Returning to Reproduction Queerly: Sex, Labor, Need

Historical materialism's critique of capitalism and queer critiques of the material history of sexuality find a fruitful intersection in the concept of social reproduction. The making of history involves the reproduction of social life—what Marx referred to as "species-being" or what might be called "social ontology." As an aspect of social ontology, affective needs feature in the reproduction of social life and are folded into cultural norms. Capitalism produces unmet human needs that are embedded in values and identities and incorporated into relations of labor in and outside the marketplace. Drawing upon workers' narratives, this essay examines sex and labor in the social ontology of the maquiladoras on the U.S.-Mexican border. Although sexual identity has eluded studies of labor relations in maquiladoras, these workers' narratives illustrate its powerful role in and outside the factory, in workers' exploitation and in labor organizing. Keywords: Queer TheoryMarxismSexualitySexual IdentityMaquiladorasValue Portions of this essay appear in Richardson, D., J. McLaughlin, and M. Casey. 2006. Intersections in Feminist and Queer Theory: Sexualities, Cultures and Identities. London: Palgrave. Portions of this essay appear in Richardson, D., J. McLaughlin, and M. Casey. 2006. Intersections in Feminist and Queer Theory: Sexualities, Cultures and Identities. London: Palgrave. Notes Portions of this essay appear in Richardson, D., J. McLaughlin, and M. Casey. 2006. Intersections in Feminist and Queer Theory: Sexualities, Cultures and Identities. London: Palgrave. 2For further discussion of social ontology, see Bakker and Gil (Citation2004, especially pt. 1). 3In Mexico, naming the male homosexual meant pointing to the passive partner as the visible homosexual and it was this subject who was expelled from the national fabric as "waste." The lesbian, already effaced as woman under the law, slipped through the cracks of official prescriptions, though she was named as marimacha or mamflor when women transgressed prescribed codes for gender or desire. "Homosexuality" in Mexican culture is a term that does not fit all practitioners of same-sex behaviors and desires; it hovers between a performative practice and an identity, and men move around in this space more than most labels suggest. As Max Mejia put it, "machista fights against homosexuality in theory but accepts it in practice; rejects it in public but invokes it in private; despises it in daylight and procures it under cover of darkness" (Citation2000, 49). "Outing" and "the closet" function differently in Mexico and Latin America generally as same-sex identity circulates through public and private discourses in which silence, secrecy, and masking enfold normative sexuality in an ambiente still affected by patriarchal family ideologies and the value placed on being fathers of children—along with the virtual absence of any critical public discourse about gender and sexual identity. 4In Mexico, homosexual relations between adults over eighteen are not criminalized, but strictly legal rights are of no avail to individual homosexuals in the hands of notoriously corrupt politicians. Police have sweeping powers to arrest anyone who behaves using language that contravenes public decency, and the federal labor code (Article 47 #8) still permits employers to dismiss workers for having committed "immoral acts" on the work site regardless of their competence and fulfillment of their work obligations (Lumsden Citation1991, 53, 75).