Total Sexual Difference
Volume 38, No. 1
Spring 2026
A special issue on sex and gender, edited by Amy De'Ath.
Introduction: Sex As It Really Is - Amy De'Ath
GENDER IS THE EXTENT WE GO TO IN ORDER TO BE LOVED - Kay Gabriel
On the Cisness of the Bourgeoisie - Emma Heaney
Two Substantialisms: On Value and Sexual Difference - Amy De'Ath
Making Gender on the Shop Floor: Literary Labor in Stone Butch Blues - Samuel Solomon
What can Marxist methods tell us about sexual difference? As this forthcoming dossier suggests, they can help to reveal how the colonial imposition of sex and gender was entangled with the suppression of proletarian gender variance in the capitalist core; they can tell us about the effect of shifting labor relations on the composition of queer and trans subjects; and they can explain precisely why there are zero degrees of separation between sexual liberation and class struggle. Indeed, a critique of sexual difference requires that we restore to the concept of class its richness as a category internally bonded — at the level of capital’s own contradictory movement — to categories of social differentiation. The relation between capital and labor is the analytical root, for instance, when it comes to matters of unwaged and precariously-waged survival, where sexed categories and their orderings can be grasped as an indirect product of capital-in-motion.