Nic Cottone

In Eros and Alienation, Alan Sears provides a historically grounded account of sexuality under capitalism, showing how erotic life is shaped by the subordination of our practical activity to the growth imperatives of capital. By bringing Marxism to bear on theories of sexuality, Sears shows how sexual liberation is inextricably linked to the struggle against capitalist production. Sears traces how the resulting alienation conditions the erotic, ultimately demystifying common sense assumptions about sexuality. He exposes how predominant sexualities are mediated by market relations and sustained through state hegemony, social organization and normativities that are conducive to the reproduction of the necessary conditions for capital. Alongside advancing theories of sexuality – particularly through a Marxist lens – Sears also offers a distinct contribution to social reproduction theory (SRT). He develops the theoretical resources necessary for pushing SRT beyond the (hetero)normative frame that it typically assumes in its analysis.... (see more)

What shapes our understanding of sexual violence such that certain cases, and not others, are recognizable as rape? What do prevailing beliefs about sexual violence imply about our social world and practices? Drawing on socio-political and feminist philosophy, this dissertation argues that the selective recognition of sexual violence stems from an ideological form of social consciousness, for which it develops an account. It further suggests that properly apprehending this form requires situating it within historically specific social relations, which it theorizes through the framework of social reproduction theory. This approach underscores the necessity of theorizing sexual violence in relation to its material and historical conditions. Without such analysis, hegemonic conceptions of rape—including those feminist anti-rape activists have sought to displace—risk being reproduced in ways that reify the very social relations from which they emerge.

Will Daddario’s article, “What Acceptance Is,” brilliantly moves through aspects of grief, despair, and Acceptance; it allows grievers to meaningfully hold together aspects of loss that are otherwise fragmented and dispersed in our subjective experience of it. Daddario traces contradictions that permeate our experiences not only of grief and loss, but also of how we live in light of them. This includes the paradoxical relationships between accepting and giving, cure and poison, being open and closed off, centered and decentered, and, as I will later add, of willingness and willfulness. His confrontation with acceptance resists the typical rectilinear picture (e.g., the “stages of grief”), ultimately providing us with a picture of the process out of despair that manages to retain its life and dynamic movement despite the fixity of language.... (see more)

In Women and Work: Feminism, Labour, and Social Reproduction, Susan Ferguson carefully maps a history of feminist thinking about work and makes a compelling case for the present need to grapple with the way compulsory work under capitalism affects women. She develops an integrated theory capable of addressing and explaining the ways in which anti-racist feminism is necessarily anti-capitalist, rather than holding patriarchy, racism and capitalism as separate systems. Ferguson draws upon multiple trajectories of feminist thought to situate and develop a contemporary iteration of social reproduction theory (SRT) rooted in anti-oppressive politics. Carefully weaving together insights from anti-racist feminism and Marxism, Ferguson pushes SRT into new directions by complicating the traditional idea that unpaid housework is the shared condition of women under capitalism; rather, Ferguson elucidates how social reproductive work consists in activities involved in reproducing life, whether those activities are service work or child-rearing, paid or unpaid, or occurring within institutions, the workplace or within the home. In the first section of the book, Ferguson traces a historical lineage of feminist thinking about work consisting in three trajectories: socialist feminism – including what she calls critical equality feminism – and liberal, rational-humanist forms of feminism. The second half of the book analyzes social reproduction theory.... (see more)

The gray area of sexual violations generally refers to ambiguous sexual experiences that are not readily distinguishable from rape or sex. Such experiences are describable as ambiguous or complex in a way that, to some, seems to defy existent categories of sexual experiences. This leads some feminists to approach the gray area as a puzzle that must be resolved either by understanding it as a new category, or by upholding existing rape categorization. Rather than dispelling the gray-area ambiguity by resolving conceptual puzzles, I assign the gray-area ambiguity a positive analytical role by attending to it in a historical and dialectical light. By tracing histories of feminist antirape discourse, I elaborate a way of understanding the “gray area” of sexual violations, articulating it as a historical condition affecting the interpretive possibilities of our sexual experiences. Such an approach underscores the potential of the gray area to inaugurate feminist critique in virtue of its status as a historically specific yet ambiguous horizon where our experiences can contradictorily seem not-like rape, but not-like sex.