Global Justice and Desire: Queering Economy(Social Justice)

Employing feminist, queer, and postcolonial perspectives, Global Justice and Desire addresses economy as a key ingredient in the dynamic interplay between modes of subjectivity, signification and governance. Bringing together a range of international contributors, the book proposes that both analyzing justice through the lens of desire, and considering desire through the lens of justice, are vital for exploring economic processes. A variety of approaches for capturing the complex and dynamic interplay of justice and desire in socioeconomic processes are taken up. But, acknowledging a complexity of forces and relations of power, domination, and violence – sometimes cohering and sometimes contradictory – it is the relationship between hierarchical gender arrangements, relations of exploitation, and their colonial histories that is stressed. Therefore, queer, feminist, and postcolonial perspectives intersect as Global Justice and Desire explores their capacity to contribute to more just, and more desirable, economies.

Table of Contents:
I. Entanglements of Desire and Economy; 1. Marx’s Concept of Radical Needs in the Guise of Queer Desire 2. Can the Subaltern Desire? The Erotic As a Power and the Disempowerment of the Erotic 3. The Associations of Black Queer Life: Reading and Seeing the Nineteen Eighties 4. Queer Economic Justice: Desire, Critique, and the Practice of Knowledge II. Intersections of Sexual and Economic Justice; 5. The Instrumentalization of Sexual Diversity in a Civilizational Frame of Cosmopolitanism and Tolerance 6. Unruly Desires, Gay Governance, and the Makeover of Sexuality in Postcolonial India 7. Integrating Sexual and Economic Justice: Challenges for queer feminist activism against sexual violence in South Africa 8. Classing Desire: Erotics, Politics, Value III. The Political Economy of Queer Embodiments 9. Queer Needs Commons! Transgressing the Fiction of Self-ownership, Challenging Westocentric Proprietism 10. The Ruse of Sexual Freedom: Neoliberalism, Self-Ownership and Commercial Sex 11. Queer Economies: Possibilities of Queer Desires and Economic Bodies (Because ‘The Economy’ Is Not Enough)

About the Author :
Nikita Dhawan is Junior Professor of Political Science for Gender and Postcolonial Studies and Director of the Frankfurt Research Center for Postcolonial Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Antke Engel is the director of the Institute for Queer Theory in Berlin, Germany. Christoph H. E. Holzhey is the founding director of the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Germany. Volker Woltersdorff is currently a fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute, Germany.