Description
This paper uses the ‘trans culture war’—here understood as a coordinated, multi-scalar attack on trans rights and subjectivities in the UK—as a departure point to make sense of the political economy of the body in the context of capitalist crisis. Despite resurgent interest in the study of crisis since 2007/8, critical IPE scholarship has paid scant attention to trans struggle and to the phenomenon of body politics more generally. Yet understanding the political economy of the (trans) body is, we argue, a pressing task. This is because converging economic, political, social, and ecological crises, often referred to as the ‘polycrisis’, have seen the far right and other reactionary political actors increasingly build their platforms on contestations over body politics—from access to abortion services, gender equality initiatives, and sexuality education in schools to gay marriage and adoption rights—as well as strident forms of anti-trans politics. We consequently seek to advance critical IPE scholarship on crisis, and the gendered dimensions of crisis, by mobilising insights from Black, decolonial, and trans feminist scholars regarding the centrality of gender- and race-making practices to processes of capitalist development and transformation. Rather than viewing the trans culture war as a distraction from other conventionally ‘political’ or ‘economic’ crises—or invoking the (trans) body as a metaphorical or figurative site of power relations abstracted from political economy—we locate the contemporary attack on trans rights within a historical set of state (and extra-state) practices that seek to (i) discipline and govern certain populations regarded as unproductive, unruly and/or otherwise disposable and (ii) instantiate or retrench dominant gender and racial orders that are seen as in flux or under threat.
