Positing a spectrum that spans political economy and culture, she situates lesbian and gay struggles at the cultural end of this political spectrum. Homophobia, she argues, has no roots in political economy, because homosexuals occupy no distinctive position in the division of labor, are distributed throughout the class structure, and do not constitute an exploited class. "[Tlhe injustice they suffer is quintessentially a matter of recognition" (17-18), she claims, thus construing lesbian and gay struggles as merely matters of cultural recognition, rather than acknowledging them as struggles either for equality throughout the political economic sphere or for an end to material oppression.
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Given the socialist-feminist effort to understand how the reproduction of persons and the social regulation of sexuality were part of the very process of production and, hence, part of the "materialist conception" of political economy, how is it that suddenly when the focus of critical analy sis turns from the question of how normative sexuality is reproduced to the queer question of how that very normativity is confounded by the nonnormative sexualities it harbors within its own terms-not to mention the sexualities that thrive and suffer outside those terms-that the link between such an analysis and the mode of production is suddenly dropped? Is it only a matter of "cultural" recognition when nonnormative sexualities are marginalized and debased, or does the possibility of a liveli hood come into play? And is it possible to distinguish, even analytically, between a lack of cultural recognition and material oppression, when the very definition of legal "personhood" is rigorously circumscribed by cultural norms that are indissociable from their material effects? Take, for instance, those instances in which lesbians and gays are rigorously excluded from state-sanctioned notions of the family (which is, according to both tax and property law, an economic unit); are stopped at the border; are deemed inadmissable to citizenship; are selectively denied the status of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly; are denied the right, as members of the military, to speak their desires; or are deautho rized by the law to make emergency medical decisions about dying lovers, or to receive the property of dead lovers, or to receive from the hospital the bodies of dead lovers-don't these examples mark the "holy family" once again constraining the routes by which property interests are regu lated and distributed? Is this simply the circulation of vilifying cultural attitudes or do such disenfranchisements mark a specific operation of the sexual and gendered distribution of legal and economic entitlements?