The Specter of Materialism: Queer Theory and Marxism in the Age of the Beijing Consensus
The Specter of Materialism: Queer Theory and Marxism in the Age of the Beijing Consensus
by Petrus Liu
Duke University Press, 2023 Paper: 978-1-4780-1942-8 | Cloth: 978-1-4780-1679-3 | eISBN: 978-1-4780-2405-7 Library of Congress Classification HQ76.3.C6L58 2023
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
In recent years, queer theory appears to have made a materialist turn away from questions of representation and performativity to those of dispossession, precarity, and the differential distribution of life chances. Despite this shift, queer theory finds itself constantly reabsorbed into the liberal project of diversity management. This theoretical and political weakness, Petrus Liu argues, stems from an incomplete understanding of capitalism’s contemporary transformations, of which China has been at the center. In The Specter of Materialism Liu challenges key premises of classic queer theory and Marxism, turning to an analysis of the Beijing Consensus—global capitalism’s latest mutation—to develop a new theory of the political economy of sexuality. Liu explores how relations of gender and sexuality get reconfigured to meet the needs of capital in new regimes of accumulation and dispossession, demonstrating that evolving US-Asian economic relations shape the emergence of new queer identities and academic theories. In so doing, he offers a new history of collective struggles that provides a transnational framework for understanding the nexus between queerness and material life.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Petrus Liu is Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature at Boston University and author of Queer Marxism in Two Chinas, also published by Duke University Press, and Stateless Subjects: Chinese Martial Arts Literature and Postcolonial History.
REVIEWS
"Petrus Liu’s The Specter of Materialism is intellectually courageous and theoretically sophisticated, advancing both queer theory and Marxist thought. This review has only scratched the surface of this paradigm-shifting work. Scholars of queer theory, gender and sexuality studies, Marxism, and China Studies will all find this book indispensable for their fields."
-- Wenqing Kang Modern Chinese Literature And Culture
"The Specter of Materialism is a major intervention into its announced three arenas of inquiry: queer theory, Marxism, and China. ...The product of many years of thinking and refining, Liu here extends the inquiry into asking and answering two questions: why does queer theory in China and elsewhere need Marxism, and why does Marxism need queer theory and China? These, as he shows, are intertwined problems of a global materialist history of capitalism that haunt our present, and they are problems of how to think from China about the world we currently inhabit. ... We would do well to follow Liu’s lead."
-- Rebecca Karl Chinese Literature
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Periodizing the Post-1989 World Order 1 Part I: Theory 1. Alterity in Queer Theory and the Political Economy of the Beijing Consensus 21 2. The Specter of Materialism 52 Part II: History 3. The Subsumption of Literature: Lu Xun’s Queer Modernism in the Chinese Revolution 81 4. The Subsumption of the Cold War: The Material Unconscious of Queer Asia 104 5. The Subsumption of Sexuality: Translating Gender from the Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women to the Beijing Consensus 135 Conclusion: Toward a Transnational Queer Marxism 161 Notes 165 Bibliography 195 Index
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