Sexual Injustice

Sexuality—broadly defined to include sexual practices, behaviors, desires, and identities—remains a key site of political struggle around the world. While mainstream (and some critical) International Political Economy (IPE) has tended to overlook the importance of sexuality, there is a rich tradition of feminist and queer scholarship that locates sexual subjectivities, labor, and oppression firmly within the boundaries of the global capitalist economy. This chapter explores some of the material bases of sexual injustice and explains what a queer approach to IPE tells us about the relationship between capitalism and sexuality. It examines the relationship between sexuality and IPE across three primary dimensions: hetero- (and homo-)normativity and the nation-state; hetero- (and homo-)normativity and global governance; and the everyday political economies of queer lives and resistance. The chapter argues that it is impossible to understand the social relations of global (re)production and the types of exploitation and oppression they entail without paying attention to the social construction of sexuality (and therefore to the lives and experiences of LGBTQ+ people). Moreover, since capitalism constitutes, and is constituted by, sexuality across multiple scales and modes of governance, sexual injustices are fundamentally globalized in character. This means that scholars of IPE must not only interrogate the sexual politics of neoliberalism and how this plays out in different parts of the world, but also examine how the legacies of slavery and colonialism continue to shape global terrains of sexual struggle and injustice.