This issue of Mediations is dedicated to the work and legacy of Kevin Floyd and honors his impact on and commitment to the Marxist Literary Group and the field of queer Marxism. Kevin became a member of MLG while still a graduate student in the late 1990s and remained an active and insightful member until his untimely death in November of 2019 from a brain tumor. He was the first ever Vice President of MLG, as well as the President for three years (2016 – 2018), with his term being cut short by the onset of his illness. Beyond these official roles, Kevin was, in many ways, the heart of MLG. As Neil Larsen explains in his contribution, one of the “coolest place[s] to be” at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association is the MLG/Minnesota Review cash bar and despite the fraught nature of the MLA itself and the impulse to “look over your shoulder for someplace else that was better for your career” there was always one person in attendance that could put even the most anxious graduate student at ease: “across the room, much to your delight and relief, the tall figure of Kevin Floyd and above the murmur of the many animated conversations underway, the sounds of his faintly Texan drawl and of his explosive laugh.”

Kevin embodied the egalitarian mission of MLG, especially its commitment to graduate students. For Kevin, everyone at the Institute for Culture and Society was not only a comrade and a colleague, but a friend – regardless of where they were in their career. As David Pritchard, one of the many graduate students Kevin met and mentored through MLG, observed: “Kevin was the real deal: a true comrade and the model of a revolutionary intellectual. He was a passionate and generous interlocutor; he took the work of graduate students seriously, treating us like peers and comrades rather than underlings.” And this generosity extended well beyond the annual ICS to his graduate students at Kent State University. Allie Brooks was one of those graduate students and remembers, “I was terrified by his intellect but amazed by his kindness and decency to everyone he encountered.” She also asked us to share that she and some of the other graduate students who now have to finish their dissertations without him have organized a reading group in his honor, which can be found on Facebook: “The Floyd Group.”

As Allie implies, Kevin’s compassion for and commitment to graduate students is all the more striking because his “terrifying” intellect and innovation shaped the entire field of queer Marxism. Peter Drucker, for example, acknowledges a debt to Kevin’s The Reification of Desire in his contribution to this issue noting, “All of us queer Marxists who have published since then have been in dialogue with this seminal work. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that we have been writing a series of glosses on it.” Kevin’s impact on queer Marxism extends beyond the page to inspire, entice, and incite current and future scholars. Beyond Kevin’s written work, his selfless mentoring of graduate students, as well as endless collaborations and discussions with colleagues, expands this impact exponentially. Kevin’s last project, the edited collection Totality Inside Out: Rethinking Crisis and Conflict under Capital, is one such collaboration. Unfortunately, Kevin himself was not able to see the finished collection, but his fellow editors, Jen Hedler Phillis and Sarika Chandra, completed the project in his honor and it is now forthcoming from Fordham University Press in January 2022. Kevin’s spirit, then, lives on in both his own words and those inspired by him. It is this intellectual and inspirational legacy that we have aimed to capture in this issue. Indeed, as Rosemary Hennessy recognizes in her contribution, Kevin’s work even has the ability to speak directly to those grieving him: “But I think he would tell us to stop crying now and fold our grief into the aspirations that shaped so much of his writing. Re-reading his work has helped me to recognize the politics of vulnerability he championed: that to be vulnerable is to dwell amid the damage, and to find in it the queer stance that unearths from loss collective outrage and a refusal to forget.”

To that end, the essays collected in this issue highlight both Kevin’s own work, as well as work he has directly inspired. The first three essays present a more personal view of Kevin’s legacy as a pioneer of queer Marxism. We begin with Rosemary Hennessy’s “Queer Dwelling in the Damage: In Memoriam for Kevin Floyd,” which utilizes Kevin’s numerous publications as a roadmap of not only Kevin’s own intellectual journey but that of queer Marxism as a field of study. She articulates the various triangulations of queer theorists and Marxist scholars, such as Adorno, Lee Edelman, and Jose Muñoz that Kevin employed to forge a dialectical understanding between queer theory and Marxism.

In “Remembering Kevin Floyd: Reflections on our Continuing Debt to his Work and Thought,” Neil Larsen describes Kevin’s presence in and contributions to MLG and how he so completely encapsulated the spirit of the organization. He then goes on to present a personal account of Kevin’s growth as a Marxist scholar, paying particular attention to The Reification of Desire, as well as Kevin’s discussions of “automatic subject.” In a similar vein, Peter Drucker’s “Kevin Floyd’s Foundational Queer Marxism: A Tribute” outlines how Kevin paved a new road for queer Marxism that more actively engages with queer theory This active engagement allows for a synthesis of queer theory and Marxism, as opposed to a struggle to choose between the two.

The next two essays are written by two people who were directly mentored by Kevin while in graduate school. The first, David Pritchard, met Kevin at MLG and, though he only saw him once or twice a year, Kevin’s impact on his work cannot be easily measured. His essay here, “Poetry, Sexuality, Totality: On Kevin Floyd and Steve Benson,” uses the central claims of The Reification of Desire to analyze the avant garde poetics of the Language Poets, in particular Steve Benson’s long poem “Blue Books.” His reading of Benson’s various types of improvisation shines new light on the perennial modernism versus realism debate in order to “sublate this stale binary” and instead examine recent forms of “militant poetics” and how they foreground the question of totality, as opposed to aesthetic particulars.

The second, Allie Brooks, worked with Kevin at Kent State, where he was her dissertation director until his untimely death. Similarly to Kevin’s synthesis of queer theory with Marxism, Brooks’ essay, “’Women’s Work’ and the Reproduction of Labor: Revisiting Seminal Marxist Feminist Texts to Reconstitute a Subject for Feminist Identity,” advocates for a type of Marxist feminism that avoids not only class reductionism but also gender reductionism. In other words, she argues that a re-reading of second-wave Marxist feminists of the 1970s will reveal that the particular forms of exploitation seemingly reserved for women were “never about reproductive organs but about the reproduction of labor.” Through this re-reading, then, a Marxist feminist understanding of labor can expand beyond the questions of sex or gender to include all identity groups that are especially exploited by capital.

The final two essays in this issue are re-printed from previous issues of Mediations. Jen Hedler Phillis’s review of Kevin’s book, The Reification of Desire, underscores how this text not only advocates for both queer theory and Marxism, but also reinvigorates our understanding of the central keywords and “orthodox arguments” of both theories. In other words, beyond an inter-weaving of these two theories, Kevin reinterprets and reimagines their respective tenets to show a hidden compatibility. This review also homes in on three of Kevin’s particular readings: that of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Midnight Cowboy (1969), and the gentrification of queer neighborhoods in New York City, in order to emphasize both the scope and impact of Kevin’s intervention in queer and Marxist scholarship.

We end this issue with the words of Kevin himself. This essay, “Reading Life and Death,” was featured in our Spring 2015 issue on Surface Reading and is an eerily timely discussion of the “epidemic of signification” that surrounded the rise of AIDS. Through a reading of Samuel Delany’s Plagues and Carnivals, he shows how the construction and interpretation of “truth” can, quite literally, be a matter of life and death. The parallels of this moment and Kevin’s presentation of it to the COVID-19 pandemic cannot be overstated. For example, this sentence rings just as true, if not more so, today: “Reading that proliferates meaning also produces, in this case, a truly frightening social incoherence.”

Of course, we cannot hope to adequately capture the importance and growing impact of Kevin’s work, nor his personal impact on the lives of his students and mentees, colleagues, friends, and family. Rather, our goal is to present a small tribute to Kevin and his work in order to further his legacy in MLG and Marxist thought more generally.

Lastly, then, I want to say on behalf of the editorial board of Mediations, as well as the entire MLG: Thank you, Kevin, for all that you have given to each of us, to the MLG, and to queer Marxism. We love you and we miss you.

-Melissa Macero, for the Mediations editors