In Sexual Hegemony Christopher Chitty traces the five-hundred
year history of capitalist sexual relations by excavating the class
dynamics of the bourgeoisie's attempts to regulate homosexuality.
Tracking the politicization of male homosexuality in Renaissance
Florence, Amsterdam, Paris, and London between the seventeenth and
nineteenth centuries, as well as twentieth-century New York City,
Chitty shows how sexuality became a crucial dimension of the
accumulation of capital and a technique of bourgeois rule. Whether
policing male sodomy during the Medici rule in Florence or accusing
the French aristocracy of monstrous sexuality in the wake of the
French Revolution, the bourgeoisie weaponized both sexual constraint
and sexual freedom in order to produce and control a reliable and
regimented labor class and subordinate it to civil society and the
state. Only by grasping sexuality as a field of social contention and
the site of class conflict, Chitty contends, can we embark on a
politics that destroys sexuality as a tool and an effect of power and
open a front against the forces that keep us unfree.
