman
Revised third edition, Montreal: Concordia University Press, 2023. Distributed in the USA by University of Chicago Press, 480 pages, $49.95 paperback.

THE PUBLICATION OF the third edition of Gary Kinsman’s The Regulation of Desire is an opportunity to mark the contribution of this path-breaking classic of queer Marxism. It is characteristics of Gary Kinsman’s work that the two subsequent editions (1996 and 2023) each involved substantial and creative reworking to integrate new thinking and challenges emerging from activist movements.

I would consider my relationship to The Regulation of Desire to be rather personal. It was a crucial resource for me as I was trying to work out the relationship in my own life between socialist organizing and queer mobilization.

This work has been a resource for me since I picked up the first edition, shortly after it appeared in 1987. I found it to be the most systematic Marxist account of what we might now call queerness, tracing the historical development of sexualities and gender identities under capitalism.

The first edition combined theoretical richness, drawing on a wide range of perspectives to develop a nuanced analysis, with a deep grounding in activist knowledge and queer movement experience.

Gary’s writing draws on his long history of committed and thoughtful activism. He has played a crucial role in queer mobilizations challenging not only the power structure but also the mainstream leadership of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer (LGBTQ+) movements.

I first became aware of Gary’s activism around the militant response to the 1981 Bathhouse Raids in Toronto, following the roundup and mass arrest of 286 patrons of gay bathhouses. The police taunted the men they arrested with homophobic slurs.

Gary played a role in mobilizing the militant response in which people blocked streets, confronted the cops and chanted “Fuck you 52!” outside the headquarters of Police Division 52 that conducted the raid. This response launched a new phase of activist radical militancy in the queer community.

Theory and Activism

Gary was then involved in Gays and Lesbians Against the Right Everywhere (GLARE), launched after the Bathhouse raids to fight back against right-wing attacks.

At the time, the right was building bigotry against LGBTQ+ people, just as today the right is deploying anti-trans bigotry to fan the flames of their broader hate agenda. GLARE mobilized resistance to this right-wing agenda, ranging from education through to activist mobilizations to challenge hate events.

Gary became part of the AIDS activist response to the devastating epidemic, mobilizing against state inaction and official bigoty. One of the key features of AIDS activism was the way it honored the knowledge and community of people living with AIDS and queer people more generally.

A sophisticated theorist who puts activist knowledge at the core of his analysis, Gary has recently contributed to the work of No Pride in Policing, building solidarity with anti-racist and anti-colonial abolitionist movements to challenge the police presence at Pride events. He has also been prominent advocate of queer solidarity with Palestine. This activist mobilizing guides the most recent edition of The Regulation of Desire.

Gary’s writing also reflects his committed anti-capitalism, developed in part through his complex relationship with revolutionary socialist organizations. In the 1970s, he was a member of the Young Socialists and the Revolutionary Marxist Group that eventually merged into the Revolutionary Workers League. He and other queer activists ultimately left the organization, finding it to be an inhospitable environment for the queer anti-capitalist perspectives they were developing.

Gary and I were both members of the New Socialist Group in the 1990s, though he left with others who disagreed with the direction of the group. He has continued to work to combine revolutionary anti-capitalism with queer militancy.

Changes in Queer Lives

Gary’s ongoing activism is the basis for his reworking of the two subsequent editions of The Regulation of Desire around key political issues of the moment.

The 36 years between the first and third editions saw enormous changes in queer lives and politics in much of the Global North and some places in the Global South, including a much more prominent representation of (some) queer lives in movies, songs, television shows and other forms of popular cultural expression, formal legal inclusion in human rights codes, and the recognition of same-gender relationships including the right to adopt children.

It may be difficult to believe, but in 1987 there were few prominent out queer performers and almost no queer characters in mainstream popular culture. People could be fired simply for being gay. Life partners could be excluded from participation in medical support or decision-making.

There have been important changes since then, but the latest edition of The Regulation of Desire is not a simple victory celebration. Rather the book carefully unpacks these changes, examining the ways new forms of queer inclusion have gone along with the emergence of new barriers and forms of exclusion along lines of gender, racialization, Indigeneity, migration status, poverty, and categorization as disabled.

In this review I will comment on what I see as crucial contributions of the book over time, and the specific rethinking that went into the writing of this new edition. I am going to discuss Kinsman’s overall method of analysis, which I consider to be an important model for queer marxism.

I will also focus on the three most important innovations in the third edition: (1) the discussion of the emergence of the neoliberal queer and queer life in the context of neoliberal capitalism, (2) the examination of the impact of settler colonialism and systemic racism on queer lives and politics and (3) the focus on trans lives and the centrality of trans activism to queer liberation.

A Focus on Struggle

One of the great strengths of this work is the focus on struggle, working from the key issues of the day in queer movements. Queer struggles, as all other movements, are dynamic — they must respond to changes in the world that frame our life experiences and our activism.

At the simplest level, the words we use to describe ourselves and each other have changed since the first edition of The Regulation of Desire, for example through the reclaiming of the previously offensive slur queer as a self-description. Mobilizations lead to victories, defeats, and complex “settlements” that change the ground we are fighting on and our own forms of activism in important ways.

Movement leaders and activists may, for example, be more inclined to try an insider approach to manipulating the levers of power after their rights have been formally recognized.

Since 1987 we’ve seen remarkable changes in the formal recognition of lesbian, gay and trans rights in the Canadian state (where both Gary and I live), and more broadly in much of the Global North and parts of the Global South. Yet this partial inclusion is organized around deep exclusions and persistent violence. These changes disproportionately benefit some (especially cis-gendered white men in higher-class positions) more than others.

The trend towards recognition of queer rights is proving to be far from irreversible, and over the past few years the far right has been successfully targeting trans rights in the United States, Canada, Britain and elsewhere.

The fault lines within queer politics, between those who have benefitted from inclusion as insiders in the dominant power relations and those facing increasing marginalization and prosecution, are clearly exposed in this context.

The deep revisions in both the second and third editions of The Regulation of Desire represent a recognition of the ways changes in the world cast a new light on queer life and politics. Gary’s commitment to thoroughly rewriting this book in the light of political developments and movement issues is an important model of how to respond to the dynamism of struggles.

His work is a very special combination of deep principle, firm commitments and clear theoretical compass points with a deliberate open-endedness, oriented around learning from struggles and reassessing honestly. At the core of this approach is a recognition of the richness of activist knowledge, the analysis and perspectives emerging from particular experiences of struggle.

Activists learn a great deal about how power works and how to mobilize effectively as they organize to change the world. This knowledge is shared and developed through movement engagement, and Gary Kinsman has been there for conversations, meetings, and demonstrations and other actions.

This book carefully weaves activist knowledge in with a supple and nuanced theoretical reflexivity. It book models a non-reductive, dynamic and integrative historical materialism, marked by careful attention to the active historical processes of formation that have made the world we now inhabit. The practices of sexuality and gender we grow up with in this society are not hard-wired natural features of human life, but the product of struggles around freedom and subordination within the context of capitalist social relations.

This book is particularly attentive to the ways contemporary practices of gender and sexuality have been organized around racialization, colonialism, class formation, gendering and sexualization. Kinsman challenges class reductionist approaches to Marxism, critiquing those “who adopt a narrow ‘class first’ politics and who claim to reject the politics of identity.” (lv)

Class is lived and organized through gender, racialization, settler colonialism and sexuality, and cannot be understood in isolation. This approach to historical materialism makes this book a valuable resource, and I always learn from Gary Kinsman’s work even though I approach queer marxism through a rather more orthodox lens.

I do not agree, for example, with his argument that socialism is “too state identified” to be useful in describing liberation from below. (lv)

Kinsman also uses theory to disturb our taken for granted assumptions about the way the world works. One example is a granular reflection on the ways we use “we” in writing and conversation.

“We” is often used as if it includes everyone, when in reality it often reflects experiences of those who share the same social position with the speaker. “We” is often framed by whiteness, masculinity, heterosexuality and settler status. Kinsman challenges us to work towards the development of a genuine collective, a real ‘we,’ as an organizing project in which people do the work of listening, learning and taking responsibility for the impact of social inequalities: “We is a project that people can come to be involved in and identify with.” (xix)

The Neoliberal Queer

This book makes an important contribution to the extensive body of work examining the impact of the neoliberal restructuring of capitalism since the 1980s on queer lives.

The cultural presence and formal rights of queer people in much of the Global North increased tremendously through the process of neoliberal restructuring. Kinsman traces the emergence of a queer politics aligned with the dominant power relations of neoliberal capitalism.

At the core of this politics is “the growth of a gay, white middle class and a business/professional/managerial class — mostly composed of cis men — that identifies its rights and progress with a non-moral-conservative form of neoliberal capitalism.”(287)

There are many dimensions to neoliberal queer politics, including the commercialization of Pride parades and events, the bureaucratization of AIDS service organizations and the retrenchment of racialized and trans exclusion at all levels.

The right to privacy for some goes along with the lack of access to privacy for others, for example those who are among the unhoused, who face bureaucratic scrutiny as social assistance clients, who undergo deep surveillance as migrants, and/or who are incarcerated.

Access to neoliberal respectability is granted only on condition of demonstrating “responsibility,” for example gaining access to sufficient resources to meet your needs through the sale of your capacity to work and the purchase of goods and services on the market.

Kinsman traces the many dimensions of this emergence of the neoliberal queer, ranging from the specific role of layers of the queer community in the gentrification of urban spaces to the development of a queer version of the normative model of domestic relationships and parenting.

The neoliberal queer perspective extends into the realm of global relations, where the pinkwashing of the Israeli state cast as supposed queer ally in the apparently hostile context of the Middle East is only one example of the identification of imperialist violence with the spread of global gay rights. The neoliberal queer tends to identify with their own nation-state as the protector of their rights on a national and global scale, an attitude is described as homonationalism.

Settler Colonialism and Racial Formation

The homonationalist identity with their own nation state includes the neoliberal queer identification with whiteness. The third edition of The Regulation of Desire includes much more deliberate learning from a broad range of Indigenous, Black and other racialized and anti-colonial activists and writers.

Official queer movements too often pursue cooperation with the police, forgetting the long history of harassment and incarceration queer folks.

Kinsman traces out the crucial role of anti-colonial and anti-racist queer resistance in challenging the political dominance of the neoliberal queer perspective In 2016, for example, Black Lives Matter Toronto mobilized to grind the Pride Parade to a halt to advance an abolitionist perspective.

Anti-racist and anti-colonial queer movements in Toronto have mobilized to counter the celebrations of the Canadian state as a model of lesbian and gay rights by official queer organizations. This celebration obscures the role of settler colonialization and systemic racism at the heart of the project of the Canadian state, informing every aspect of its policies and practices.

The genocidal destruction of Indigenous communities required deliberate attacks on their practices of life-making through the violent imposition of a colonial regime of sexuality and gender identity. As Kinsman described, “Going after gender/sexually diverse Indigenous peoples was a crucial strategy of colonization, and was not only about sex, sexuality, and gender but also very much about land and culture.” (51)

The imposition of settler sexualities and gender relations was fundamental to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and colonization of the land. The settler colonial regime of gender and sexuality was integrally connected to the enforcement of capitalist property relations in regard to land and personhood.

Trans Mobilization

This edition of The Regulation of Desire does important rethinking in relation to the expansion of trans organizing since 1996, when the second edition went was published. This expansion has cast important light on the long history of trans activism as the leading edge of queer liberation, for example in the crucial role of racialized trans people in the 1969 Stonewall uprising that launched the contemporary gay liberation movement.

The emphasis on trans activism and analysis in this edition is particularly important given the intensive spread of anti-trans measures globally. Anti-trans politics have become the leading edge of the far right’s anti-queer agenda.

Kinsman traces out the political fault lines between the neoliberal queer stream in trans organizing, emphasizing human rights and respectability, and the transformative stream pressing for a fuller vision of liberation. He contrasts the two in relation to the question of the prison abolition, which aligns with the politics of the transformative stream: “rather than focusing only on trans people being assigned to the gender-appropriate prisons, this raises questions about why trans and other people are being imprisoned at all.” (352)

Conclusion

This edition of The Regulation of Desire contributes to a period of impressive development in queer marxism, including such works as Peter Ducker’s Warped: Gay Normality and Queer Anti-Capitalism, Rosemary Hennessey’s Fires on the Border and Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O’Rourke’s Trans Gender Marxism.

Kinsman’s pathbreaking book has been carefully rethought and revised to address crucial issues in contemporary queer politics. It models a dynamic queer historical materialism, founded on a deep commitment to learning from movements and integrating anti-racist, anti-colonial and trans perspectives.

The third edition provides crucial tools for making sense of contemporary queer movements, understanding the influence of neoliberal queer perspectives, and seeing the centrality of trans, anti-racist and anti-colonial queer mobilizations to moving beyond the neoliberal queer towards liberation.

January-February 2025, ATC 234