Research work · 2012

Review of Kevin Floyd's the Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009)

Japhet Johnstone

Gender forum

Abstract

Review of Kevin Floyd's The of Desire: Toward Queer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009)1 Kevin Floyd begins The of Desire at an impasse between Marxist and queer theory on snowy night in New England when he missed Judith Butler's appearance at Rethinking conference. From there Floyd attempts reconciliation between and queer theory via historicizing arguments that scrutinize social, economic, and political practices and norms in the twentieth and twenty-first century. Floyd's path toward queer Marxism traces economic and sexual regulation over the last one hundred years in the United States. The path is marked by vivid examples and theoretical complexity-for example, fishing scene from The Sun Also Rises appears as an intersection of failed masculinity and deskilled labor, and gay pictorials from the 1950s and 1960s serve as evidence for an unregulated, covert economy of desire. Floyd's combination of textual analysis with philosophical reflection promises to make the book new classic in queer studies.2 Floyd's comparisons of theoretical positions and his analyses of films, magazines, and novels build upon chronological structure that starts with Taylorism and psychoanalysis in the early twentieth century and arrives at neoliberalism and queer worldmaking in the twenty-first. The critique of capitalist and heteronormative structures during this period benefits from Floyd's ability to develop arguments on multiple levels and at different pitches. This quality also enhances the connections he makes between perhaps unlikely interlocutors such as Lukacs and Foucault; Butler and Hemingway; or Jameson and Midnight Cowboy.3 Floyd's book makes the most of queer theory's eclecticism and strategic ambiguity. He argues throughout for keeping theoretical frameworks flexible and exploratory instead of drawing stark lines of demarcation and setting up boundaries between terminologies and ideologies. Indeed, he explicitly characterizes his treatment of as an open theoretical system. Those wishing for clear, but predetermined, definitions of Floyd's key terms-reification and totality-might find his recursive method too labor intensive. But in order to develop new ways of understanding the term reification, Floyd claims that we need to follow its diverse connotations and permutations (25). Floyd never does deliver simple answer or final definition. However, it is clear by the end of the book that his early abstract formulations are part of the book's architecture and ultimately connected to localized instances of both reification and thinking. For instance, in the introduction Floyd writes, Reification compels an experience of privatization and isolation, an experience of exchange relations as impermeable to human intervention (17). Each link in this chain of terms becomes part of the material history of regulating desire. From Lukacs's implicit heteronormative moral imperatives in chapter one to the final discussions concerning the sexual, racial, and economic rezoning of Greenwich Village, the book links past and present, abstract and concrete. Floyd's self-description of the book as a queer variation on the dialectic of reification and totality (32) implies more than just codetermining relationship between the two terms. The book is also dialectic in Hegelian sense, as it leads the reader through cognitive process to help us grasp terms that, at first, seemed mere abstractions.4 Part of what makes this history and dialectical journey coherent and innovative is the incorporation of regulation theory throughout the book. By focusing on the accumulation of capital, Floyd presents his most compelling parallels between and queer history. He shows how the regulation of financial capital functions similarly to the regulation of sexuality and, thus, connects Taylorism and psychoanalysis, skilled labor and masculinity, and cowboys and Fordism. …