by Alan Sears
Pluto Press
1/20/2025, paperback
SKU: 9780745349435
Our deeply human drive to shape the world around us and fulfill ourselves through labor is subverted by capitalist alienation, leaving us to find fulfillment elsewhere.
As a result, our erotic drives become the central focus for transformation and life-making, but are themselves restricted and fueled by whatever energy is left after completing the monetized or social reproductive work required to survive. This alienation encounters ongoing resistance, as life-making activity can never be fully separated from the person who labors.
Eros and Alienation delves into the underexplored relationship between alienated labor and sexuality. Alan Sears explores the ways this alienation frames the processes of gender and sexual formation, showing how the organization of work contributes to the development of a dominant regime of gendered sexualities, defined by a binary gender mapping of desire as heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual.
Reviews:
"Alan Sears meticulously outlines how capitalism shapes human intimacy. Eros and Alienation offers a sweeping, original analysis that challenges how we think about sexuality, life-making, and building a better world." -- Holly Lewis, author of The Politics of Everybody: Feminism, Queer Theory, and Marxism at the Intersection
"Alan Sears offers a compelling argument on the pervasive alienation of capitalist society that truncates and distorts our capacities for creative expression, love and human flourishing. He maps erotics as a terrain of struggle, both captured by profit and the state, as well as a means of resistance and collective emancipation. Sears shows the vitality and necessity of queer Marxism, deftly synthesized with Black feminism, family abolitionism, social reproduction theory, utopian speculation, and critical theory. This book is a powerful tool towards the reclaiming of ourselves as sexual beings in a revolutionary transformation of society." -- M. E. O'Brien, author of Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care
About the Author:
Alan Sears is Professor of Sociology at Toronto Metropolitan University. He has been writing about queer Marxism for activist and scholarly audiences since the mid-1980s. He is an activist and author of several books including The Next New Left: A History of the Future.