Eros and Alienation: Capitalism and the Making of Gendered Sexualities

Social justice activist and academic Alan Sears delves into the underexplored relationship between alienated labor and sexuality. Our instinctual drive to shape the world around us and fulfill ourselves through labor is subverted by capitalist alienation, leaving us to find fulfillment elsewhere.

As a result, our erotic drives become the central focus for transformation and life-making. Still, they are restricted and fuelled by whatever energy is left after completing the monetized or social reproductive work required to survive. This alienation encounters ongoing resistance, as life-making activity can never be entirely separated from the person who labors.

Alan Sears explores the ways this alienation frames the processes of gender and sexual formation, showing how the organization of work contributes to the development of a dominant regime of gendered sexualities, defined by a binary gender mapping of desire as heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual.

Alan Sears is Professor of Sociology at Toronto Metropolitan University. He has been writing about queer Marxism for activist and scholarly audiences since the mid-1980s. He is an activist and author of several books including The Next New Left: A History of the Future.