Date: Thu, 15 Sep 1994 09:40:21 -0400 (EDT)
From: Donald Morton <dmorton-AT-mailbox.syr.edu>
To: foucault-AT-world.std.com
Subject: Call for Papers


Since there is considerable discussion of the relation of Marx
to Foucault on the list, I thought this message might be of
interest to some. D. Morton

ANNOUNCEMENT OF NEW JOURNAL
AND CALL FOR PAPERS FOR ISSUE 2

TRANSFORMATION: MARXIST BOUNDARY WORK IN THEORY, ECONOMICS,
POLITICS, AND CULTURE is  a new bi-quarterly journal edited by
Mas'ud Zavarzadeh, Teresa Ebert, and Donald Morton. It is devoted to
classical Marxist analysis of urgent contemporary issues by
bringing back into present discussions such concepts as class,
mode of production, labor theory of value, surplus value,
exploitation, . . .  The first issue, TRANSFORMATION 1:
POST-ALITY: MARXISM AND (POST)MODERNISM, will be published
in November, 1994 (publisher: Maisonneuve Press, 301-277-7505).
We are now receiving texts for the second issue.


CALL FOR PAPERS FOR CONSIDERATION FOR ISSUE 2

TRANSFORMATION  2
THE  "INVENTION" OF THE QUEER:
MARXISM, LESBIAN AND GAY  THEORY, CAPITALISM

TRANSFORMATION 2: THE "INVENTION" OF THE QUEER engages Queer
Theory as an advanced form of bourgeois social theory from a Marxist
perspective. (Post)modern social and cultural theories, and especially Queer
Theory, routinely claim that Marxism lacks a theory of gender/sexuality
and is in fact so fundamentally flawed that it cannot produce one.
TRANSFORMATION 2 contests the question of sexuality through
the discourse of invention (as in such recent books as The
Invention of Ethnicity, The Invention of Renaissance Woman, The Invention
of Pornography, Heuretics: The Logic of Invention . . . ).  Invention is
the latest concept being deployed in ludic theory to try to solve the
historical impasse of social constructionism. While the "constructionist"
view of the (homosexual) subject has become the dominant "progressive"
view today, it is a cultural constructionism promoted by those who
are hostile to a rigorous, determinate constructionism through economics,
class, and the social division of labor, but who think it "unethical"
to rule out the effects of such factors as race, gender, class, sexual
orientation,  . . . (all theorized as effects of culture, representation,
textuality, or ahistorical "matter"). As "constructionism" has
increasingly turned "ethical," it has also turned "inventionist" --that
is, it has become a question of "invention," implying idealistically
that social change has everything to do with the subject's
"inventiveness" in a technicist (often called "technocultural")
sense ("self-fashioning" in New Historicism, "cyborg mutation" in
Haraway, "electric speech" in Ronell, "performance" in Butler,
"choreography" in Drucilla Cornell, "architecture" in Jameson).

TRANSFORMATION 2: THE "INVENTION" OF THE QUEER argues that
"constructionism" is not so much "exhausted" (as we are told in such
texts as Fear of a Queer Planet), but rather has reached an historical
impasse of which the new discourse of "invention" is symptomatic.
TRANSFORMATION 2 will critique today's dominant "ethical and
technicist constructionism/inventionism" as a mystification that
blocks a rigorous theorization of the materiality of the subject
in general and of the homosexual-as-queer in particular. It
investigates sexuality through ideology critique by focussing on such
issues as homosexuality and/in the social division of labor;
queer theory and the new pornotopia; genetics and identity; commodity
fetishism and "queer" readings of Marx; cybersex and libidinal economy;
imperialism and (homo)sexual exploitation; (post)modern indeterminacy and
AIDS pedagogy; text/sex--tech/sex; queering the internet; (re)inventing
the body; lusting and the politics  of lust . . .  We are seeking both
shorter critiques of 10 to 12 pp. on the queer and the everyday, as well as
longer inquiries of 20-25 pp. Please send texts, proposals, and inquiries
for consideration by the editorial collective to Donald Morton,
Department of English, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York
13244-1170.