The odd couple. Intersections between subaltern classes and sexualities

Abstract

In contemporary social analysis, the intersection of social class and sexuality has been barely explored. In fact, both have tended to occupy opposite poles in different theoretical issues. In particular, the idea of the displacement of economic claims by cultural ones (of which homoerotic identities would be one of its main exponents), seems to have been reinvigorated in recent years, even taking the form of a zero-sum game. In this article, this opposition will be problematized on the basis of an analysis of the autobiographical discourse by several LGTB intellectuals with working-class backgrounds, both in France and in Catalonia. These exercises of self-analysis combine a denunciation of the homophobia experienced in their families and communities of origin with the critique of class domination and the reproduction of classism in trajectories of social mobility. In the autobiographical stories analysed here, the reflection on class subjectivation (discouraged by the neoliberal hegemony in recent decades) is nourished by a set of categories, metaphors and concepts arising from the reflexivity of the LGTB experiences. These autobiographical reflections show a type of intersectionality that is not that of the fragmentation and atomization of experiences of oppression, but one that provides resonances and parallelisms between different expressions of difference and inequality, of domination and liberation, and that allows the less legitimized areas of subjectivity to be stimulated by the reflexivity developed in other areas of life.