The Reification of Desire : Toward a Queer Marxism

K. Floyd

Scholarship in queer studies has increasingly acknowledged global capitalism as a significant determination of heteronormativity, and several recent works have explicitly engaged the Marxist tradition. Kevin Floyd's The Reification of Desire: Towards a Queer Marxism is a rich, rigorous, and useful book that builds on and substantially augments this work, explicating the interactions of sexuality and capitalism in the United States over the last century and developing the epistemological implications for queer theory and Marxism of bringing these knowledge projects together. Floyd emphasizes that capitalism is not only a system of commodity production but a system of knowledge production. As Georg Lukács provides one of the most elaborate and devastating critiques of the epistemological implications of capitalism through the concepts of reification and totality, it is first and foremost these concepts that Floyd seeks to rework. He sheds the totalizing connotations of totality by focusing on Lukács's articulation of an "aspiration" to totality as a critical method. Floyd argues that this aspiration is shared by Marxism and queer theory (in its "universalizing" moments): "The effort to think totality is itself a critique of ontological and epistemological particularization . . . [of] capital's systemic, privatizing fragmentation of social production especially and of social life more generally".