This seminar seeks to connect two recent parallel developments in trans studies and contemporary Marxism, both of which offer new ways of conceptualizing the processual dimensions of our social world. In trans studies this has involved (among other things) attending to the practical effects of legal sex classifications as well as to the continued creation of social and embodied realities through practices of sexual dissidence. In a related shift, new reconstructions of Marx’s work have advanced a processual concept of social form in order to critique capital as an “automatic fetish”: an impersonal economic force that works on and through the actions of humans.

Working from the premise that forms and practices of sexual dissidence threaten the labor hierarchies on which capitalist accumulation depends, this seminar asks how we might usefully think about that threat. The seminar will foreground three related questions. Firstly, we are interested in how the non-representational and automatic movements of capital shape law, social policy, aesthetic production, and culture wars. Is a more robust conception of capital required here? How does capital, as a regime of value accumulation, directly and indirectly impose limits and tendencies that reproduce hierarchical categories of sex and gender? Secondly, we ask how to account for the abstract movement of capital as also reliant upon bodies, both in terms of how “the productive body” is itself produced (Vishmidt 2020) and how dissident bodies are understood (Currah 2022). Finally, we pose the question of how vernacular and counter-cultural aesthetic practices, languages, and concepts  have historically evolved to account for what, in an Argentinian context, Marlene Wayar calls sexual dissidence as opposed to sexual diversity; an appellation she links to a processual concept of mutable identidades cloacalizadas (“gutterized identities”) (Wayar 2024).

In an age of extinction phobias, trad wives, looksmaxxing, and manospheres, the aesthetic dimensions of sexual dissidence point to why reading methods are politically urgent, reminding us that things are never simply themselves; that it matters how we read and which objects we choose to read. In this regard, what do Marxists need to learn from transfeminism? How do we become better readers of vernacular, sensory, experimental, or otherwise denigrated feminized cultural forms and dissident practices in order to be sensitized to what they have to say about the constitution of sex and gender in capitalist societies?