Peter Ramsay reviews a new book that explains the transnational character of queer politics and the national character of gay and women’s rights.
Book Review: Alexander Stoffel, Eros and Empire: The Transnational Struggle for Sexual Freedom in the United States (Stanford University Press, 2025)
(Long read)
The revelation earlier this year that the gender ideologists at Stonewall were funded by the American government agency USAID was both unexpected and, as soon as you heard it, unsurprising. The news emerged when, shortly after taking office, Donald Trump closed USAID down, and the queer campaign group was forced to admit a big cut in its budgets. Celebrating the outing of transgenderism’s most influential British organisation as an arm of the American state, Julie Burchill in Spiked drew attention to the role of British women:
‘the specific part played by ceaseless TERF guerrilla action against the formerly crushing-all-before-it Stonewall is a particular reason to be cheerful. In a world where Britain is a shadow of its former self, a country the younger generations are increasingly reluctant to fight for, at last we have a victory we can be proud of against the might of the American woke empire – and it was TERF Island wot won it.’
Burchill is right that long before Trump adopted the cause, it was Britain’s gender-critical feminists, and the activists of organisations like Transgender Trend, Woman’s Place UK, Women’s Rights Network, For Women Scotland, Let Women Speak and Sex Matters who had spent the previous decade struggling to turn the tide against the decadent and regressive cult: to protect their (frequently autistic and/or lesbian) daughters from medical mutilation; to defend their right to spaces free from predatory males (in prisons, rape crisis centres, sport, public toilets and changing facilities, lesbian dating apps); and to resist the gender-stereotyping of the drag cult. Mystified American liberals and leftists renamed Britain ‘TERF Island’, and the evidence bears them out.
Many of the gender-critical feminists in Britain who have led the struggle against American-funded gender ideology hail politically from the left, and they may have felt uncomfortable with Burchill’s light-hearted patriotism. But they shouldn’t. Burchill’s suggestion that the resistance of Terf Island has in some respects been a national effort against American globalism speaks to the fundamentally transnational nature of gender ideology, on the one hand, and the deep connection between women’s rights and the nation-state, on the other.
These connections are explored in Alexander Stoffel’s new book, Eros and Empire. Stoffel himself is a partisan of what he calls the ‘erotic worldmaking’ (6) of queer and trans radicals, and he is bitterly opposed to gender-critical feminism. His book is an academic contribution mostly devoted to the history of American gay politics and the elaboration of Stoffel’s own ‘Marxist theory of sexuality and desire’. Nevertheless, its chief merit is that Stoffel explains the fundamentally transnational character of the queer tendency, and he contrasts this movement with old-school gay rights activism, demonstrating that the latter is committed to the political form of the nation-state. And Stoffel extends his critique of gay ‘assimilationist nationalism’ (37) to feminists who insist on the sex-based character of women’s rights: they too, he argues, seek an ‘escape into the illusory universality of national identity’ (210).
This analysis is persuasive, and ironically it turns out to be helpful to anyone trying to marginalise the influence of ideas that Stoffel himself supports. While Stoffel’s characterisation of feminists desiring an ‘escape’ into national ‘identity’ is a distortion that only indicates his ignorance of gender-critical feminism, he is correct that the cause of women’s freedom is fundamentally connected to the strength of national politics and that the cause of queer and transgenderism is fundamentally anti-national. What Stoffel gets wrong is also instructive. The key weakness in his argument in favour of queer transnationalism exposes not only the vacuity of the political left generally, but also the shortcomings of the increasingly influential conservative backlash against queer.
The left’s transnationalist backing for queer and gender ideology has forced gender-critical feminists into the arms of the populist and neoconservative right. For years, it was only in the columns of neocon publications like Spiked or the Daily Telegraph that they got a sympathetic hearing. Now that Terf is the new punk, younger people who are drawn to the fight against the genderborg are most likely to be drawn to Trumpian populism or (at the time of writing, at least) the neoconservatism of British Tory leader Kemi Badenoch. The gender argument has been framed by the culture wars: the left-liberal elite vs the people; cultural Marxism vs Western civilisation. But where the left-elitist side is delusional, the right-populist side is evasive, and what Stoffel gets wrong tells us why.
I will start with what he gets right and then move on to his errors.
(A note on terminology: I use the term ‘gender critical’ when referring to gender-critical feminists or to any theory or political viewpoint that recognises the negative impact of the idea of gender; otherwise I use the broader term ‘sex realism’ or ‘sex-realist’ to refer to all those who share with gender-critical feminists the beliefs that the sex binary is a biological fact, that individuals cannot change their sex, and that this fact ought to be a significant consideration in our understanding of gender, social policy and the distribution of legal rights. This wider category includes conservative opponents of queer theory and gender ideology.)
Queer transnationalism v national sex realism
Stoffel reminds us that the history of the gay movement is conventionally thought of as divided between ‘liberationists’ and ‘assimilationists’. The liberationists of the 1970s sought to unite the political struggle of gay men and lesbians with the struggles of other oppressed groups against the state as part of a broader revolution against capitalism and its entire structure of sexual and personal life. The assimilationists by contrast campaigned to end the oppression of homosexuals as a particular minority group within the wider existing order. Stoffel argues persuasively that this distinction in the gay politics of the 1970s maps on to another and equally important distinction between the two tendencies.
The liberationists of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) were oriented to transnational struggles against what leftists of the time called imperialism. They were very supportive of black power (and the Black Panther Party in particular), of the anti-Vietnam war movement and of the Cuban revolution, all causes which challenged racial and post-colonial oppression and the imperial power of the American state. They were moved to solidarity with these causes because they thought of their own politics as revolutionary, although their focus was less on the political overthrow of the state and more on the transformation of the sexual culture of capitalist society. As Stoffel points out, for them ‘sexism’ was the underlying source of the oppression of homosexuals, and their political struggle was aimed at ending the oppression of women by men. They believed that, once this system of oppression was ended, people would be freed from both heterosexuality and homosexuality to live more freely self-determined sex lives. (51) Stoffel then traces a path of transnationalism from the GLF of the 1970s through the black lesbian feminism and the AIDS activism of the 1980s to the queer politics of the 1990s and after.
By contrast, the assimilationist tendency was fundamentally nationalist in its politics, according to Stoffel. Moderates like the American Gay Activists Alliance might not have called themselves nationalists, and were not generally gung-ho patriots like today’s MAGA movement, but their commitment to the nation-state was nevertheless fundamental to their politics. As Stoffel puts it, the assimilationists’ ‘diagnosis of homosexual oppression…conceived of gays and lesbians as American citizens who were denied their rights’, and critically:
‘their strategy to redress this injustice through achieving full recognition and equality under the law, placed lesbian and gay activism within a domestic frame and rendered it structurally dependent up on the prevailing powers of the nation-state.’ (39)
For Stoffel this ‘elevation of the legal field as the primary sphere of social struggle tethered the lesbian and gay movement firmly to the nation-state’ (40). It effectively constructed an ‘ethnic model of homosexuality’ (45) in which gayness was a minority identity seeking equal citizenship rights within the nation and it ‘implied a foreclosure of certain emancipatory horizons’ (39). These emancipatory horizons were to be found in the liberationists’ ‘gay internationalism’. Stoffel characterises this outlook as one that:
‘envisioned homosexuality as a structural position constituted in relation to global systems of oppression and conceptualized gayness as a political stance that was forged through the fight against those systems. This political account of homosexuality eschewed essentialisms, developed a frame for understanding the cause of domination as common to all oppressed people, and installed solidarity with revolutionary movements across the globe at the heart of sexual liberation.’ (45)
According to Stoffel, it is this transnational project of sexual liberation that unifies the GLF activists of the 1970s with the queer activists of today. Their shared task was revolutionary transformation:
‘the concept of erotic worldmaking captures the continuities of US-based struggles for sexual liberation over the past sixty years. These struggles…share the conviction that the pursuit of sexual pleasure, erotic enjoyment, and bodily self-determination are central to the cause of revolutionary transformation on a world scale.’ (9-10)
Stoffel is right about the basic contrast here, and it offers a persuasive account of the opposition today between LGBTQ+ and LGB, between the activists lined up with Stonewall, on the one hand, and those who back Britain’s LGB Alliance, on the other. The latter are concerned with the equal rights of minorities; minorities that are defined by reference to their particular erotic preferences with respect to biological sex. These equal rights are recognised in, and protected by, the laws of nation-states. The former are concerned to challenge the sexual categorisation as such (including categories based on erotic preferences with respect to the different sexes). Today’s queer project is the dissolution of the entire social order that recognises sex-based differences into transgenderism, multigenderism and gender fluidity. As we shall see, this is an intrinsically transnational project because it entails the undermining of the psychosocial processes through which nations were built and maintained, nation-states that have in turn made an equality of rights possible.
His contrast between nationalist assimilation and queer transnationalism also accounts for the opposition between the perspectives of gender-critical feminism (and other sex realists) on the one hand, and queer activism on the other. Since the 1970s, gay assimilationist nationalism has won an almost total victory in the West through legal reforms, and in that same period women’s rights activists have gone a long way to achieving legal equality for women, although a deeper material social equality with men still eludes us as a nation. Again, like many gay assimilationists, gender-critical feminists might be surprised to discover that they are nationalists, but the term describes the essentially national and anti-transnational character of their political positions and strategy.
Queer theory and transactivism wormed their way to influence through the channels characteristic of transnational globalist politics more generally: supranational institutions, (American) state-funded NGOs, bureaucratic EDI processes, and trade union, professional and other activist networks. Their political organisations, such as Stonewall, have adopted a censorious and authoritarian approach familiar from anti-democratic leftist movements of the past, refusing to debate their basic political positions, denouncing anyone who dissents from their policy prescriptions as fascist and genocidal, and recruiting corporate human resources and EDI bureaucracies to the task of harassing and silencing their opponents. By contrast, gender-critical feminists have been able to rely on the persisting democratic character of the nation-state in order to bring majority opinion to bear on the political process. As Helen Joyce puts it, ‘In democracies, policy capture can take campaigners only so far. Once voters openly disapprove of a measure, politicians start to take notice.’ [1]
When gender-critical feminists refused to be silenced by organised intimidation and cancel culture threats, and instead openly campaigned to make elected political actors publicly accountable for their backing of the policies promoted by queer theory, the political effects were marked. This was most striking in Scotland’s regional government where the SNP’s insistence on putting male sex offenders who claimed to be women in women’s prisons exposed just how remote the party was from majority opinion and contributed to their major losses at the 2024 General Election. That experience has chastened both the ruling Labour Party and the Conservative opposition at Westminster, with leading figures in both backing off their parties’ earlier fulsome support for gender ideology and its policy implications. The impact of queer theory on American public life subsequently provided some low-hanging electoral fruit for Trump’s MAGA presidential campaign.
Secondly, it is striking that on Terf Island, the feminist-led resistance to the gender ideology of the queer movement has been very successful in the courts, while trans activism has consistently played fast and loose with the law (for example, pretending that ‘gender identity’ was a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010 when in fact it was the much narrower category of ‘gender reassignment’, and encouraging organisations to continue to misinterpret legal obligations even after the Supreme Court has made it very clear that sex in the Equality Act means biological sex). Notwithstanding the transnationalists’ misrepresentation of the law, their demands that EDI policies ‘go beyond the law’, and their attempts to censor dissent, they have come unstuck legally as a result of, on the one hand, the persistence of the freedom of thought and expression that was established during the formation of the modern British nation in the middle of the twentieth century, and, on the other, the sex-based legal rights achieved towards the end of that era. Both of these elements of Britain’s legal order have so far at least, proved to be durable resources for gender-critical feminists and an obstacle for the transnationalism of the queer activists.
Stoffel’s analysis of the conflict between the queer transnationalism of gender ideology, on the one hand, and the sex-realist nationalism of lesbian and women’s rights campaigners, on the other, is borne out by our recent experience. Stonewall was a vehicle of transnational transgender transformation, and it has come up against the barrier of nationally organised sex realism. There is a crucial lesson here for the gender critical and all sex realists: the future of both women’s equality and gay rights is bound up with the future of the nation.
Nationalism cannot be equated with ethnonationalism: on the contrary, as we have previously argued on TNS, ethnonationalism is the last refuge of the identity politics that characterise transnationalism. Nor can nationalism be equated with imperialism: the nation-state has been the ground on which Terf Island’s gender-critical feminists and sex realists have resisted the global influence of American queer transnationalism. The nation-state is the only form of government that is directly politically accountable to the population, and it is the point at which democratic majorities can make their influence count. With its general laws, the nation-state has provided the forum in which equal rights for women and for minorities such as gay men and lesbians have been achieved. The political and legal inheritance of the nation against transnational forces is a key condition of women’s equality.
The long era of globalisation and transnational government has undermined nation-states and, even if that era is now at an end, it leaves behind disintegrated nations whose elites and professional middle classes still have political investments not only in gender ideology but also in other transnational causes that are a threat to women’s rights, such as promoting Islam or the policy of importing tens of thousands of deracinated young men from distant countries into Western cities. Women’s rights are a national cause, and the partisans of women’s freedom have an interest in the strength of the political nation.
Readers might leave the story here with I hope a valuable insight. But there is a lot more to be said about the depth of the connection between transnationalism and queer identity politics, and between women’s equality and the nation. Not only are women’s rights in need of nation-building, but the nation has an interest in women’s rights, a connection I will return to in another article. Before we get there, however, the interdependence between women’s rights and nation-building can be better grasped by understanding more precisely what Stoffel is wrong about. While he is on the ball in contrasting the fundamentally transnational character of queer to the national character of sex-realism, his political assessment of these two movements is the wrong way round. His error lies in thinking that his queer transnationalism provides a ‘political account of homosexuality’, one that widens ‘emancipatory horizons’ when compared to the fantasies of ‘assimilationist nationalism’. The truth is exactly the opposite.
Understanding Stoffel’s key error on this point helps us to grasp the limits of culture war politics if the nation is to achieve a lasting victory over queer imperialism. To explain this will require some detailed engagement with Stoffel’s own academic ‘Marxist theory of sexuality and desire’ that he elaborates in the book. I will look first at why the transnationalism of queer is not the force for emancipation he thinks it is, and then turn to what his critique of the nation as a vehicle of freedom is missing.
The fantasy politics of queer
There is an obvious flaw in Stoffel’s claim that the pursuit of ‘sexual pleasure’ and ‘erotic enjoyment’ are central ‘to the cause of revolutionary transformation on a world scale’. Stonewall, Britain’s leading NGO promoting LGBTQ+, was funded by the US State Department. And the enthusiasm of the capitalist powers-that-be was not restricted to their state agencies. Pride has been backed by many big corporations from PepsiCo and Walmart, BAE systems to Airbus. Stonewall once listed huge numbers of corporations among its diversity promotion schemes, not to mention all the big law firms, the accountants and the management consultancies. To dismiss the episode as pinkwashing misses the key point: the captains of industry had no problem with LGBTQ+ until what Stoffel rightly identifies as essentially nationalist forces—feminist in Britain, and later MAGA in the US—began to push back. Whatever else we might think about gender ideology or queer power, the idea that it is a revolutionary threat to capitalism is laughable. Queer Marxism is a good name for Stoffel’s thinking, since his Marxism is performative: it is the revolution in drag, an academic identity constructed out of a terminological costume, adorned with occasional quotes from Karl Marx.
The fact of corporate queerness is, however, not only a problem for the would-be revolutionary ‘erotic worldmaker’. It must also be played down by his neoconservative opponents for whom this fact is almost as embarrassing. For neocon culture warriors, the queering of sex and gender is the result of a postmodern trahison des clercs, the betrayal by intellectuals of their duty to seek the truth. On this account, the 1960s New Left carried out its long march through the institutions and the result is that postmodern university professors have spread irrational ideas that infected the professionals they taught. Corporate involvement in backing gender ideology can then be put down to contamination by the DEI/EDI industry. Nevertheless, the tricky thing for the right is that the big corporations were more than happy to play along until the MAGA backlash in the USA began to hit sales, and Trump subsequently came to power the second time, and changed the political climate. Before that they were all in. Why, if queer and trans is a leftist plot, were corporations so happy to sign up; why did they let their human resources and marketing departments run with it? For the right to dismiss the episode as chasing the trends is no more effective than the left dismissing it as pinkwashing: once again, LGBTQ+ just wasn’t bad for business, at least not before essentially national (and sometimes explicitly nationalist) forces began to push back. This is where Stoffel’s theory is again illuminating because if we understand his core error, we can see why the market is queer, and from there get to the heart of the political impasse that is the culture war.
Let’s set out from what Stoffel thinks is wrong with the gender-critical feminists’ nationalism. From Stoffel’s standpoint, the problem with gender-critical feminism is that it ‘idealizes womanhood as the basis of securing rights, recognition, and freedom’. And this fundamentally nationalist commitment to equal rights, he argues, is imbued with a particular type of desire, that he describes as:
‘attachment to a normative gender classification [that] represents a vertical relation of desire, as it invests its object [ie, the nation-state and its law] with fantasies of redress, justice and emancipation’. (210)
This dense sentence needs some unpacking. Stoffel’s argument is that feminists are attached to women as ‘adult human females’ and that this idealised ‘normative classification’ seeks recognition in the nation-state and its laws (sex-based rights). The nation-state and its equal rights constitute an object of a desire for them that Stoffel calls ‘vertical’ because gender critical politics offers women a (desirable) escape from their actual social position in civil society (or, as he puts it, the ‘particularities of racialized, sexual and gender hierarchy’) into a higher ‘universality of the citizen subject’ (with her supposed equality of rights), and the ‘universalised condition of national sovereignty’ (with its promise of self-government). (154) These vertical desires are in turn imbued with ‘fantasy’ because the ‘justice’ and ‘emancipation’ promised by equal citizenship and the universality of national sovereignty are, he claims, ‘illusory’ (154, 156). They are a false promise that will always leave the benighted masses who desire them frustrated, stuck in the exploitation and power relations of civil society.
I will return below to his repudiation of citizenship and national sovereignty as illusory. But first we need to stick with his theory of desire in its own terms. By contrast to these vertical desires, Stoffel presents queer desire as a ‘horizontal’ alternative to the nationally focused fantasies promoted by sex realists. The vertical desires that Stoffel says we should reject can be found in attachment to any object that promises entry into the ‘normative categories’ that form the desirable and officially acceptable conditions of citizenship in the ‘bourgeois’ political order of the nation-state, categories such as ‘whiteness, heteronormativity, Americanness’ (156) or the nuclear family (167). Stoffel notes in passing that the satisfaction of these desires involves a process that psychoanalysts call sublimation, through which base sexual desires are redirected towards objects that enjoy normative approval from larger society. However, the key point for him is that ‘people fail to constantly repeat attachments to normative ideals…giving rise instead to non-normative desires and the pleasures of which they are a source.’ He calls these non-normative pleasures ‘horizontal desires’ in contrast to the sublimated vertical desire, and claims these horizontal desires ‘are cast aside as corrosive and threatening to the reproduction of bourgeois society. They are stigmatized, and devalued (as queer)’. (156)
Stoffel illustrates the argument by giving an account of the postwar era in which the normative categories of citizenship, including a racially coded national identity, and the moral imperative of heterosexuality and family life were indeed officially and repressively prescribed—and not just in America but across the West. Increasing numbers of people chafed under those restrictive categories, failed to find satisfaction in them, ceased to desire them and instead adopted ‘deviant’ identities and political rebellion. This tension came to a head in the late 1960s with the black power movement, radical feminism and the gay revolt (among others). For Stoffel, the Gay Liberation Front of the 1970s, black lesbian feminism and militant AIDS activism in the 1980s, and the more recent queer activism all in their own particular but transnational ways rejected the vertical relations of desire, and instead embraced the ‘horizontal rearticulation of desire’. And it was this queer politics that, by prescribing Eros ‘as a revolutionary horizon’, allowed them each to expose both the real sexual and racial hierarchies in American society, and ‘the illusory universality of national ideals’. (174) This is what Stoffel thinks of as the global revolutionary and emancipatory potential of the ‘pursuit of sexual pleasure, erotic enjoyment, and bodily self-determination’.
At the same time, Stoffel is not blind to what he calls the fundamental ‘ungovernability of desire’ which on his account gives desire its emancipatory potential, but also means that it is always susceptible to ‘subsumption by the bourgeois state’ (174), or some ‘accommodation’ within the capitalist system (183). He returns to this possibility of the accommodation of desire repeatedly. He tries hard to fit the risk of desire’s accommodation by the market system into his framework of (bad, nationalist) vertical desires vs (good, transnational) horizontal desires. But it is here that his story comes unstuck.
He gives an account of the postwar consumer society with its myriad objects of desire for consumption: automobiles, televisions, household goods, fashion, holidays, sport, popular music and so on. He recognises that ‘the cultivation of particular pleasures associated with “leisure” was central to the reproduction of this social order’ (159). But he argues this consumerism subsumed these desires and their satisfaction ‘vertically’ into the institutions of the idealised white suburban 1950s producing ‘a normative nuclear family model of bourgeois domesticity’ with its strongly gendered distinctions (160). More significantly, he explores how this vertical subsumption of desire accounts for the later ‘normalization of homosexual desire in the Global North’ that was the achievement of gay assimilationist nationalism (200-01). He points out that this normalization culminated by the late 1990s in the gay demand for marital status, and he draws attention to the way that the formerly pathologized and outcast queers re-presented themselves as ‘healthy, responsible, deserving parents, citizens, consumers’ (139). This argument works as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough.
Stoffel does not address what came after gay marriage. Not long after gay marriage was recognised by many states came the rise of LGBTQ+ to public prominence. The gay campaigning group Stonewall became a trans campaign group. Pride was converted into a kinkfest. It was time for drag queen story hour in public libraries and primary schools. The trans flag appeared everywhere on corporate logos and police cars. Stoffel’s ‘horizontal’ desires were no longer ‘cast aside as corrosive and threatening to the reproduction of bourgeois society’, and nor were they normalised by assimilating them ‘vertically’ into the nation’s pre-existing heterosexual norms. Instead, they were directly celebrated for what they were, for their queerness; and they were celebrated by the markets’ and the state’s big players. What had begun as the process of normalising the previously queer developed into the queering of the social norm itself.
Since Stoffel does not mention any of this, he does not have to explain it (although he comes tantalisingly close to discussing it at points). The sex realist and the gender critical, by contrast, need to understand how this came about. The origins of queer theory are well known, and others have recounted the rather more obscure history of the active promotion of gender ideology by its adherents. However, the question that has been less discussed is why this theory and these activists were successful in influencing the state and the official culture. What is it about contemporary society that allowed their ideas to have the impact that they have had? As we saw above, Stoffel recognises in passing that his ‘vertical’ desire involves a process that psychoanalysts long ago called sublimation; and, by implication, his unruly ‘horizontal’ desires are those that remain unsublimated. Stoffel doesn’t investigate the idea any further. If he had he would have found that the Freudian idea of sublimation offers an explanation as to why the market is queer and in fact indulgent of his horizontal desires.
In Sigmund Freud’s original theory, the human infant is born ‘polymorphously perverse’ with a capacity to eroticise anything. The norms of socialisation in the patriarchal family then served to repress these infantile polymorphous desires, channelling them into the genitally focused objects of desire found in heterosexuality or homosexuality. But these processes also ‘sublimated’ the immediate polymorphous desires, redirecting our ‘libidinal energy’ into non-sexual objects such as religious devotion, intellectual and artistic pursuits, sporting or political accomplishments, and so on. This mediation of desire by the higher ends of society as a whole, the sacrifice of immediate gratification in order to develop the capacities intellectual, spiritual, patriotic or political, is a process without which modern society and its nation-states could not have arisen. The sublimation of base and infantile sexual desires into higher cultural activities was for Freud one of the driving forces behind the development of human civilisation. However, Freud’s theory of sublimation had arisen from his studies of the bourgeois family in the Edwardian era, and, as psychoanalytical theorists began to notice as long ago as the 1960s, the capitalist world after World War II was radically different.
Stoffel’s account of the postwar era is one-sided. Notwithstanding the vertical enticements of the nuclear family that he describes, postwar consumer capitalism with its cornucopia of commodities, its technological mediation of everyday life and its popular culture, was also offering immediate gratification of desire in place of the delayed and mediated gratification involved in the stern sublimation of the Edwardian patriarchy. This process was marked by a greater degree of sexual freedom and the integration of sexual desire into work and public life more generally. From advertising through fashion to popular music and the cinema, sex sold, and it still sells. From the 1920s onwards, the sexualisation of popular culture has advanced steadily and, since the cultural revolution of the 1960s, that process has accelerated. These tendencies tended both to narrow the possibilities of sublimation and render it unnecessary. The polymorphous desires were not only sublimated vertically into the heterosexual or later homosexual norms of consumer society; they were increasingly incited directly as part of advanced capitalism’s orientation to consumption, its desublimation.
Stoffel himself quotes the cultural critic Mark Fisher who observed that the contemporary “neoliberal” condition” is “constituted not by an inability to get pleasure so much as by an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure” (200). But Stoffel does not really think about the implications. Nor does he cite the source of Fisher’s own thinking, the philosopher Slavoj Zizek and his account of the psychoanalytic theory of desublimation. Writing in the 1990s, Zizek summarised the idea as follows:
‘the agency of social repression no longer acts in the guise of an internalized Law or Prohibition that requires renunciation and self-control: instead it assumes the form of a hypnotic agency that imposes the attitude of “yielding to temptation” – that is to say, its injunction amounts to a command: Enjoy yourself!’ [2]
Through this process of desublimation, of inciting us to yield to immediate desires, the interest of the capitalist market in buying and selling have been inscribed as one of ‘the innermost drives of its citizens’, as Herbert Marcuse put it back in the 1960s. [3]
Desublimation haunts Stoffel’s book because it provides a persuasive account of the instant gratifications to be found in the addictive algorithms of social media, the pornification of popular culture, the rise of BDSM, and the celebration of paraphilias of all kinds. The market is queer, and the long desublimation of our social order that it has effected can explain the contemporary cultural prominence and official endorsement of the very ‘horizontal’ desires that Stoffel naively sees as the instruments of his transnational revolution. It turns out that the postmodern professors and the cultural Marxists were not the cause of the current disintegration, they merely provided the rationalisation (if that’s the word).
In desublimated transnational capitalism there are no higher objective norms to which we should attach our sublimated vertical desires (those are just the illusions of the bourgeois nation-state); there are only the immediate ‘horizontal’ desires of the individual. And this is the background context in which the recent conflict between gender ideology and sex realism has developed. The claim of gender ideology is that to dispute the idea of self-identification, that is to dispute the idea that a person’s gender is solely a question of the way an individual feels about it—which is to say, to dispute the individual’s immediate horizontal desires with respect to their gender or their sex—is to dispute the person’s existence. On the queer account, there really is nothing more to a person than their immediate desires. It is a social theory of a truly radical atomisation; and one without higher collective norms or aspirations, an ideological expression of consumer capitalism’s desublimation. That is one reason why the consequences are so deeply irresponsible. The horizontal desires of the queer revolutionaries demand the renunciation of adult authority or responsibility for the welfare of children. But they are in the final analysis the infantile demands of a purified consumer, for whom there is only what they desire right now.
The queer, gender fluid, desublimated consumer with nothing but immediate desires to be gratified is, as Ashley Frawley puts it, a new ‘ideal liberal subject’ who is more ‘more governable’ and ‘adaptable’, ready-made for ‘a lifelong process across ever-changing jobs, homes, and relationship’, which is to say, for the conditions of the contemporary globalised labour market. No surprise then that the big corporations were happy to wash themselves in pink. And what do you get when you put this corporate support together with the financial backing Stonewall received from the American state during the globalist era? The answer is a transnational movement that gives voice not to a revolution of the world’s oppressed against capitalism—the revolution that Stoffel fantasises about—but to the revolution that has actually been taking place over the past 40 years, the revolt of the transnational market forces against any external social or political order that might restrain them—above all, as Stoffel’s analysis itself suggests, against the nation-state.
For Stoffel’s queer Marxism, the institutions of family, citizenship and nation are all just illusory objects of vertical desires, offering endlessly deferred pleasures that will be frustrated by the reality of capitalist society, and they therefore need to be subverted by the gratification of horizontal desires. But it turns out that there is a global, which is to say, transnational, market on hand that is willing and able to incite these subversive horizontal desires, to supply their needs and support the public campaigns to promote queer ideology. Marxist queer theory, far from offering a new emancipation of human beings from the alienation of capitalist society, only provides a mystifying apology for that society’s accelerating desublimation of its own culture, and the emerging horror of its Brave New World, in which there isn’t anything beyond instant gratification.
And this brings us back to the impasse of culture war. While cultural Marxists pretend to be engaged in world revolution, conservatives take that delusion as good coin, allowing themselves to pretend in turn that the left is the problem, and to overlook the systematically queer tendency within the market system that creates the basis for the gender ideology they rightly resist. Our impasse consists of a situation in which the left identifies the unrestrained market as a fundamental problem, but mistakes actual problems that the market causes for solutions, while the right correctly identifies actual problems, but looks away from the market’s fundamental role in causing them. The analogy with the arguments around mass migration, another great contemporary conflict between transnationalism and the nation is striking. The right correctly identifies mass migration as a problem but blames migrants for it rather than the market system which has caused it; the left treats the disaster of mass migration that the globalised market system is causing as if it were a social benefit, and denounces anyone who opposes it as a racist. In both cases the left and the right have different parts of the puzzle, but their political commitments systematically prevent either from putting the pieces together. That is the culture war impasse. The politics of national interest offers a solution.
And here again, Stoffel’s errors are instructive. He claims that the nation is a fantasy object of desire. But, just as he is deluded about the true potential of his horizontal and transnational desires, he is equally wrong about the vertical desires for the equal rights of nationhood.
The national interest: solidarity in equal freedom
As we noted above, Stoffel asserts that the gay transnationalism of the GLF, from which he draws inspiration, ‘conceptualized gayness as a political stance’. At the same time, Stoffel rejects the nation-state because he thinks that the claims of equal citizenship and universal recognition made on behalf of the sovereign state are ‘illusory’. However, as he notes in passing, it is through the nation-state that the political sphere is itself constituted (147). There is a tension, not to say a contradiction, in Stoffel’s understanding of politics here.
His rejection of the nation relies directly on his (mis)reading of Karl Marx’s critique of the French Revolution in the latter’s essay ‘On the Jewish Question’ (147-50). Marx’s argument was that in the condition of national citizenship, people appear as equals in the state, but this is only possible by abstracting them from their real concrete differences and inequality in civil society, and Marx was particularly concerned with their differences in religious adherence and their inequality in property ownership. The concrete particular differences and inequalities between people in civil society are the real basis and the presupposition of the abstract equality of citizens in the political life of the state, and of the imaginary national sovereignty that these abstract citizens enjoyed. Without this promise of equality in the state, the divisions of civil society are an unmanageable realm of egoism and conflict; but without that realm of conflict there would be no need of the state with its realm of the political. Marx compared this realm of the political, this nation-state with its equal liberty, to the Christian heaven: an imagined realm whose existence is both premised on, and offered as the solution to, the Earthly trials among the living down below in civil society.
What Stoffel fails to notice is that Marx’s criticism is a criticism of the political realm as such, and that Stoffel’s own rejection of the nation-state in favour of transnationalism is, therefore, a rejection of the arena in which politics can be done; and any conception of sexuality that is based on that rejection cannot be a truly political one, as he claims for his liberationist conception. His theory is better thought of as anti-political and that is why, as we saw above, his queer Marxism turns out to be an apology for the revolt of market forces against the nation-state.
Marx himself was pointing to what he thought were certain important limitations of politics and the state because he thought there was more to human freedom than political freedom. But it did not occur to him to reject the political sphere. On the contrary, as he wrote in ‘On the Jewish Question’ itself: ‘Political emancipation is, of course, a big step forward.’ On this particular point, gender-critical feminism appears to agree with Marx. To be gender critical is to see in gender a set of coercive norms that persist as an obstacle to women’s freedom, and gender-critical feminism ultimately seeks the abolition of gender. [4] This is a significant historical transformation that would be the result of changes more far reaching than the merely political. But gender-critical feminists include the achievement of full recognition of women as bearers of equal rights within the nation-state as part of their route towards their aim. This is why, notwithstanding the national character of sex realism and women’s rights, Stoffel is wrong to characterise gender critical feminism as a mere ‘escape’ into ‘national identity’.
The irony is that it is the assimilationist gay nationalists and the gender-critical feminists who have a truly political conception of gender and sexuality, and not the transnational liberationists championed by Stoffel, because assimilationist nationalists are contesting for equal rights and political emancipation in the only way that is possible, through the nation-state. For lesbians and gay men, equal rights within the state were for the most part achieved in the 30 years between the GLF and the millennium. Women too have had their equal rights formally recognised to a great extent. It is these gains that the anti-political queer movement is both a reaction to and which it threatened to undermine. The political nation is the only force powerful enough to restrain or overcome the effects of the destructive desublimation produced by the queer global market.
That said, politics is in many ways a deeply frustrating and unsatisfying game to play, as Stoffel suggests. The tension between the difficult struggle in the state, on the one hand, and the development of the economy and civil society, on the other, has conditioned a long and equivocal history in which unintended consequences lead again and again to disappointment. As Stoffel puts it: ‘vertical relations of cruel optimism mediate the contradictions of the bourgeois state.’ (168) But ‘cruel optimism’ just is the condition of politics. The struggle to win over your fellow citizens to your preferred way of organising the state, civil society and the relation between the two, is indeed the antithesis of enjoying the immediate pleasures of queer horizontal desire. Taken seriously, politics requires a willingness to play the long game, to engage in the ‘slow drilling of hard boards’, as Max Weber described the political vocation.
The decades of desublimation, of the slow triumph of Stoffel’s horizontal desire, seem to have stripped us collectively of individuals with the political imagination, courage and stamina to rise to the immense challenges of real statecraft; and we have become used to the shallow, venal rabble that inhabits our legislatures and governments. But if we are to get beyond the failed promise of sexual liberation, beyond the dreary pornographic kinkery and the algorithmic compulsions of the now queered norms of consumer capitalism; if we are to defeat the transnationalist facilitators of medicalised child mutilation, male supremacism and lesbian erasure; and if we are to secure women’s and gay rights, then culture war will not be enough. We will need to try to realise the nation’s promise of solidarity in equal liberty by embracing the cruel optimism of vertical desire.
The universality of the state, the idea that we can all be united in equal liberty is indeed a fiction, something we must imagine (as Thomas Hobbes had argued long before Marx). But it is that very fiction, the idea of the nation as solidarity among equally free citizens engaged in collective self-government, that provides a political standard by which we can judge ourselves and our government. If we are unwilling to imagine this sovereign nation-state that could in some way unite us in the solidarity of equal freedom that are its promise, then we will never achieve that solidarity, equality and freedom. We will remain mired in our current condition, or worse. Of all the difficulties none is greater than achieving the material aspect of equal freedom, an adequate equality of means. But rather than run the risk of tragic failure that defines politics, the Marxist queer theorist complains that the grapes of the struggle for equal freedom are sour, and promotes instead the satisfaction of immediate desire, an adaptation to the political impotence of childhood.
If we are to turn the nation’s imagined solidarity in equal freedom into reality, here on Terf Island, then the equal freedom of women with men is a fundamental aspect of that political project, of the project of nation-building. The majority of the nation’s citizens are women, and that majority does not consist of a particular regional, ethnic or religious group or a particular social class but is evenly distributed within all of these. If, as I have argued here, the cause of women’s freedom is to a great extent dependent on the strengths of the nation-state as the form of democratic political life, so also is the future strength of the nation-state dependent on the freedom of its women. This may seem counter-intuitive given the oppression of women during the past era of nationalism during the 19th and 20th centuries. But only if you take no account of the changes in the late 20th century that we have just described, the changes that permitted the emergence of the transnational queer order of the era of globalisation.
The culture of our actually existing state in the mid-2020s is a desublimated one in which the overriding injunction is to ‘Enjoy!’. This desublimation has been, at the same time, part of a wider process of dismantling the repressive authority of the old patriarchal order analysed by Freud. Men may still have some relative power and privilege, and many men still abuse these in ways large and small, but none of this any longer enjoys any real political or moral authority. Very few within the mainstream of British political life defend the traditional basis of male dominance, the idea that fathers ought to rule over their wives, daughters and sons. The old patriarchal mechanisms of repression and sublimation are radically weakened and socially discredited. Queer, with its decadent recycling of gender norms, is a morbid symptom of the demise of the old moral and psychosocial order. But there is also an opportunity here.
The death of the old moral order is a done deal. Some middle class people can play at trad wifery if they can afford it, but there is no way back to the old patriarchal ways for society as a whole. The people of a nation that will be able to contain or overcome the dystopian drift of the transnational markets will have to find new ways to take themselves seriously, to give authority to their higher aims and make those aims desirable. These new ways will have women at their centre. They will require not merely consolidating sex-based rights but going beyond them to achieve a deeper solidarity between men and women by dismantling the threadbare remains of the old gender norms. Our collective national interest in women’s mobilisation as equal citizens is not conservative, it is gender critical; but it will also differ from contemporary feminism both in its self-conscious nationalism and its emphasis on prioritising women’s equality and agency as citizens over their vulnerability to victimisation by men. We will return to that idea on TNS.
(Thanks to Eve, Adam and Max for comments.)
ENDS
[1] H Joyce, Trans, (One World, 2022) p288
[2] S Zizek, ‘The Impasse of Repressive Desublimation’ in The Metastases of Enjoyment (Verso, 1994) 16
[3] H Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Beacon, 1966) 72.
[4] H Lawford-Smith, Gender Critical Feminism (Oxford University Press, 2022)43-45.
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