Trans*agrarian Marxisms?

Abstract

This article recasts agrarian studies’ concerns with nature, productivity, and subjectivity through the provocations raised by transgender Marxism. Transgender Marxism has interrogated how normative gender, sexuality, and racial dynamics are inseparable from the material and reproductive matrices required for capital. Critical agrarian studies has a long history of carefully tracing out the political economy of agrarian capitalism and resistance to it. Engaging with the unruly materialisms of transgender Marxism would further the work of critical agrarian studies, particularly in regard to the ways gender and sexuality are taken up in the field. The project of transgender Marxism offers a scathing critique of rights-based recognition, hetero- and homonormativity, apoliticized science, and the ways in which the biological family figures at the heart of capitalist reproduction. Such questions have been taken up in small corners of queer and feminist critical agrarian studies, particularly those rooted in the United States, but transgender Marxism offers a new opportunity to bring together the material and historical concerns of the ways agrarian capitalism takes place and creates conditions for unruly forms of resistance. The article demonstrates their possible interconnectivities by exploring three themes: theories of change, the centrality of gender/sex in the agrarian, and unruly, ungrounded materialisms. While primarily a theoretical intervention, the article draws some insights from the authors’ ethnographic work in Paraguay and Colombia to ground the theoretical possibilities in place.