On June 22, 2019 at the annual Marxist Institute on Culture and Society, many of Kevin Floyd’s comrades gathered at the University of Illinois in Chicago to honor his work. The theme for this year’s institute was Intelligent Idealisms, and it marked the 50^th anniversary of the Marxist Literary Group. Kevin was a longtime active member of the MLG. He had just assumed its presidency, and for decades, he had contributed to this journal. That fall, Kevin was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Like many attending the anniversary event that week, I was still reeling with the shock of his illness and rapid decline. Unlike Kevin, I had not been a faithful attendant of the MLG summer institute, but I knew him well as a colleague, and it was a privilege to be invited to speak about his work. His family requested that we record our panel, and their virtual presence as well as Kevin’s in the room that afternoon was palpable.

I began my remarks by saying that in preparing what I had to say, I was afraid, worried actually, that I would cry when I spoke. A lot. The crying, that is. I was afraid it would be the kind of weeping that once you start you can’t stop, possibly for minutes, even longer. A friend advised me that rather than pretend I could handle this, I should just admit my sadness and fear. My vulnerability. I did. Even then, my voice quivered and against my will, the tears began spilling. Through them, I could see the faces of the others, bereft, mourning our loss, and Kevin’s, and his family’s in the face of the unfathomable.

A year later, I want our grief at Kevin’s suffering from this cancer and his death in November 2019 to bear witness to his rare gifts, his brilliant intelligent idealism, and his work. I feel sure that Kevin would understand our profound sadness. 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.

Ever since 1998 when I first read Kevin Floyd’s extraordinary article, “Making History: Marxism, Queer Theory, and Contradiction in the Future of American Studies,” published in Cultural Critique, he has been my intellectual hero. This essay appeared the year Kevin received his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa, the year he was appointed Assistant Professor at Kent State. In it, he offers a groundbreaking historical and materialist history of sexuality. I remember first reading it as if it were yesterday. As each paragraph unfolded, I found myself managing a visceral sense of ecstasy and panic: here was someone opening up the very path I thought I was carving out between Marxism and queer theory, and doing it so comprehensively, historically, generously. Since then, I have always known I have been working in Kevin’s shadow pursuing a course he first laid out there.

History has a way of blunting the edges of debates that once sharply formed an emergent field of knowledge. The argument Kevin makes in that essay was indeed making history in ways that may be difficult to appreciate twenty years later. He was challenging a widely held idea underpinning an exciting new body of work that called itself queer theory: the notion that sexuality studies and Marxism are incompatible. In queer theory circles, which were then the cutting edge of intellectual life in the humanities and social sciences, Marxism was considered outdated and essentially useless for understanding sexuality. Yet here was a guy making the case for a queer marxism. In the next few years, prominently published interventions in queer thought would begin turning to the vocabulary of Marxism with a renewed and explicit seriousness. Among them were the works of Lisa Duggan, Michael Warner, Lauren Berlant, Jasbir Puar, Martin Manalansan and others. By 2012, however, Kevin was still able to assert in his characteristic quirky way, “We seem to be in a moment in which Marxism and queer studies remain separate, but on the other hand don’t.” A properly dialectical response to the ostensible opposition between them, he continues, “is to be found, today, in the very place where Marxist intellectuals may least expect to find it: within queer thought itself.” “But,” he continues, “one would have to be in the habit of following queer studies in order to know this.”1 Kevin’s extraordinary intellectual contribution is precisely his formulation of that properly dialectical response through his deep engagement with both bodies of work. Based in a rigorously historical and materialist method, his way of reading is at its core dialectical. From an immanent engagement with both Marxist and queer archives, he proceeds to tease out of their phobic polarization common historical roots and shared political desires across capitalism’s economic and ideological restructuring.

In his reading of that polarization, utopia is a central and recurring preoccupation. In fact, it is fair to say that the concept of utopia is the conceptual linchpin in Kevin’s case for a queer Marxism. It is present in his early attention to capitalism’s discontinuity and to the critical knowledges from below to whom it bears witness, a perspective he develops in his case for “The Importance of Being Childish.” Here he reads the representative work of Lee Edelman2 and José Muñoz3 in relation to Theodor Adorno as a teacher of non-identity, temporality, and utopian thought. If you have never read this essay of Kevin’s, read it now. And if you have, I hope you read it again. As you do, I believe you will find yourself, as I did, listening to Kevin, the exquisite teacher and reader, speaking to you about an unfathomable present and future. Here he astutely parses out from the least likely queer writers to be paired—Lee Edelman and José Muñoz—a way of understanding utopian temporality both unlike and akin to Adorno’s. As Kevin follows the tracks laid down by the figure of the child in the work of each, he makes visible to his readers the complex relationship between progress and utopia, history and time.

Progress is for Adorno internally contradictory. It is both stasis and dynamism. As stasis or empty time, progress is like death. It is what Adorno recognizes as capitalism’s power to continue producing more of the same, and in that sense, it is narcissistic. Even as progress for Adorno is the reproduction of capital’s social relations, however, Kevin reminds us that it also “represents for Adorno a genuinely historical, dynamic, social movement forward.” Moreover, progress “also represents a revolutionary break in time that interrupts the constant repetition of that which merely is.”4 In other words, for Adorno, both narcissistic and utopian temporality are irreducible dimensions of historical progress itself that cannot be reconciled.5 “The devastation wrought by progress can be mended if at all only by its own resources never through a restoration of the previous conditions that were its victim.”6 This discontinuity that progress harbors—“its violent and telling manifestations of its volatile nonidentity with itself”—constitutes the materiality of utopian aspiration.7 Unlike Benjamin, Adorno sees progress as neither simply catastrophic repetition nor a redeeming ideal. Rather, for him it is structured by their contradiction. Capital’s triumph over the most radical collective energies indeed does recur, but its repetitive and continuous narcissistic time is interrupted continually by the historical discontinuity of its utopian destruction. Thus, for Adorno, utopia is not conceptualized as “abstract negativity, but as inseparable from damaged life.”8

Kevin reads Edelman’s critique of capitalism’s reproductive futurism and his case for queer non-identity and negativity in No Future as deeply engaged with Adorno yet misunderstanding this concept of utopia. His reading of Edelman is perverse in that he recognizes even in Edelman’s abstracted ahistorical concept of negativity traces of Adorno’s utopian destruction. Edelman dismisses utopian thought as a break from the present that can only result in the end of time, in stasis, or death. But for Adorno, insofar as death signifies a break from the way things are, from the status quo, it is identical to utopian aspiration. The form such a utopian break takes for Adorno, however, is not a deathly plenitude but a non-identity with the present whose destruction we imagine through our rage.

Triangulating Edelman and Adorno with José Muñoz, Kevin celebrates Muñoz’s longstanding engagement with utopian thought and his insistence to bring utopia down to earth. He sees in the practices of the racialized queer kids Muñoz represents in Cruising Utopia aesthetic performances of queer world making that enact a utopia inseparable from damaged life. Here in the devastated urban spaces of New York City, a queer politics enacts counter-history to neoliberal progress. For Muñoz, these queer kids of color represent a willful insistence that echoes Ernst Bloch’s utopian refusal eloquently formulated as “not yet.” This is an insistence “to see an apparently neutralized political present ‘laden with potentiality,’ to find political hope in the face of abundant evidence of its absence, in the face of privatization, lockdown, ‘security’”.9 Such a conception of utopia rescues queer politics from Edelman’s abstract deathly non-identity. It is not an abstraction nor a transcendent escape into no-time. If it is idealistic, its idealism is grounded in the historical discontinuity that conditions continuity, the “indeterminacy and irreducibly historical character of the ‘not yet’” inseparable from loss, anxiety, damage and danger.10

This dialectical and material relation between stasis and change, what is and what can be, undergirds the tempered political possibilities Kevin highlights from his earliest work: of collective resistance and critical imagination, of public discourse and activism that can emerge out of a thoroughly commodified process of community and subject building.11 Such possibility is historically grounded potential manifest in practices of irruptive discontinuity. These practices constitute the seedbed of the revolutionary proposition from which queer marxism’s aspirational praxis springs. The implications of this conception of utopia for politics are profound. Under pressure from queer insights, Kevin nudges Marxism to confront its own “symptomatic sexual blindness” and to revise several of its central concepts, among them the subject of revolutionary political agency.12 Clearly committed to honoring the political and intellectual contributions of gay and lesbian social movement, yet facing squarely the incorporation of homosexuality by capitalism, he articulates the insights of queer theory’s critique of identity into a historical and materialist conception of dialectical change. It is an argument that places Kevin Floyd even still on the cutting edge of a new generation of scholars.

This groundbreaking work is nowhere more evident than in his first book. Kevin published The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxismwith the University of Minnesota Press in 2009. It is his magnum opus. It is also without question the most notable advance in twenty-first century materialist work on Marxism and sexuality. Here he confronts the polarized terrain that divided the study of sexuality from the critique of capital for over a century. Through a rigorous reading of the leading intellectual theorists of materiality, gender, and sexuality, he reveals the reification of the erotic as materially linked to the commodification of social life and the deskilling of the workforce, both overdetermined historical conditions for the emergence of incongruent forms of politics. The same forces that made anti-heterosexist politics possible also marked the defeat of certain forms of working-class struggle. From a forthrightly Marxist standpoint, he sets out to probe that uneven development and split, to foreground not the interdependence of class and sexuality nor their intersectionality but rather their historical specificity and “the liberating capacity of contradiction.”13

The brilliant interventions of this book are multiple: it redirects Marxist scholars to fresh readings of classic texts and re-orients queer theory to address the historical formation of gendered and sexual subjects as capital accumulation shifts from its Fordist to its neoliberal phases. Two concepts anchor these interventions and Kevin’s argument for queer Marxism: reification and totality. “A queer critique of the reification/totality dialectic that is also a Marxian concretizing of this dialectic is my most basic objective,” he tells us, “an objective that insists throughout on the simultaneous convergence and divergence of these open, unfinished, forms of critical knowledge.”14 “What might Marxian versions of totality thinking look like,” he asks, “if they really did incorporate a rigorous account of the complex heteronormative dimensions of the social totality they aspire to map?”15

Again, somewhat perversely—and dialectically—Kevin claims that in such a map Marxism and queer theory actually share an effort to think totality. He sees in queer theory’s scrutiny of heteronormative exclusions and its concept of performativity traces of Marxism’s aspirational conception of social totality, a shared perspective that reads critically capital’s continual imposition of new forms of social differentiation. The aspiration to totality, he reminds us, aims to comprehend capital’s simultaneous unity and differentiation. It is, in short, knowledge capable of negating reification. In wrestling with the concept of reification, Kevin returns most pointedly to Georg Lukács who understands reification as totality’s dialectical other. Reification in this sense is the “misapprehension of capitalist social relations” and its processes of social differentiation.16 In developing this relation, Kevin turns to another theorist of reification, Fredric Jameson. Unlike Lukács, Jameson enables us to see that the processes of reification do indeed distort, normalize, and police, but they also open up capitalist differentiations to possibilities for collective subjectivity that break reification’s spell.17 This contradictory feature of reification shapes capital’s historical formations of sexuality and desire and becomes a condition of possibility for the development of queer forms of critical knowledge.

One of the strengths of The Reification of Desire is that it presents these claims through a critical practice grounded in history. Kevin traces the reification of desire at the turn of the twentieth century as capital managed its crises of accumulation through the engineered rationalization of production and the ideological inducement of desiring subjects that accompanied the advance of consumer culture. He fleshes out “the relation between the dynamics of capital accumulation as they develop over a century in the United States and a reification of sexual desire that attributes to bodies certain new normalized forms of sexual and potentially critical, subjectivity.”18 The hetero-homo binary, he argues, became a way to manage anxieties about changing gender norms as Fordism eroded a Victorian patriarchal gender hierarchy centered on manhood and womanhood and replaced it with mid-century masculine and feminine performance. In chapters on disciplined and performative bodies he turns to cultural icons of masculinity, among them Hemingway’s bullfighter and the Texas cowboy, that represented heteronormative and homosexual difference and reshaped national allegories. In tracing the disarticulation of sexuality from nineteenth-century gender norms, Kevin nonetheless keeps a keen eye on the persistence of patriarchal gender hierarchies and insists that the reification of sexual desire requires a qualitatively new epistemology of gender and a politics attentive to this history.19

Kevin’s case for a queer Marxism that accounts for the history of gender formation remains peerless in its rigor, range, and reach. In addition to Jameson, Lukács, and Adorno, he engages the writings of Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, but also those of Samuel Delaney and David Wojnarowicz, Judith Butler, Herbert Marcuse, and others. The chapter on Marcuse is especially important. Here Kevin’s keen historical and dialectical method reads the aspirations and limits of Marcuse’s concept of reification. He details its interface with a Freudian discourse saturating the mid-century U.S. state apparatus, cultural scene, and homosexual politics. And he puts Marcuse in conversation with the minoritizing versus universalizing typology of Eve Sedgwick. Most importantly, his analysis highlights the historical tensions and correlations between Marcuse’s thought and the efforts of the Gay Liberation movement to translate theory into collective political subjectivity.

In addition to his interventions into cultural theory, Kevin made major contributions to literary criticism and twentieth-century American Studies. His readings of the representation of masculinity in Ernest Hemingway’s work brings a fresh perspective to one of the most over-studied figures in literary and cultural history. At the same time, Kevin is an adept reader of less widely read texts—for example John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy.His analysis of the film as an allegory of three embedded historical moments—the Vietnam War, an emerging Gay Liberation movement, and the crisis in global capital—is original and cogent. The project on masculinity that he launched with Stefan Horlacher of Dresden University focuses on the comparative study of Post-45 and contemporary discourses of masculinity in the U.S. and the U.K. It was awarded a Fulbright award as well as an Alexander von Humboldt grant, initiated shared ventures between Dresden University and Kent State, provoked fruitful intellectual exchanges, and produced two co-edited volumes. All of this groundbreaking work is propelled by Kevin’s relentless focus on capital’s continual advance and its impossible full recuperation of cultural forms.

Not least of all, Kevin’s recent work on social reproduction and the bioeconomy is a major contribution to feminist thought. I had the privilege of hearing about this project in its nascent form. Over the years, I would see Kevin from time to time at conferences, and it was always a treat to catch up. In 2015 at the American Studies Conference in Toronto, we met for drinks and Kevin was his usual effervescent self, talking a mile a minute and brimming over with his latest idea for an essay that addressed the biopolitical turn in feminist work on social reproduction. The idea became his essay “Automatic Subjects: Gendered Labour and Abstract Life,” which was published the next year in Historical Materialism. Feminists had recently begun debating how to understand the bio-economy’s investment in surrogacy and the harvesting of reproductive tissue from stem cells. Several of them (most notably Kalindi Vora, Catherine Waldby, and Melinda Cooper)20 were addressing these developments as relocations of the labor relation to the biological processes of life itself. In his careful reading of these arguments, Kevin makes the case that attributing value-producing agency to sheer biological substance is problematic. Doing so, he claims, assumes a capacity for autonomous value production that obscures the history and sociality of bio-reproduction. There is a danger in granting biological materiality a capacity for the autonomous production of value, he contends, because it abstracts life from capital as a social relation. Arguments that vitalize labor or that see life forms as self-valorizing, he argues, assign capital to a position external to labor and life. He counters that the biomedical mode of reproduction, facilitated by the conjuncture of finance and biotechnology, is best understood in relation to the expansion of capital relative to labor in capital’s latest phase. Here he quite incisively addresses the historical conjuncture we are living in terms of the expansion of debt on the one hand and surplus populations on the other.21 This approach to understanding the absorption of bio-technically abstracted life into value circuits relocates these processes in the global relations of labor that condition the export of people and the growing number of surplus populations in need of strategies for survival. In capital’s newest wave of expansion, diminishing opportunities to perform wage labor accompany the growth of the bioeconomy. As a result, increasing numbers of disposable people, many of them women, are forced to sell the living materiality of their bodies.22 Some enter the pool of reproductive labor that crosses global households; others are disposable populations unable to work. Still others are the “vital remainder” of “bio-available populations,” many of whom risk their health and even their lives in clinical trials, organ harvesting, and blood donation schemes.23

Kevin’s analysis offers a way of thinking that is eerily prescient and attuned to the impact of the Corona virus pandemic whose effects we now struggle to comprehend. Moreover, here, as throughout his work, Kevin’s analysis invites us never to forget that capital continues to accumulate through exploitative social relations. He characterizes the bio-medical mode of social reproduction as “an emergent, gendered variation on a very old story of financial plunder”—that is, capital’s reduction of feminized bodies to a condition of value-dissociated abstract life.24 In the daily reports of those bodies now exponentially impacted by COVID-19, the biomedical mode of social reproduction comes clearly into focus, as does the reduction of some essential labor to value-dissociated life. Statistics on the virus in the United States to date indicate its disproportionately lethal impact on the poor, on prisoners, and especially Black and Latino Americans.25 These stark numbers throw into relief the historical pattern of persistently relegating those bodies that have been racially marked into value-dissociated life.

As his essay on childishness reminds us, however, even in times of massive destruction, within the contradictions of capitalist devastation a persistent non-identity with the way things are endures. As he suggests there, marxist feminist analysis, as only one of many proliferating ‘knowledges from below,’ recognizes that this refusal and reflexive self-awareness points the way to a conception of political agency that cries both “Not” and “Yet.”

In these challenging times of illness and lockdown, I miss Kevin’s clear and incisive reading of contemporary developments. We sorely need his insistence that a Marxist perspective is also fundamentally a queer and a feminist one, which is to say an intelligent idealism. This is a stance committed to making evident capital’s brutal and evolving accumulation of value through the cultural marking of disposable labor and life. It is a perspective that intelligently recognizes the damage of entrepreneurial survival that externalizes death or encodes it in progress even as its down to earth idealism insists the future is not elsewhere but here.

It is significant that Kevin finds the figure for such a perspective in his reading of queer and Marxist thought where childhood appears as the emblem of possibility and discontinuity, the other story that history shelters. This is not the childhood of nostalgia or sentimentality, nor of abstract potential, innocence, or rebirth. For Kevin, the childhood he finds in Adorno and Munoz “figures a critical perspective on the lie of formal equivalence, the lie of identity, an ability to see the naked violence of capital, the sheer strangeness of it.”26 One of the reasons Minima Moralia is a distinctive text of Adorno’s, he tells us, “is its endorsement of this standpoint and its relation to another well known, explicit, personal one signaled in its famous subtitle: ‘reflections from the damaged life.’”27 To dwell amid the damage is childishly to refuse to forget, and it is indeed a queer stance. What is childhood but the simple awareness of what constitutes life and death, an awareness of the contradictions the resigned adult no longer sees? This queer childish stance seems to me to capture something essentially Kevin whose lucidity and playfulness accompanied his most incisive assessments of capital’s “historically radical unnatural character,” its violence, lies, and discontinuity.28

Kevin’s work reveals that he thought deeply about death and about truth as a matter of life and death. For him, some representations of truth can be—are—aimed at extinguishing life. And certain forms of life rest upon disallowing other forms of life, queer forms of life. It is, of course, Kevin’s persistent pursuit of a life-affirming politics that makes his death so crushing. I wrote to him after the cancer had him in its grip that I hoped he was able to embrace this untimely and all too concrete and impossible disease that came into his life as he has so much else—with passion and outrage. It has been an honor for me to follow Kevin’s outrageous clarity through the twists and turns of his professional life and to learn from his writing, his critical eye guiding my thinking like a lodestar marking the path, his sassing, irreverent manner brightening our encounters.

He has been that guide, of course, for so many others who have been animated and inspired by his discerning mind and restless spirit. In his writing, that mind and spirit propel Kevin’s clear prose, which can explain and distill dense theoretical arguments and tease out historical connections without losing any of their complexity. This was one of his many gifts. It is also the mark of an effective teacher. Graduate students I have directed through their doctoral program in English at Rice University, among them Kim Macellaro and Joanna Fax, valued Kevin Floyd’s writing as precisely this sort of teacher. Along with many other students and anonymous readers who Kevin mentored unknowingly from afar, they were major fans of his, and they found in his work a luminous guide. As long as there are books and journals, generations of readers will continue to find such a teacher in Kevin’s work where his voice invites them to locate and multiply queer dwellings amid the damage. His expansive energy remains in the illuminating imprint he has left on entire fields of study and on the lives of so many like me who, in the fullest utopian sense he instructs us to grasp, love him and aspire to pursue the childish life-making paths he has opened.

1. Kevin Floyd, “The Importance of Being Childish,” Works and Days 30.1-2 (2012): 323.
2. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).
3. José Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity(New York: New York University Press, 2009).
4. Floyd, “Childish” 331.
5. “Childish” 332.
6. “Childish” 332.
7. “Childish” 336.
8. “Childish” 334.
9. “Childish” 335.
10. “Childish” 335.
11. Kevin Floyd, “Making History: Marxism, Queer Theory, and Contradictions in American Studies,” Cultural Critique 40 (1998): 188.
12. Kevin Floyd, Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009) 5.
13. Floyd, “Making History” 172.
14. Floyd, Reification of Desire32-33.
15. Reification of Desire9.
16. Reification of Desire17.
17. Reification of Desire22.
18. Reification of Desire35.
19. Reification of Desire80.
20. See Vora Kalindi, Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell, Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs, and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), and Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby, Clinical Labor: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy(Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).
21. Kevin Floyd, “Automated Subjects: Gendered Labour and Abstract Life,” Historical Materialism24.2 (2016): 76.
22. Floyd, “Automated Subjects” 71.
23. “Automated Subjects” 81.
24. “Automated Subjects” 71.
25. See “COVID-19 in Racial and Minority Groups” on the CDC’s website: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/need-extra-precautions/racial-ethnic-minorities.html.
26. “Childish” 332.
27. “Childish” 332.
28. “Childish” 328.