The Specter of Materialism Quotes

“The rise of commodified male same-sex sexual labor forms an important aspect of China’s “pink capitalism,” which has created a significant expansion of queer public spaces, including parks, bars, clubs, community centers, and, most important, social-networking mobile applications that make these encounters possible.”
― Petrus Liu, The Specter of Materialism: Queer Theory and Marxism in the Age of the Beijing Consensus

“Despite these shifts, materialist queer theory has reached an apparent impasse and finds itself continuously absorbed into the liberal project of diversity management, where the concept of class is read as a static form of social advantage among others.”
― Petrus Liu, The Specter of Materialism: Queer Theory and Marxism in the Age of the Beijing Consensus

“This analysis lays the groundwork for the discussion of the intellectual trajectories of queer theory’s own encounters with materialism in the next chapter, “The Specter of Materialism.” Here I consider various historical attempts to synthesize queer theory and Marxism since the 1990s and their limits.”
― Petrus Liu, The Specter of Materialism: Queer Theory and Marxism in the Age of the Beijing Consensus

“The year 1990 is remembered by many as the annus mirabilis of queer theory. In addition to the publication of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, David M. Halperin’s One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet, 1990 also saw Teresa de Lauretis’s coinage of the term queer theory as the title of a conference at the University of California, Santa Cruz. But 1990 was also the year when a new economic relationship of mutual vassalage between the United States and China began to take shape, one that would eventually lead commentators to speculate, in the wake of the 2007–10 subprime mortgage crisis, that an alternative Chinese economic model called the Beijing Consensus—with its huge holdings of US government debt, productive capacity, and high savings rates—would enable the formerly socialist country to displace the United States as the center of global capitalism.”
― Petrus Liu, The Specter of Materialism: Queer Theory and Marxism in the Age of the Beijing Consensus

“The thesis of gender variability (between, for example, lesbians and heterosexual women in the modern West) becomes a thesis of cultural variability (between Western and non-Western worlds).”
― Petrus Liu, The Specter of Materialism: Queer Theory and Marxism in the Age of the Beijing Consensus