Nat Raha

This creative and critical doctoral dissertation undertakes a detailed consideration of the uptake of Marxism in twenty-first century queer theory, constituting this body of work as the field of queer Marxism.  The dissertation analyses significant contributions to the field, such as the work of Rosemary Hennessy (2000, 2013) and Kevin Floyd (2009), alongside the key concepts elaborated in Marx’s Capital, value, labour and the commodity, in order to establish a solid theoretical basis for queer Marxism. The thesis includes an invigoration of Marxist feminist social reproduction theory through a queer and trans studies perspective, establishing the concept of queer and trans social reproduction through a synthesis of historical materialist methodology and intellectual herstories of queer and trans activist groups Wages Due Lesbians and Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. The thesis argues that queer Marxism elaborates an interrelation between economic and cultural spheres that understands their influence on material conditions and affect in the political present. It elaborates the affective condition of transfeminine brokenness in the context of contemporary challenges facing liberal transgender politics.
Queer Marxist theory is then deployed in an extended literary analysis that focuses on the work and life of gay femme poet John Wieners, and is finally developed in a creative portfolio – a collection of poems of sirens / body & faultlines. On the basis of archival research, the thesis situates Wieners’ writing and political activities of the 1970s in the Gay and Mental Patients’ Liberation movements of Boston, Massachusetts, USA, as a form of queer labour, which includes the production of Gay Liberation newspaper Fag Rag and the publication of Wieners’ Behind the State Capitol, or Cincinnati Pike (1975) by Boston’s Good Gay Poets. Furthermore, reading letters, journals and other poems through a Mad Studies lens, I elaborate Wieners’ survival of numerous psychiatric incarcerations from 1960 – 1972 in the context of institutional homophobia, and its influence on his politics and aesthetics.
of sirens / body & faultlines develops a linguistically-innovative queer lyric, elaborating experiments in language and life, amid contemporary transformations of capital and neoliberal regimes of social and economic divestment in London. Inhabiting the present tense and attending closely to to its material conditions, the poems deploy language and its visual permutations on the page in the service of queer and trans life and a queer of colour, anti-capitalist politics that refuses assimilation, attempting to rupture the syntax of homonormativity and transnormativity. The poems capture moments of political and affective affirmation and tumult, provide radical elaborations and defamilarisations of trans and queer embodiment under the conditions of neoliberal capital disinvestment, wage labour, and queer life while dreaming in the service of queer and trans world-making.

The affects of transfeminine life and their relationship to the material conditions undergirding such life are under-theorized in transgender studies and queer studies. This creative and critical essay conceptualizes transfeminine brokenness through negative experiences and emotions, drawing connections between such negative states to transmisogyny and material precarity. The essay intends to politicize transfeminine brokenness for a radical transfeminism. It argues that the material basis of transfeminine brokenness involves the marginalization of the labor of trans women and trans feminine people within a radicalized and gendered division of labor under capitalism alongside transmisogyny within queer, trans and feminist spaces and communities.
The essay defines radical transfeminism as a collective political praxis and critique which centers transfeminine bodies that are or find themselves precariously employed, poor, overworked and/or pathologized. Radical transfeminism is oriented around forms of care and support amid conditions material precarity, which include cultural production, political protest and solidarity and forms of socially reproductive labor.

The essay historically situates such bodies and the labor they undertake at the crossroads of the political ascendency of the far right in parts of the world, and the ‘transgender tipping point’. Focusing on the context of the United Kingdom, it argues that the securing of national borders throughout the fabric of public and private spheres undermines lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights. Responding to recent discussions considering transfeminism, trans people of color and the politics of prison abolition, the essay argues that the cultivation of radical transfeminism as both a life praxis and political practice may inaugurate a more livable world. The essay calls for the transformation of the material conditions that fracture transfeminine life.

The Many Voices podcast by Scottish PEN brings into focus voices that are often marginalised or silenced.

In this episode, writers Nat Raha and Eli Clare discuss writing as a space for both survival and dreaming, articulating queer and trans politics through poetry, and their work on our Many Voices project in partnership with LGBT Youth Scotland. Playwright Jo Clifford talks about her play being banned in Brazil and gives a powerful speech to the importance of defending persecuted trans writers around the world.

Marxism in Culture Talk
28 April 2017
Institute of Historical Research, University of London

Despite the recent resurgence of social reproduction theory and Marxist feminist political praxis, the social reproduction of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) lives remains under-theorised. While heterosexuality as a form of work has long since been considered as part of Marxist feminism’s analysis, the consideration of queer sexualities, and the reproduction of life and labour-power outside and beyond of the cis-, heteronormative nuclear family, have been sidelined in the canon of Marxist Feminism. Bridging the theoretical work of queer Marxism, Black feminism and trans studies, and the political praxis of LGBTQ groups Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries and Wages Due Lesbians, this paper will address the expanded definition of social reproduction necessary to understand the social reproduction of LGBTQ lives.

The paper will argue that the forms of caring labour that enable LGBTQ lives take place in spaces beyond the domestic sphere and within familial forms that exceed the nuclear family; and moreover that such labour includes the reproduction of genders, desires and bodies anchored in non-normativity – work that is often naturalised and not considered as labour. Furthermore, the continued failure of the capitalist socius to support the lives of poor trans women and trans femmes of colour and/or sex workers raises questions of how the politics of queer and trans liberalism(s) devalue and compound the conditions of queer and trans social reproduction under a racialised and gendered division of labour.

Difficult Women & the Common Good, IASH, University of Edinburgh, 28 June 2018

Across the mid 1980s and early 1990s, the London chapter of Wages Due Lesbians, part of the International Wages for Housework movement, enumerated a multitude of forms of ‘emotional housework’ undertaken by lesbian and bisexual women. Such emotional housework included caring labour to support partners and families, to challenge societal homophobia and racism, to fight for one’s right to remain in the UK, and to express one’s gender and sexuality in a hostile environment, as lesbian women in precarious and marginal economic positions. Wages Due’s challenge to the heteronormativity in conceptualising unwaged domestic labour under capitalism provides an important insight into (the archive of) queer social reproduction. Furthermore, in the historical context of both Margaret Thatcher Government’s economic disinvestment in the working classes and of Section 28, which banned the promotion of “the acceptability of homosexuality as a ‘pretend’ family relationship” within the public sector, Wages Due’s critique exemplifies the challenge of difficult, queer women whose everyday lives contravene social norms.

Considering of political contestations made and supported by Wages Due, this paper will problematize the notion of the common good through queer and trans social reproduction. I will argue that the social reproduction of LGBTQ subjects, in particular queer and trans women and femmes, depends on forms of collectivity that are socially and economically marginalised, including by neoliberal LGBTQ rights projects. How might the common good depend on forms of extraction from queer and trans bodies? How does queer of colour critique, in practice and through praxis, elaborate queer forms of the common good?

Panel - From the Political Economy of Queer, to Queering the Political Economy; Stream - Critical Thinking About Sex, Sexuality, Gender and the Family

This paper will draw insights from queer Marxism, queer theory, Marxist feminism and transgender studies to consider the labour of LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) persons and the work of queer emancipation as crucial aspects of a queer political economy.
Addressing the contemporary contradiction of the enfranchisement of LGBTQ subjects through civil and legal rights (including employment rights); and the corresponding disenfranchisement of such subjects (along intersecting lines of race, class, gender, ability, nationality and immigration status) under neoliberal regimes of capitalist accumulation and austerity, this paper will discuss Marx’s dialectic of the ‘natural form’ and the ‘value form’ of the commodity (posited as part of the labour theory of value in Capital) to consider how queer and trans* bodies are drawn into the contemporary flows of capital. This will highlight the importance of LGBTQ rights for the capitalist reproduction of value; the role of value’s homogenising abstraction in the production of (homo)normativity; and how the social restructuring of contemporary regimes of capitalist accumulation impact on the social reproduction of queer and trans* life.

The political and aesthetic implications of John ‘Jacqueline’ Wieners’ involvement in the Gay Liberation movement (in Boston, Massachusetts in the 1970s) is yet to be addressed in critical writing on the poet. This paper will situate the publication of Wieners’ writing from the 1970s in the context of the radical social critique of Gay Liberation – in newspapers such as Fag Rag and Gay Sunshine – addressing the work of and Wieners’ involvement in Boston’s Fag Rag collective, and the importance of this labour for understanding Wieners’ poetry.
Fag Rag published significant and influential critique for Gay Liberation in the USA, aiding the development of the radical consciousness of gay liberation. This critique addressed the multifaceted social and material issues facing gay and lesbian people and sociality at the time – challenging oppression and/or violence from the state, psychiatric institutions, religious institutions, prisons, imperialist war, poverty and job discrimination, alongside sexism and forms of gender oppression, racism and ageism. Furthermore, this critique was socially necessary for the realisation of liberated gay consciousness into various forms of social and sexual praxis; to “create our own existences”, “media” and “community” (Shively 2012), with the intention of a revolutionary transformation of society. Alongside this critical work, Fag Rag also published gay male literature and especially poetry.
Developing the dialectic of queer labour and queer consciousness posited by Matthew Tinkcom (as ‘camp labour’ and ‘camp consciousness’, 2002), I will consider the labour of the Fag Rag collective as a mode of ‘queer worldmaking’ (Berlant and Warner, 1998) that enables and amplifies the sexual politics of Wieners’ writing exemplified in Behind the State Capitol: or Cincinnati Pike (1975, published by members of the Fag Rag collective as the press Good Gay Poets). This will enable a reading of Wieners’ writing from the period as the realisation through poetic labour of the sexual and political challenges of the liberation era. The paper will also address questions of heteronormativity in the publishing of Wieners’ work and archive, and its impact on the critical reception of Wieners’ poetry.

The ‘breakneck’ pace of Tom Raworth's performances is well acknowledged in critical writing on the poet. Building upon the critical work on Raworth, this essay formulates how an aesthetics of speed is textually produced in the poet's charastic "long, skinny poems" (Wilkinson 2007), derived through the later work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, towards considering the political implications of this writing in Thatcherite Britain.