Gender Commodity: Marketing Feminist Identities and the Promise of Security

Description

Gender has become a commodity. Today's economy trades in symbols and narratives as much as in objects. As such, gender can be bought and sold, produced as an object, and demands constant work. What makes the commodity object seem alien, mysterious, and even threatening, Marx tells us, is that the worker's social relations - his subjectivity - are taken away from him and stamped into the object which then appears to have a life of its own, disassociated and threatening. Gender Commodity argues that gender is a social relation made into such an alienated object. In today's situation of radical insecurity, people are reaching out and identifying with objects - including symbolic ones - that promise quite falsely that they grant stability, duration, and fulfillment, and gender has been made into one of those. Gender Commodity is an interdisciplinary study that brings literary studies into dialogue with the surrounding mediascape around issues of gender, culture, and economy. It also asks how the symbolic production of gender commodity at home informs an imagination of gender policy as it reaches out globally. As it criticizes gender-affirmative feminism for participating in the culture of the commodity, Gender Commodity also looks to feminism to imagine gender otherwise.

Robin Truth Goodman is Professor of English at Florida State University, USA. Her many previous publications include Understanding Adorno, Understanding Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2020), The Bloomsbury Handbook of 21st Century Feminist Theory (Bloomsbury, 2019); Promissory Notes: On the Literary Conditions of Debt (2018); Gender for the Warfare State: Literature of Women in Combat (2017); and Literature and the Development of Feminist Theory (2016).

In the age of gender diversity, with fluidity and positivity often tied to identity "security," gendering becomes a logistical matter, part and parcel of capitalist productions on scales both private and planetary. Now, wholly catastrophic, sweetly vampiric "commodification" is the code Robin Truth Goodman cracks here with a retro-futural vision, where a good old Marx meets a "choice" feminist meets a transgender YouTube star meets a Rosa (Luxemburg) 2.0., where hope remains radically relevant. * Kyoo Lee, Professor of Philosophy, Gender Studies and Justice Studies, City University of New York, USA * Robin Truth Goodman here offers a smart, provocative analysis of how gender-similar to commodities-confronts us as something alien despite its inherent sociality. Circulating on the market and within certain feminist circles as a compensation for social lack, gender is, she argues, a fetish offering security in insecure, anti-social neoliberal times. In her fascinating rethinking of this elusive yet pervasive concept, Goodman shows how feminism can engage with and build upon the radical potential of trans theory and politics, and why it should. * Susan Ferguson, Associate Professor Emerita, Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada *