particularly that of women of color, as well as appeasing oppressed male labor. The gender binary, the patriarchal family and heterosexual marriage are key manifestations of patriarchy that affect the everyday lives of working people.
The gender binary limits and enforces the division between male and female genders, subjugating the latter under the former. Historically, male workers, particularly white men, have been attributed of rationality, scientific knowledge, and power relative to women workers. Women, the supposedly lesser sex, are cast with hysteria, emotions, instability, needing male supervision and control. Women of color have been devalued in society, the targets of racism and sexism, and their labor, the most devalued. Our cheap and accessible labor has provided capitalism an unending pool of female workers who will accept low wages.
The fraternity of male supremacy also institutionalizes this division to prevent male workers from questioning their own oppressions — there is always someone worse off. Through the process of slavery and white supremacy, the U.S. ruling class realized that it could keep white workers under its thumb by giving them better wages and other benefits denied to Black workers. It encouraged them to reflect on the fact that, as miserable as they may be, at least they’re not Black. Similarly, too many male workers congratulate themselves for not being sexualized, objectified and devalued as women workers under the capitalist system. There is always someone worse off. Under this binary, gender benders, trans workers cannot find a stable liberated place. To the male supremacists, the transwomen have betrayed their gender, and transmen desecrate the male gender. By their crossing, both render the division undesirable, indefensible and transgressible.
Our mere existence as queers do not imply naturally that we are anti-patriarchal or anti-capitalist, yet our existence threatens this binary under capitalism and it is up to us to bring forward a politics that utilizes this power. Through a queer politics that also draws from anti-patriarchal struggles, we challenge the notion that women workers need to be subservient, or that male workers need to cling on to the chains of their imprisonment. We can smash the gender binary everywhere we go, and through that, dismantle the systems that are premised on its existence.
As the capitalist system abandons previously thriving and unionized American cities to exploit cheaper labor elsewhere, deindustrialized cities are full of unemployed and poor people of all genders. Lisa Duggan’s luminal essay[1] suggests that where white privilege and male privilege had once guaranteed white folks and men a sense of entitlement on the basis of their race, gender and citizenship, today’s capitalist race to the bottom strip these benefits and present instead unemployment and welfare as the few viable options. In lieu of these losses, white male workers either acknowledge the need to stand side by side with other oppressed workers, or they resent their loss and seek to reinforce that sense of superiority and entitlement. One may argue that Vincent Chin and Brandon Teena were victims of a last grasp at masculinity and its privileges in deindustrilaizing cities.
Brandon Teena was a transman who was raped and murdered in cold blood in 1993,