“Lesbian and gay identity and communities are historically created, the result of a process of capitalist development that has spanned many generations”,
says John D’Emilio, professor emeritus of history and of women’s and gender studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
“Capitalism required a system of labour based on wages, rather than on either a largely self-sufficient household or slavery; and wages gave individuals a relative autonomy, which was the necessary material condition for the making of lesbianism and gayness.
The emergence of a stable gay identity was made possible by the rise of capitalism. Prior to the rise of capitalism the household economy ruled. These were independent family units that were self-sufficient and patriarchal. The family is an economic unit whose members depend on one another to contribute to the production of the goods they all consume.
The rise of capitalism made wage labour more common. Family members are drawn out of the household and into the capitalist system of free labour. The family transitions from an economic unit to an affective unit, “an institution that produced not goods but emotional satisfaction and happiness”: the nuclear family.
This results in a changed understanding of heterosexuality. Sex is no longer linked exclusively to procreation (creating additional economic contributors to the family), but to happiness, intimacy, pleasure. In divesting the household of its economic independence and fostering the separation of sexuality from procreation, capitalism has created conditions that allow some men and women to organise a personal life around their erotic/emotional attraction to their own sex. It has made possible the formation of urban communities of lesbians and gay men and, more recently, of a politics based on a sexual identity.”
Capitalism has weakened the material (or economic) bonds of the family, creating growing instability in the place that is supposed to be the source of happiness and emotional security. The elevation of the family to ideological preeminence guarantees that capitalist society will reproduce not just children, but heterosexism and homophobia. In the most profound sense, capitalism is the problem.”
Capitalism is of course the economic system which grew to prominence in Western Europe and America, but is less favoured elsewhere where LGBT communities are smaller.
