Then why have many of us been so heedless of its presence there, or so reluctant to acknowledge it? Even in scholarship where the left is at its most s*xual, and s*x is at its most left, there are unexplored avenues, missed encounters. Q***r critiques of capitalism frequently eschew or marginalize figures, events, and histories that are central to left scholarship, and s*xuality has an uneven pres
ence in left studies, which has tenaciously explored the intersections of race, gender, and class. Yet separately, and to a much lesser extent together, both research on radicalism and scholarship on s*xuality have been key to theorizing and historicizing politics and identity, gender and s*x, culture and the political economy, racial formations and class contradictions. This issue of ELN invites discussion across a range of disciplines, eras, and geographies on the convergences and divergences between studies of the left and of s*xuality. In thinking through and perhaps within the aporia of left s*x and the s*xual left, what new ways of sensing, relating to, and revolutionizing our world(s) might arise? Bringing the left to bear on s*xuality, we intend to build on exciting developments of q***r Marxism and political-economic analysis. In the spirit of such work, we wish to explore the interpenetrations of s*xuality, race, and capitalism, and to rethink concepts of value, production, reproduction, reification, and totality. However, we also invite contributors to consider how left figures and movements worldwide since the inception of left politics have grappled with s*xuality as a site of struggle, intervention, and re-imagining. What histories of s*xuality, what forms of q***r critique emerge from the left? How might q***r and s*xuality studies be enriched through plumbing leftist culture, politics, and history? Bringing s*xuality to bear on radicalism, we are indebted to and encourage left scholarship’s engagement with LGBT histories. But we also wonder how left studies can avail itself more productively and promiscuously of s*xuality and q***r studies. How might we review radical writing through q***r reworkings of Marxism or through theorizations of identity, difference, pleasure, and liberation within scholarship on s*xuality? How do internationalist, anticolonial, and anti-imperialist movements traverse s*xual revolutions and crises?
