>----- Original Message -----
>From: "lbo-talk-digest" <owner-lbo-talk-digest at lists.panix.com>
>
> > did ya wanna tell us about how sex workers aren't read producers of surplus
> > value while apple pie bakers are, now?
> >
> >
> > kelley
>
>Kelley, I'm not entirely sure where you are going on this.
busting your chops for claiming that sex workers unions should be different b/c they don't produce surplus value. such an assumption is founded on a sexist assumptions of what goes into the reproduction of labor, on assumptions that sexual pleasure is "extra". i gave you what for at Marxism a few years ago.
>I remember being
>called Catherine Mackinnon in the process of a debate quite a long time
>ago- on Marxmail,
i didn't call you that. someone else may have. i suggested that you read feminist critiques of old style marxist feminism: heidi hartman, alison jaggar, michelle barrett, etc.
> and it was because I tried to state a position I'm frankly not sure of
> any longer (how's that for Leninist iconclasm?)- that of prostitution
> being something wholly different than standard labour. I didn't know who
> Catherine Mackinnon was then, frankly. Now I'm unimpressed.
i'd like to know why you are unimpressed with Catherine MacKinnon!?
In the meantime:
Post-Lacan, actually post-Foucault, it has become customary to affirm that sexuality is socially constructed. Seldom specified is what, socially, it is constructed of, far less who does the constructing or how, when, or where. When capitalism is the favored social construct, sexuality is shaped and controlled and exploited and repressed by capitalism; not, capitalism creates sexuality as we know it. When sexuality is a construct of discourses of power, gender is never one of them; force is central to its deployment but through repressing it, not through constituting it; speech is not concretely investigated for its participation in this construction process. Power is everywhere, therefore nowhere, diffuse rather than pervasively hegemonic. 'Constructed' seems to mean influenced by, directed, channeled, as a highway constructs traffic patterns. Not: Why cars? Who's driving? Where's everybody going? what makes mobility matter? Who can own a car? Are these accidents not very accidental? Although there are particular exceptions ...the typical model of sexuality which is tacitly accepted remains deeply Freudian and essentialist: sexuality is an innate natural prepolitical unconditioned drive divided along the biological gender line, centering on heterosexual intercourse... Allowed/not allowed is this sexaulity's basic ideological axis. The fact that sexuality is ideologically bounded is known. That these are its axes, central to the way its "drive" is driven, and that this is fundamental to gender and gender is fundamental to it, is not.
Towards a Feminist Theory of the State.