A Small Piece of Red Sky to Fly in: Transition Pending Revolution

A specter is haunting transgender studies—the specter of Marxism. Recent years have seen the emergence of numerous trans scholars, militants, and organic intellectuals championing the centrality of Marxist analyses of social life to a thorough systemic understanding of trans subjectivity, oppression, and liberation. Beginning from the Marxist premise that no aspect of life under capitalism, including sex, sexuality and gender, exists in isolation from the mode of production, trans Marxism considers how capital intertwines with trans life—through the medicalized and carceralized regulation of bodies, differentiated experiences of exploitation in labor, the ubiquity and material power of the normative family structure—and how this can be collectively overcome.