Skip to main content

Sexual politics, 1917/2017: proletarian morality – and beyond?

4 November 2017
Lecturer(s)
Peter Drucker
Lecture number
2
Date
04-11-2017
Image
maral peter paul

The first decade of the October Revolution yielded a wealth of thinking and activism on sexual politics, notably Kollontai's insights into what we today call polyamory and gendered desire. Yet Bolshevik sexual politics suffered from a failure to support self-organization of the sexually oppressed, a more-than-semantic rejection of feminism, and uncritical reliance on science. Today, despite a recent renewal interest in Marxism in queer studies, the weakness of working-class organizations fuels ambivalence about Marxism's political and theoretical implications. A century after 1917, we need to ask: can a working-class-identified sexual politics still stake a plausible claim to hegemony in movements for sexual liberation, or hope to carve out an autonomous working-class sex-radical milieu on a mass scale?

Peter Drucker is the author of 'Warped: Gay Normality and Queer Anti-Capitalism' (Haymarket, 2015) and editor of 'Different Rainbows' (2000), a pioneering volume on LGBT organizing in the the Global South . He has published widely on socialist theory and history and movements for sexual liberation and is a fellow of the IIRE.

Audio(s)
Audio lecture in English
Download audio
Category
© IIRE 2024

The IIRE is an international foundation,
recognised in Belgium as an
international scientific association
by Royal decree of 11th June 1981.

Address
IIRE
Lombokstraat 40
1094 AL AMSTERDAM
The Netherlands

Contact
T: (+31) (0)206717263
Email: iire @ iire.org