Quotes from this essay:
The goal is not to create new categories to label people, but to show that the categorization of individuals is repressive and violent as such—most of all the dominant heterosexual binary of “male” and “female.”
In other words, a queer critique of capitalism based on an analysis of commodity fetishism would do the following: it would have to recognize that the heterosexual matrix based on the gendered division of labor is not so much an extension of patriarchy into capitalism but rather a genuine product of it. Capitalism does not only assign men and women different roles within its realm, it also creates the modern notion of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine.’ This is done by splitting the circuit of value production and exchange from the social relations it is embedded in. Deconstructing gender from this perspective means a lot more than the individual subversion of traditional gender roles—it means the collective deconstruction of the heterosexual split that separates the “male” commodity economy from its “female” support system. The task at hand then is not to play one of these realms against the other, as do feminisms that want to either include women in the “male” sphere or emphasize the moral superiority of the “female”; it is to critique and actively subvert the binary as such. Not least in the light of the current and ongoing economic crisis, there are quite a number of attempts at doing precisely that, even if they do not always come from an explicitly queer or feminist background. One example—which I personally am particularly interested in—are the “free shops” that are popping up in an astonishing number of quite different locations. A free shop is a place (mostly DIY or volunteer-run) where people can deposit things they no longer need but that may still be useful for others. These things can then be taken by anyone who needs them, without this person having to give anything themselves. This principle has the potential to subvert the heterosexual economic matrix in a number of ways: it obviously challenges the logic of commodity exchange in its most basic assumption. The basic assumption is that one has first to have something in order to be able to get something. This is effectively addressed by a model that deliberately disconnects individual economic “input” and “output” and gets rid of the accounting in between. It takes the element of competition out of the equation (having to sell something ahead of others to be able to buy things one needs. This creates a system that does not exclude anyone on the basis of their ability to participate in market exchange.
