Femboys in the Factory: Trans Labor beyond Abjection?

Abstract

This article aims to explore the political economy of trans life through an examination of the category of the “femboy” as a means for understanding the concrete processes of sexuality and social activity responsible for the internally differentiated valuation of kinds of trans labor and the wider regime of accumulation of which these valuations form a part. Following Kevin Floyd's historical materialist account of gendered performativity, it details the femboy's historical emergence within hierarchies of racialized sexuality. Using the case of online streaming, the article argues that femboys’ disavowal of transness, and intelligibility to dominant regimes of sexuality, subtends their higher valuation than trans women in comparable lines of work. Making use of the case study, the article argues that identification itself appears to affect the judgment and valuation of individuals within the labor process and that such aesthetic judgements—the contours of how capital “sees” its subjects—are both ineliminable and constitutive of the concrete differences that emerge in the process of production. Aesthetic judgment and the process of abstraction therefore offer an entry point into both the analysis of the labor process more generally, and the relations of desire, abjection, and identification that enforce the present subordination of trans people.

Trans life is subject to a variety of disvaluations that we analyze as aspects of both our unique subjection in medical and legal systems and the machinations of contemporary capitalism. We struggle to make livable lives for ourselves, through our production and reproduction. However, capital's orientation to trans labor is neither a uniform or dispassionate one: trans people become expert in the sensuous dimensions of work, and different zones of economic activity have come to find trans labor something to be co-opted, subsumed in conditional or peripheral ways, or indeed desired from us. This article aims to catalogue what Kay Gabriel (2020) identifies as “gender as accumulation strategy” in action; a process by which divisions and disvaluations of labor appear in circuits of production that differentially exploit and expropriate from those subordinated in virtue of their genders to ensure the smooth, continued extraction of surplus value.

This article will explore how trans labor appears and is valued in market-mediated work, particularly focused on the newly emergent figure of the “femboy” as a category of gendered identification, as a means for unpicking the concrete processes of sexuality and social activity responsible for the differential valuation of kinds of trans labor. First, I set out the terms through which gendered and sexualized labor can be understood in the vocabularies of contemporary Marxist-feminists and queer and trans Marxists, in particular Rosemary Hennessy and Kevin Floyd. The analysis of Floyd's thesis on the reification of gender relations helps to establish how the femboy emerges as simultaneously a position of highly political and erotically charged identification and a possibility for public and normative recuperation, through its particular cultural history and the circumstances that have given rise to it. The eventual goal will be to look to one market in which the valuations of transfeminine and femboy labor can be compared: online streaming. From this cultural history and case study, I hope to articulate how femboy labor may come to be valued above that of trans women doing the same work, and what this differential valuation might tell us about the structuring assumptions of queer, trans, and feminist approaches to Marxism that seek to explain social differentiation and relations in terms of labor and value relations.

As a zone of economic activity where the public valuation of an individual's identity and affective connection to viewers is rewarded financially, the audiences and tactics of engagement that streamers engage in can serve as a lens on their positions within relations of valuation and devaluation. Explicitly, the most well-known femboy on the planet is F1NN5TER (from here Finnster), a British Twitch streamer, who has an audience that eclipses those of the most well-known trans women on the platform by many multiples. Without offering any strict causal explanation for the gap between the size of these audiences, it appears plausible that something about the salability of labor that is marked as femboy is evidenced by the difference.¹

I have in mind a few goals in using a niche and potentially superficial-looking category as the target of this work. As a social category that may well, and I believe should, be included under expansive accounts of transness, the category of femboy's investment in gender identity provides an ideal case for examining the material valences of identification itself. Further, it expands the analysis of the devalution of trans and gendered labor in a number of senses. First, it allows an examination of the internal differentiation of trans labor, which is often treated as homogeneous and uniformly abject. Second, it attempts to open up avenues to the analysis of trans labor beyond its historically dominant site, sex work. Although there is an unavoidably erotic and possibly pornographic dynamic at play in the workings of femboy as a category, it is clear that these dynamics spill into relations and activities that are in no way explicitly sexual, and indeed are conducted in environments that are managed to exclude explicit sexuality as such. Third, it offers a view of the potential desirability and positive valuation of trans labor, vexed as it is by the positive valuation's entanglement with a range of political schema which have violent and politically damaging consequences for the trans people stuck within them.

Labor-Power, Concretized

The first task is to explicate those theorizations of the differential valuation of labor-power, which Gabriel's essay develops from Rosemary Hennessy's use of the term abjection:

This differentiation is often articulated within Marxist-feminist analysis as a relegation of feminized subjects, including trans people, to the low- or zero-wage spheres of reproductive laboring. At the same time, trans people are of course employed in “productive” spheres; that is, those aspects of wage labor that are directly subject to the extraction of surplus value. However, within that work, abjected subjects find their labor disvalued, and therefore commanding a lower wage.

As both Hennessy's and Gabriel's works make clear, the phenomenon of abjection therefore appears in two closely related but slightly different forms. First is the devaluation of marked laborers within the market, and second is the elimination of these laborers from the market entirely, relegating them to either different spheres of work not mediated directly by wages or possibly by the labor market at all. Indirectly market-mediated labor is routinely understood as “feminized,” and those differentiated in the market's processes of pricing labor-power are those gendered nonnormatively: “All subjects who transgress this prescribed distribution of gendered bodies are feminized, whether they are men or women. In other words, gender transgression itself bears the mark of abjected devaluation” (Hennessy 2013: 160). I borrow the terminology of the Endnotes collective's (2013) “The Logic of Gender,” an immensely generative contribution to contemporary Marxist-feminism authored by Maya Gonzalez and Jeanne Neton, in the demarcations of both directly and indirectly market-mediated work and waged and unwaged work.

Endnotes (2013) extend this account of “feminization” to the character of the labor composition of the workforce under contemporary capitalism: “The general tendency towards ‘feminisation’ is not the gendering of the sex-blind market, but rather the movement by capital towards the utilisation of cheap short term flexibilised labour-power under post-Fordist, globalised conditions of accumulation, increasingly deskilled and ‘just-in-time.’” The shift of labor between spheres is both an oppressive consequence of this disvaluation and also a site to examine the transformations produced by the differential valuing of groups’ labor, especially when this valuation is seen as differentially positive or is specifically necessary for a particular kind of work. Note that two senses of “feminization” are brought together in these linked accounts. The first indexes the causes of labor-power's devaluation, in the form of the “second skin,” the second indexes its consequences in the form of the “feminization” of devalued workers. The clear implication is that these processes are mutually dependent on each other, and the emergence of new categorical identities cannot be separated from the path through which individuals come to coalesce in different positions within relations of production and reproduction. Gonzalez and Neton take the sense of feminization as a change of composition of labor as “primary, before we attend to the rise of the service sector and the increasing importance of care and affective labor” (Endnotes 2013). At the same time, this characterization of the phenomenon as feminization only makes sense due to this shift being stabilized, naturalized, and justified through its inscription of sexual difference on those subjugated and differentially exploited. In sum, the secular trend toward precarious and cheapened labor-power is subtended by the marking of workers subject to it as feminized, and this marking in turn sets out the liabilities that individuals have to suffering abjection and thus their labor-power being cheapened. Henessey's and Endnotes’ accounts are therefore deeply sympathetic in their tracking of twinned sides of the entanglement of gender and capital. At the same time, the overall tendency toward feminization targets individuals heterogeneously, and along axes that appear to exceed and cut across supposed sexual difference. A central question to answer is therefore how other dimensions of social existence enter into the pricing of labor-power and interact with this expanded sense of feminization.

Hennessy's work connects the mechanism of abjection to the powerful matrix of cultural and social factors subsidiary to the abstractions of Marxist political economy which subtend and enable both its smooth operation in general, as well as its rapid and violent advancement into new geographic and social spheres of activity. These forces are both contingent and chaotic in their action, given their mediation by social interaction, class composition, local political regimes, and competitive markets. Nevertheless, the coordination of these disparate forces is necessary for the continuation of capital's circulation and accumulation (Jessop 1991: 159). These successful coordinations, external to but essential for the operation of circuits of production and surplus-value extraction, comprise what is often termed an “accumulation strategy” which comprises “a specific economic ‘growth model’ complete with its various extra-economic preconditions and outlines the general strategy appropriate to its realisation” (Jessop 1991: 160).

Hennessy explicitly points to David Harvey's (1998) “The Body as an Accumulation Strategy” as an elaboration of the power of categories of race and gender—bodily markings serving as implicit measures of a worker's capacity and value—in constituting the actual movements of the labor market (Hennessy 2013: 127), drawing together the terminology used in Hennessy and Gabriel's work. Notably, Hennessy's term second skin is itself drawn from Jay Prosser's 1998 volume Second Skins, taking transsexuality as a paradigmatic case to explicate the development of the immensely powerful affective and psychic investments in the body which ultimately enter into social relations and markets of valuation and exchange (Hennessy 2013: 126).

Trans Labor, Trans Value

The specific conditions of trans laboring are determined by a number of contemporary political configurations. While in parts of the Anglophone West some degree of legal protection for equal treatment in employment and access to health care irrespective of one's work status have been secured, though with an immediate and politically vicious campaign to eliminate them (Bakko and Kattari 2021: 75; Cahill 2020; Raha 2017; Pape 2022), these achievements of formal equality in labor markets have done little to guarantee access to subsistence for the majority of trans people. The result is a general immiseration of trans people in and out of employment. Taking the US as an example, the 2015 US Transgender Survey (USTS) found among their respondents an unemployment rate of 15 percent, triple that of the United States as a whole at the time, and a significantly higher rate of unemployment among trans people of color, of between 20 and 35 percent, with similarly higher rates of poverty among trans people of color (James et al. 2016). Further, trans people surveyed were significantly more likely than the general population to be self-employed or employed informally or performing sex work.

Gabriel's (2020) discussion rightly points out that the historically dominant trajectory through which trans social life and subsistence is possible is sex work, paraphrasing Viviane Namaste's discussion with Monica Forrester, Jamie-Lee Hamilton, and Mirha-Soleil Ross included in Namaste's volume (2005) Social Change, Sex Change that “the social enclaves that have historically enabled trans communities are predicated on the political struggles of trans sex workers, a category largely made up of women of colour” (Gabriel 2020: 29). The USTS results show that one in five trans people surveyed had at some point in their lives been involved in sex or other “underground economy” work (James et al. 2016: 158). This indicates that while the historical connection between trans and sex work politics is still deep, there is a significant amount of trans life and work that is occurring along different, and potentially new, paths of employment, subsistence, and reproduction.

In a moment of significantly increased collective visibility and intelligibility, being an out trans worker is a highly differentiated but more viable option in a variety of fields. These arenas within waged work are highly ideologically contested, opening access to stable employment that secures the potential of financially secure lives, transitions, and social goods for trans people. At the same time, this access is subject to both the disciplining of nonnormative gendered bodies within the workplace as well as the possibility that workers proactively identify with capitalist forces to entrench whichever differentiating factors open up wage work for them and not others.

Michelle O'Brien's (2021) essay in the volume Transgender Marxism, “Trans Work: Employment Trajectories, Labour Discipline, and Gender Freedom” analyses the outsized presence of trans people in the tech sector as one such case. The presence of a disproportionately trans workforce is accompanied by accounts of these workers’ political agitation and collective organization, both within the workplace and for their surrounding local communities through their position of relative security. At the same time, the trans woman working in tech is the figure around which the fascist and misogynistic theoretical sinkhole of “gender accelerationism” takes its launch point. “Gender Acceleration: A Blackpaper” (n1x 2018), which was the object of a temporary moment of interest as an endogenous trans response to the pressures of capitalism on gendered subjection through work, identifies feminization as a necessary result of the qualitatively specific character of tech work. From there, it generalizes (through some highly speculative and deeply essentialist moves) that the ultimate goal of positive identification with the feminized character of ever more precarious, partial, and distributed work is the feminization of all workers. As “The Logic of Gender” helpfully illustrates, this general tendency toward feminization involves the general subjection of all workers to the feminized conditions of precarious, flexibilized, and deskilled work. Gender accelerationism takes this tendency as both ontological and desirable, heralding a transformation that will produce a condition of similarly abject laboring for all.

Disregarding the philosophical issues with the work itself, the Blackpaper highlights how the internal differentiation of workers through the differential valuation of their labor can produce political fracture among groups nominally in similar positions. All trans women are made abject, but only a specific kind of aesthetically constrained, educated, and financially secure trans woman has the possibility of acting as a political agent on behalf of capitalism's feminizing vanguard, and therefore ride the catastrophic wave of financialized capital's encroachment into, and subsumption of, digital spheres of social life, communal subsistence, and knowledge circulation which constitute a multiplicity of forms of trans life in general.

The rest of this article will focus on one of these forms of trans life at the peripheries of market mediation in particular: the “femboy.” As a category, “femboy” has expanded from being an aesthetic marker encoding highly regulated standards for transfeminine transition, gender expression, and desirability to a salable part of unwaged, but market-mediated media circulation. Through Kevin Floyd's discussion of performance as a kind of labor complexly mediated by capital, I will describe the transformation of gendered labor from self-fashioning through consumption into market-mediated production, and the social lines of division and solidarity specific to the presentations, strategies of transition, and, most interestingly, the disavowal of transness as such, into which femboys offer a vantage.

Reification and the Labor of Performance

Kevin Floyd's (2009) The Reification of Desire advances a thesis that gender as a social form is mediated by the mode of production and the dominant regime of accumulation. To this end, he identifies a reification—explicitly, the substitution of the relational and qualitative content driving a dynamic for a static, and mutually isolated collection of distinct properties, autonomous to human action—of desire, or erotic energy, which occurred through the emergence of psychoanalytic sexual knowledge and the reconfiguration of spaces of production and leisure in mid-twentieth-century Western capitalism. This reification detaches erotic energy from its inevitable, naturalized association with the male body, and introduces a historical moment where a new kind of social action becomes necessary to reinstantiate the coherence of male embodiment: the performance of masculinity (62–65). Floyd skillfully offers an account of how a theory of gender as performative can be understood as a product of a particular historical conjuncture, relying on both corpuses of scientific knowledge as well as the exigencies of mid-century American capitalism's settlement of wages and housework.

The performance of masculinity occurs through the entrainment of habits and skills in the sphere of consumption, in particular one in which “the regulatory norm of gender [Judith Butler] theorizes instantiates . . . the mode of regulation that will ultimately secure an intensive regime of accumulation” (102). The social regulation of consumption, the organization of household life and economic power, and the entrainment of skills into bodies such that they can be legibly interpreted as masculine coconstitute each other, and together entrench a regime of accumulation, through which any particular gendered formation is a tactic to navigate. The historically operative accumulation strategy, expansive as it may be, includes not only a gendered division of labor but a dynamic imperative for the coherent gendering of its subjects as this division changes, and the performatively generative consumption activity necessary to satisfy this imperative.

Importantly, Floyd's work shows that this kind of entrainment and performance is laborious in a specifically Marxist sense. Labor is, within Marx's texts, the intentional and purposive activity through which individuals encounter the external world to both transform it, and reciprocally transform themselves (Gould 1978). As he writes in the first volume of Capital (Marx 1990 [1887]: 283),

This activity occurs necessarily in all historical moments, and only under capitalism is labor systematically organized such that the necessary labor for human subsistence must be abstracted into labor-power and exchanged for wages. The human capacity to labor is retained in other contexts though: using the standard example of someone producing a table from timber, an individual could be employed by a furniture manufacturer in return for wages, or employed in a state factory in return for wages, or could be making tables for direct sale as a craftsperson, or could be making tables for their own personal use and enjoyment. Each activity indexes a different mediation of labor and exchange relations and different location with respect to the spheres of market mediation and wage labor. Notably, however, all of these mediations of labor include their reciprocal effects: the use of, and wear on, the body and the associated entrainment of skills, habits, and knowledge into it. The activity of gendered performance is exactly of this kind: it is the reciprocal effect on an individual of particularly stylized laboring.

Transness therefore appears as a conscious adoption of the patterns and tactics of stylization an individual desires. It requires a recognition that the imperative to self-stylize arrives unbidden, but that it can be resisted and taken into one's own hands. An individual who arrives at this place of consciousness in no way leaves the hierarchical valuations and structures of discipline immanent to the regime of stylization, and indeed this kind of gendered unruliness is one of the basic markers for devaluation within these systems.

Floyd's focus in The Reification of Desire is on the Fordist economy and its transformative impact on the performance of masculinity, but I extend this analysis to the neoliberal era and its accompanying shifts in sexual and gender politics to propose a new reification of gender at work. This contemporary shift in the social form of gender is what I believe opens the space in which the femboy has emerged as a more intelligible and therefore dominantly valued identification. The shift in question is the conceptual detachment of sex, gender, and sexuality in mainstream liberal political discourse and its attendant effect on the conceptualization of transness, a shift I believe is best understood as a novel reification.

As discussed already, the historical tie between trans and sex working communities establishes a common material tie between sexual practice and trans social identity. Contemporary configurations of gender suggest the possibility of the disentanglement of the various aspects of gender in such a way that these essentialized links could potentially be broken. The model of gender in circulation in progressive and trans-inclusive spaces explicitly supposes the mutual independence of an individual's gender identity, presentation, and expression, sexual characteristics, and sexuality, and has moved from online circulation to general pedagogical and training tools and research methodologies (Ho and Mussap 2019). This working model offers distinct spaces for trans people to occupy abstractly: with our sex as is assigned at birth, and gender as we identify, both of which can be captured on discrete spectra, independently from both presentation and sexuality. At the same time, actual transness seems inescapably drawn into concrete association with sexualization and sex work, if not as essential property then as qualitative and historical detail that obtains and structures the conceptualization of transness and, in many ways, trans life itself. This content, and therefore the specific relation between each of these aspects of gender-sexuality, is evacuated in the reification of each aspect of gendered being into independent and discrete quantification.

Producing a historically concrete account of the contemporary reification of gender in both its objective and subjective dimensions would exceed the immediate scope of this article. However, in its broadest strokes, the configuration of gender in the age of mass liberal trans politics demands locating the trans individual as a civil subject, devoid of preexisting political content except for a lack of specific legal protection and recognition, and therefore similarly amenable to citizenship and formal equality as all others. Gabriel (2020: 30) characterizes this political tendency as a “trans-inflected homonationalism focusing narrowly on rights and representation centered on easing the lives of white bourgeois subjects of the imperial core.” Liberal reconceptualizations of transness therefore place trans subjects into the schema of natural and politically neutral biological, psychological, and sexual variety, and counterpose the politically neutral and vulnerable trans subject to the one described by the reactionary force it is faced with: inherently sexualized, predatory, and abject. On the other hand, in the domain of waged work, at least some sites of wage labor, in becoming more distributed, precaritized, and devalued, are in Endnotes’ terming feminized. This transformation appears to be degendering the household wage provider, such that the typical wage laborer can no longer to be expected to be legible as a particular gender just by understanding the location in the economy and nature of the work they carry out. This paired construction of an inessential and politically inert trans subject and the debasing of all work to the lowest, and most precarious, common denominator reflects the subjective and objective sides together of a contemporary gender matrix that has further dissolved many of the connections between sex, labor, and stylization of its historical predecessors. Endnotes (2013) view this as a struggle over what they call the “naturalization” and “denaturalization” of gender, a dialectic organized by transformations in the prevailing regime of accumulation and reified in the form of a conceptual scheme in this particular moment.

The following sections will aim to examine how this phenomenon might occur in the specific case of femboys: a stylization of the body and social action that appears to be complexly and ambivalently related to the dominant regime of gendered desire and legibility, but into which it can ultimately be suitably incorporated. Through exploring the historical emergence of the category, I hope to explain how it comes to occupy a different position to transfemininity in relations of value and the incorporation of its attendant self-stylizing labor in public economies.

Whence the Femboy?

The category of femboy encodes an identity category adrift from both dominant patriarchal and trans subcultural norms of gendered intellection. Its initial elaboration occurred in a cultural space that enabled the expression of trans and gender-variant desire, though amid conditions of racial and gendered vigilance and anxiety that decisively shaped the initial expression of the identity. Though both its determinate content and the environment in which it may intelligibly circulate have been thoroughly transformed, we may still track the slow changes through which this initial expression has surfaced within public consciousness in a form still connected to its initial moments of formulation.

The category of femboy emerged with two distinctive criteria for membership: first, a highly effeminate gender presentation, sometimes aided by hormonal interventions, and second, a commitment to a male gender identity. Jules Joanne Gleeson's (2018) essay “An Anatomy of the Soy Boy” offers an extended exploration of the circulation of femboy aesthetics in the underbelly of the queer internet: 4chan's /lgbt/ board has inculcated a culture among its largest contingent of participants, trans women and queer boys, of constant mutual evaluation of one's ability to achieve a highly restrictive and strenuously biomedical embodiment and presentation. This stylization is focused on the communal understanding that transition after puberty is hopeless due to the physiological changes of adolescence that cannot be overcome, and a scathing and hypercritical attitude to those trans people exhibiting their disvalued transness publicly. The norms are nominally affirmative of trans identities and impulses, but channel them into a deeply restricted array of trajectories for what appropriate and survivable trans life might be, with the only alternative, and one seriously considered, promoted, and suggested to other users being the repression of one's desires for transition, if one cannot comply with these norms. The variety of terms for people who fail to satisfy these trajectories (hon, troon) and the ease with which they are thrown around as not only disvalued but failed and disqualified conditions of gender belies the strength and ubiquity of this normative aesthetic regime.

This attitude to transition encourages and has developed a range of different gender modalities. A term like boymoder picks out those people who may undergo hormonal transition without coming out, with a classic identifying feature being an oversized hoodie masking the changes in body shape happening underneath. Femboy points to another, more publicly livable identity: one where effeminate presentation and stylization is accompanied by both a maintenance of male gender identity and, in some cases, hormonal interventions that preserve certain markers of maleness, in particular a flat chest and capacity for erections. Communal knowledge recommends the use of bicalutamide and SERMs as hormone options that achieve a significant feminization without breast development, and DIY resources reflect this kind of systematization of femboy transitions as communally recognized and supported, outside of the pathways of coherent gendering demanded by present medical practice (Transfeminine Science [2019] 2022).

Importantly, this typology is flexible, and has been decisively transformed as femboy identification and aesthetics have escaped its subcultural homes and entered into wider circulation. Writing in 2018, Gleeson notes that “the Femboy has been little heard of even across the rest of the internet,” and as such, the sense at the time was that femboy rigidly encoded both a positive identification with maleness and disidentification with transness. Using the sidebars of subreddits as an indicator of its communal norms, En, En, and Griffiths (2013) find that “r/femboys states as one of its rules: ‘No transsexuals! This is for feminine boys! MtF transsexuals are girls.’” (emphasis original), but a return to the same subreddit today shows a distinct change in the attitude relating identification as a femboy and one's gender modality: “Users must clearly be femboys, or femininely presenting trans-women/trans-men/nonbinary. This is a place for femboys, trans-women, and femininely presenting people. Having some body hair doesn't automatically break this rule, but excessive body hair most likely will.” While the dissociation between transness and femboy identity has clearly been overcome, the regulative norms of the identity and its communal enforcement are as explicit as ever. That loosening rests on the presence of people of a variety of genders taking up the aesthetic themselves and forcing a reckoning with the bounds of the identity while expressing commitment to and uptake of the aesthetic features of the category.

The origins of those aesthetic features are closely tied to a common set of cultural and embodied signs and markings. The bodily features include, as discussed, feminization without breast growth and most particularly hairlessness (exemplified by /r/femboys’ suggestion that even if it doesn't automatically place the post up for removal, having some body hair is grounds for suspicion for one's authenticity as femboy). In general, the aim is a look continuous with juvenile femininity, attached to the idea that the idealized trans presentation is only possible atop a canvas of a prepubescent neutrally gendered body. Clearly there is a deeply racialized element to this: both the possibility of hairlessness concretely, but also the presumption of a degendered prepubescent body are afforded vastly more easily to white people (Gill-Peterson 2018: 184), and while there are clear public counterexamples (one of TikTok's popularizers of the now ubiquitous #FemboyFriday hashtag is a nonbinary Black content creator), the dominant image of femboys is white.

Moreover, the origin of the identity within 4chan and Reddit spaces has meant that Japanese media sources in particular, such as anime and video games with anime art styles, have been the cultural sources supplying its idealized figures. Given the forms’ long history of effeminate male characters, many have made an impact on the production of femboy aesthetics, art, and cosplay: Astolfo, a character from Fate/Apocrypha, originally released as a light novel in 2012 and subsequently in manga and anime adaptations as part of the larger Fate media franchise, has become one of the most iconic fictional femboys, as has Bridget, one of the characters within the Guilty Gear fighting game series, who was depicted with a Mars symbol attached to her outfit in previous entries into the series, establishing her character both narratively and visually as a crossdressing boy. In the latest installment in the series, the symbol was changed to a combined Mars-Venus symbol typically associated with androgyny, and her narrative indicated a shift in her identification to being a trans woman, prompting a defensive backlash about the “loss” of an iconic femboy character (Reidel 2022; Pearson 2022).

The positive identification with these characters, notably both white in their own characterization (Astolfo is a reimagination of a historical character, originally a knight of Charlemagne's from the medieval body of literature comprising the Matter of France [Muir 1985; Tomotani and Salvador 2021], while Bridget is canonically British) but depicted in distinctly anime visual styles, reveals in part an investment in a racially reactionary politics of effeminacy, but with its organization reoriented. Gleeson's account of the origins of femboy as a category notes its emergence in parallel to the development of a new vocabulary of right-wing derision and abuse of their opponents by describing leftist and liberal men as “soy boys.” Soy is both a staple protein across east Asia and has been the object of conspiracies about its supposedly high estrogen content and feminizing effect on those who consume it. The figure of the soy boy colocates right-wing ethnonationalist concerns about the racial composition of the nation with a concern about gendered degeneracy; the “amateur endocrinology” rests on the assumption of the effeminacy of Asians which threatens the well-being of Western men (Gleeson 2018; Gambert and Linné 2018). The collapse of the visual iconography of the two categories is evident from Gambert and Linné’s (2018: 149) example of a tweet showing an image of Astolfo drinking a soy-based meal substitute, derisively suggesting his presentation as an effeminate boy is the consequence of his diet. Beyond the discussion provided in that paper, however, the image of Astolfo is an edited piece of pornographic fan art (CILICA 2017), with the bottle of Soylent covering a Black penis, thoroughly cementing the association between the femboy's sexually receptive and abjectly effeminate position with a deep anxiety about the associated racial and sexual violation of the white race.

Within the matrix that both soy boy and femboy political associations have developed, specifically the Western cultures engaged in the reception of media, including pornography, from Japan and east Asia, queer Asian men are seen as inherently “effeminate, soft and poorly endowed” (Nguyen 2014: 2), and this has been projected onto characters stylized in Asian media irrespective of their actual race. However, instead of being taken as a devaluation, effeminacy, and indeed softness and potentially lack of endowment, is a virtue to be sought after and achieved through biomedical intervention and presentation changes. The femboy is indeed a rewiring of both reactionary and conventional trans associations of desirable gendering, but one formed within a frame that explicitly ties this gendering to race through a politically odious essentialization. This frame, of both conventional gendering and white racialized anxiety, has still enabled queer and trans desires, slippery and effervescent as they are, to become intelligible through positive identifications with past objects of sexual abjection and derision. The femboy appears as a coherent form within which the structure of desire offered by this political environment is tacitly accepted, but where impulses toward male effeminacy and transness in the broadest sense find an avenue for their successful expression and recognition.

How to Sex a Femboy

The degree to which femboy aesthetics and identity are subsumed by pornographic and explicitly sexualized content is highly contested, and indeed Nguyen Tan Hoang's project in examining Asian American queer sexual representation rests in particular on the relationship between effeminacy and bottoming as a sexual practice. Helpfully, Nguyen (2014: 19–22) offers one strategy for navigating these related aspects of racialized sexuality: a rejection of the reinscription of normative masculinity as the only desirable positionality, and a holding to the distinct pleasures and liberatory possibility of a positive identification with bottomhood, through accepting in some conditional sense its attendant abjected effeminacy. It is notable here that abjection, in a slightly different sense, is raised as the prospect for the least desirable or most unlivable positions within sexual hierarchy, and abjection in this sense might be conceived of as the “second skin” modifying or debasing one's exchange value within an erotic economy, and can be directly tied to Hennessy's sense of abjection when the markets in question are those related to sex work and pornography (Hennessy 2013: 144).

Within this triangulation of effeminacy, race, and sexual role, femboy identity offers a parallel strategy, centered on the possibility of recovering the desire for effeminacy, but with both a strong rejection of its associated racialization and an indeterminate or open relationship to the role of bottoming. While femboy sexualities offer the potential for strongly “gender stratified” relationships that link feminine presentation to bottoming (Vytniorgu 2023), the specificities of femboy transitions are specifically geared to allow the potential for the opposite. Bicalutamide, as the anti-androgen of choice for femboys, minimizes testosterone's effect on the expression of bodily characteristics but maintains it at a high serum level and therefore generally leaves the capacity for erections intact. The projection of femboys as potential tops is a reversal of the supposedly tight link between abject effeminacy and bottoming as a sexual role; notoriously Astolfo as a character is memetically associated with his being well endowed.

Perhaps most interesting and politically significant though is the middle space between these two poles. Within the landscape of contemporary gender politics, femboys offer the potential for a form of gender nonconformity that disavows transness, and with it, the necessary sexualization of gender itself. The massed tangle of cultural associations with transness regularly circle trans individuals as figures of sexualization: whether in individual psychopathology, as object of fetish, or tied to sexual practice, transfeminine people's disqualification as livable subjects rests in large part on their inscription as both inevitably sexualized and sexually incoherent (Stryker 2008: 148; Raha 2017). Nat Raha explicitly ties this state, what she describes as “brokenness,” to the disvaluation of both trans people's bodies and labor.

A consequence of the liberal reification of gender is the opening of the interstices of the matrix of gender properties that previously went unexplored, and femboy fills one of those specific gaps; sex: male, gender identity: male, gender expression: feminine. Similarly distinguishing itself from other social categories that might have occupied this position such as transvestite, it is self-consciously neither a pathology nor a social activity, but rather an identity: a means of forming coherence and recognition in virtue of its status as a coherent combination of gendered traits. The idea that this discretely could capture the constitutive nature of femboy identity is thrown into relief by all the specific political content and the local convergences that brought this term into contact with this combination of gendered features; similarly, by the clear subjection to stringent standards associated with the category membership, rather than simply a benign, representative description of the factual nature of particular individuals’ gendered existence. Femboy is not merely a descriptor of a position within an abstract space, but is a normative status conferred conditionally based on judgements against rigidly enforced standards.

However, the contemporary discourse finds an imperative in noticing the existence of individuals at each of these interstices and proffers them an ahistorical inevitability. Lacking the same degree of narrative baggage as trans people, femboys can appear as a nonnormative gender category less prone to being immediately sexualized, as they are less inherently anything: they index merely a possible position in the combination of independent spectra. What is crucial to stress is that there certainly is determinate political content to both trans and femboy subject positions, and both may be reincorporated into the contemporary, reified schema of gender, but the success of this reincorporation is indexed by, and is indeed coconstitutive of, the relative abjection of gendered subjects and their labor. The argument here is that femboy as an identity, through its affinities to and coordinations of dominant patterns of desirability, is more comfortably reincorporated as a politically benign and salable public identity in at least some markets and contexts, where trans womanhood is subject to a mass political struggle that extends in time far beyond the present reorientation of reified gender and directly strikes at contemporary anxieties and reactive formations around sexual and social reproduction and the family.

The dynamics of the femboy disavowal of transness become crucial in explaining this difference; the abstract position of femboy can be achieved exclusively through changing one's presentation, and the disavowal of transness offers both a resistance to the position's automatic sexualization and the necessity of changing of one's embodiment such that one would be enmeshed within nonnormative forms of life and social reproduction (Raha 2021). Defending the public visibility of a femboy does not require engagement in political struggle, it can be advocated for through a denial that any political struggle is necessary for a femboy's inclusion in the social order. Femboy is a category uniquely able to enclose trans social and medical practices without raising the specter of trans sexual politics and its attendant abjection. Indeed, given its thorough and highly specific subcultural origin, it is able to be subsumed into at least some of the dominant norms of racialized and sexual difference, and therefore resist its devaluation.

Watching Gender

The task now is to see whether we can observe the differential valuation and regulation of differently styled activities of gendering. If our activities of consumption can themselves be subsumed and turned into potential labor for exchange, then this is the labor that is up for consideration in exchange. One such category of activity is streaming: the production of content for real-time consumption on massive public platforms, generally without the expectation of a wage in return but earning income through a cut of advertising revenue and sponsorship in the case of popular creators, and otherwise subscriptions and tips (Woodcock and Johnson 2019; Panneton 2019: 45–51).

Streaming takes the work occurring in an originally indirectly market-mediated domain and subjects it directly to the conditions of unwaged piecework, directly quantifiable in its marketed outcomes. The work of streaming evidences both formal and real subsumption. The organization of the activity of streaming is not yet subjected to abstraction in time; there are no clocks governing its operation in the general case. However, the imperative to meet the marketized conditions of streaming work has started to qualitatively transform the conditions and content of the work: once reaching a certain commercially relevant threshold, streaming itself becomes a professional activity that must be more strictly regulated in time and can generate new labor itself in economies of video and audio production, design, promotion, and moderation, with varying degrees of wage provision and labor organization among all these domains of activity (Johnson 2021; Lo 2018). The political economy of streaming is contentious and in flux, with continual contestation over the technical means through which exchange has occurred (Partin 2020) and the working conditions and labor organization of performers (Johnson and Woodcock 2021), with conditions defined by both precarity and the thorough blurring of the work/leisure distinction, as well as a distinct powerlessness on the part of workers and streamers who find that Twitch, as provider of their technical means of production, is continually invested in their dispossession and the capture of larger portions of the returns on their work.

We can see at work here a twinned expression of the general tendencies of labor under neoliberal capital, as well as a distinctly gendered component. This is expressed throughout Endnotes’ analysis of gendered differentiation in labor valuation imminent to capital, but effectively transformed in the contemporary configuration of Western capitalism. The precarity, piecework, and disposability of labor has exploded in magnitude in the era of the dismantling of waged, indirectly market-mediated—that is, state-organized—organizations of socially reproductive labor. The trend of precaritization has engulfed whole industries, at the same time as more aspects of our personal lives have been subsumed into capitalist systems of labor and exchange (Endnotes 2013). At the same time, the differential valuation of workers’ labor accentuates the global trends toward piecework and precarization: as noted earlier, Kay Gabriel states that “abjection contours not only what you do for a wage, then, but un- and underemployment, and the social precarity that follows” (Gabriel 2020: 28).

Two consequences may be apparent in this particular conjuncture. First, more individuals attempt to labor without the assurance that it is going to be rewarded with payment, and when this labor is in oversupply, the differential valuation of people's labor is reflected not as a lower price but as a greater likelihood of that labor simply not being exchanged. In these kinds of piecework economies, the evidence of collective judgements about the value of trans labor can putatively be tracked through the social validation of trans work as worthy of exchange at all. Second, laborers who find themselves devalued in dominant cultural spheres may prospectively turn to activity outside of the traditional workplace as a potential source of income, taking up the tools offered as a result of the process of ever more intensive subsumption of domestic and leisure activity.

The qualitative nature of this work is crucial in determining what aspects of labor contribute to its valuation. The labor of streaming games depends on building and retaining a large audience who are primarily focused on giving attention to the streamer as a personality and performer. As T. L. Taylor (2018: 92) describes in Watch Me Play, “Most of their viewers are not there to learn how to play a specific game better but instead for the streamer themselves. The real or imagined authenticity of the streamer, even within a performative context, becomes a powerful affective anchor in fostering supportive communities along with building audience connection and loyalty.” As such, any tools that can be used to construct a compelling streaming persona are both a way to identify and target a particular audience and keep them watching. Taylor describes the distinct emotional labor involved in a streamer mastering, heightening, and directing their everyday expressions of self into aspects for their on-stream performance: “Much of everyday life is performative, and live streaming merely picks up on that theme and amplifies it for entertainment purposes” (87).

Streaming is therefore a means of taking a mixture of activity that would have already happened—gaming and conversation in one's leisure time—which is deliberately stylized, and through mastery of the skills of personal presentation and performance to an audience, turning it into labor up for exchange on the market. This is exactly a case of performative labor ultimately being subsumed by capital. Floyd remarks in his work that gendered performance appears to occur within the domain of consumption, going so far as to call it labor without capital. While a whole chain of productive relations emerges to feed the activity of gendering (someone must produce and sell the fishing rods and power tools to suburban husbands), the performance of one's gender is on the one hand analytically severed from capital in Butler's terms, and on the other hand resolutely unproductive in Floyd's reconstruction. The paradigmatic spaces of masculine performance—the fishing boat, the toolshed, the sports stadium—are, by their nature, zones of consumption. The activities of gendering, at least in the case of Fordist masculinity, occur in the affordances and gaps of a work week organized by the sale of labor-power; it is certainly subject to an “increasingly abstract temporality of accumulation” (Floyd 2009: 113). At no point, however, does Floyd suppose this activity ever becomes the object of exchange.

The present tendency toward the subsumption of labor does not appear to respect the separation of gender into the sphere of consumption. The elaboration of a novel kind of reification of gender tracks the emergence of a new era in political economy dominated by austerity and an unchecked tendency toward crisis, one in which the situation of marginal, abjected laborers has become more characteristic of the workings of the system itself. As such, performative labor may enter into relations of exchange, paradoxically starting with the most devalued.

The symmetries here to trans life are transparent. First, we can already see the exchange of the most severely abject labor through the already discussed predominance of trans individuals within sex work, where the practical links between spheres of precarious and casualized work and gendered marking are already in place. Pornographic streaming is a well-established mode of sex work operated through different channels to games streaming, and trans porn is a well-established niche within this (Pezzutto 2019). Streaming, whatever the content, involves this platform-mediated precarious work, monetizing the affective relationships between performer and audience, contoured by the salability of those features of the individual's performance and presentation the audience differentially invests in and values.

Second, both streaming and at least some aspects of transition involve turning the intentional labor of self-fashioning into a potentially salable product. Trans streamers themselves therefore are engaged in one mode of this kind of marketisation of personal labor, with the stylization of that labor as trans a direct factor in generating emotional and economic relations to their audiences. The valuation of this work in the market is still subject to its accordance with the norms and hierarchies that continue to influence these more marginal spaces even as they offer marketable sites of exchange to those who use them.

If trans labor is devalued because of its aesthetic or stylized properties, we should expect to, and indeed do, see the consequence as a lack of salability of trans labor on an open marketplace. Notably, while there is a trans presence throughout gaming and tech spheres, transparently given Michelle O'Brien's earlier discussion as well as the pervasive influence of gamer culture and east Asian media within trans subcultural space throughout this essay, and there are a vast array of trans streamers, there are none as popular as Finnster. Finnster is not only the most widely viewed femboy streamer on Twitch but possibly the most widely viewed trans streamer on the platform. Finnster is also the most visible self-described femboy in any part of the public sphere. Finnster's audience dwarfs all but the most popular and well-known English language trans streamers, Umbra, Suzi “The SphereHunter,” and Keffals being the closest that the author has found, each with between 50,000 and 180,000 followers, while Finnster has over 730,000 as of the time of writing.² There is, as per Finnster's own Reddit, a “reasonably packed niche market” for femboy streamers—explicitly, for the intentional performance of femininity by individuals who identify as male—which greatly exceeds the market for the performance of gender-constitutive labor of any given trans person. It appears that, at least in this singular and highly culturally specific context, the labor by which femboys self-fashion their gender is valued higher, or at least is suitably valued by a larger number of people, than the self-fashioning gendered labor of trans people.

Sianne Ngai's Theory of the Gimmick (2020) describes how our evaluation of certain kinds of art and media is affected by our judgements about the valuation of the labor that contributes to it. A work can be judged as a “gimmick” to the extent that someone experiencing it can judge it to contain an inappropriate amount of labor in its creation, whether too much or too little. Ngai's analysis draws attention to how estimations of value and exchangeability within capitalism are decisively marked by aesthetic considerations. Her project aims to answer both how the concrete processes of capitalist circulation “shape other ways of seeing and appraising value,” and conversely “what role could aesthetic judgement . . . play in shaping how people perceive economic abstractions that most deeply structure their relations to other people” (39). Without wishing to indict the work of a particular public performer, Finnster is consistently understood as enacting a gimmick: a stylization of his labor that encourages, among a specific audience, an appreciation of the effort involved and positive valuation which gets accompanied by financial reward, while a plurality of outsiders would judge the content as confected. There is no question that Finnster's marketing is decidedly about his gimmick as a femboy streamer: his social media presence is saturated with sexualized, hyperfeminine photos alongside text that frequently reminds the audience of his male identity, pointing simultaneously to the desirability of the specific, trope-heavy presentation as well as the gimmick itself for its appeal (an example from his most recent promotional post at the time of writing: “if god didn't want you to kiss boys, why would he make me look like this??” [@F1NN5TER, September 17, 2023]). At the same time, the content of Finnster's streams is conversational and, while it plays off the comedy and sexualized implications of his presentation, is in no way sexually explicit. Femboy identification therefore effectively neutralizes its overt sexualization through the reassuring security of a male gender identity, meaning that effeminacy can be presented and indeed sold without a collapse on the part of the audience into viewing the feminine performer as abject. Quite simply, the mode of presentation and audience engagement that Finnster employs is not available to trans women on the same platform and at the same scale. Whether it is through phobic public hostility or the actions of the platform itself to limit exposure or ban content, there are mechanisms to ensure that workers whose affective labor is judged to be sexualized or objectionable cannot obtain mass audiences. Notably these mechanisms are not something necessarily engaged willfully, and the category's effectivity occurs without Finnster himself supposing an antagonism between femboys and trans women: Finnster has explicitly supported trans medical causes and transitions with donations and fundraisers and makes use of communal knowledge around transition for his own ends. The relative security afforded by the category inheres in the identification and the associated stylizing practices, not necessarily in the acknowledgement or explicit activation of the regimes of desire that produce this relative security.

The notion of a gimmick specific to femboys might obscure the fact that the presence of feminine people with dicks who are able to top is a position occupied by a wide variety of trans people engaged in sex work. As a pointed example, Sel J. Hwahng's ethnographic investigations of trans women involved in sex work around New York City identified Asian sex workers as a distinct community (Hwahng 2018). According to Hwahng, the salability of the labor of Asian sex workers depended on both the supposedly natural femininity ascribed to their race, as well as their ability to penetrate their clients. This combination appears to reflect the exact combination of sexual and racial hybrid traits that are exemplified in the gimmick of the femboy, though this time embodied by actually racialized trans individuals.

However, the description of the practices of avowal and disavowal shifts the connection to dominant hierarchies of sexual desirability. One of the sex workers interviewed confirmed that “most of the time they were the giver,” as a direct result of their clients’ ultimate desire to be penetrated. However, clients “use a smoke-and-mirrors approach,” avoiding explicitly requesting or making obvious their desire for receptive sex. The interview with the sex worker makes this illicitly fulfilled desire clear, in response to the question of whether her clients generally want to be penetrated: “Exactly, they want to feel it. . . . All their lives they've been giving [penetrating] . . . in the end they always ask” (Hwahng 2018: 9–10). This interaction indicates that the client himself is struck with the problem of experiencing a sexual desire that is both illicit and a threat to their ordinary gendering, which he finds himself simultaneously disavowing and satisfying. The desire to seek the services of a trans sex worker is itself the move that appears to shift into the realm of repudiated sexuality, and this departure from the bounds of normatively acceptable sexuality is a psychic burden of which the client must accept some small part. The sex worker, by contrast, is situated firmly in the realm of the “taboo,” exotic and abjectly sexualized (Fletcher 2013: 70; Sabsay 2011).

This example seems to illustrate that transness itself marks a division in an individual's ability to be incorporated into positions of relative security and recognition as within the bounds of acceptable difference, and distinct from the kind of public identification and subjection to either state or social punishment for making visible that repudiated sexuality. Even when combining a similar set of stylized traits and enacting the same “gimmick” as the femboy, an Asian trans sex worker is still rendered abject within a sexual economy in a way that a femboy is not. This schema is clearly limited by the kind of compulsion to work that a trans sex worker is faced with: Hwahng (2018: 15) found that Asian sex workers interviewed were generally engaged in survival sex work and were frequently undocumented. Similarly, no ethnographic or theoretical work has yet looked into the emergence of femboy, not only as a pornographically stylized identification, but also a category which might mark sex workers themselves. I still believe it would be defensible to read femboy as a category as one that, at present, opens itself up to white and more economically secure people and expresses their gender nonconformity in a way that defensively avoids elision with the trans individuals who are subject to the harms and devaluations of their abjection in schemas of sexual desire and recognition.

Femboys in the Seminar: Returning to Marxist Methodology

An interesting and novel way of exploring the relationship between trans identity and value appears here: femboys can stylize themselves in ways that, in their explicit content, are identical to transfeminine presentation in both appearance and the skills it demands and entrains in the individual. However, femboys appear to retain a higher valuation to their labor-power in the context of its direct marketability. Identification itself is therefore a decisive aspect of determining the valuation of a worker's labor, insofar as it brings into view not a normative gender—femboys are indeed still present an extreme effeminacy—but a commitment to a constellation of relations between gender, race, and desirability that allow them to be retrieved as gimmicky exceptional cases of a new normative order, rather than being marked as excluded from that order. This offers a counterargument to Endnotes’ account of how gendered abjection occurs. Gonzalez and Neton argue that the general category of “women” have their labor devalued in the formally equal market as the category is conceived of as including the capacity to bear children, regardless of an individual's actual capacities, and as such all women bear the aggregate reduction in the price of their labor. In this case, the gendered labor of self-fashioning that is differentially valued is the same in content, and only the practices of identification and discourse around the labor costs are different. In the hypothetical case that they consider “in which employers did not enquire about the gender of an applicant” but compensate laborers based on their labor's group differentiated features, then transfeminine people and femboys would appear near indistinguishable in the aggregate, at least in those contexts where both transness and femboy identification are intelligible. The differentiation of the valuation of trans labor clearly depends constitutively on the avowal or, indeed, disavowal of transness itself and not just the social practices of transition that trans people are assumed to generally undertake, which are shared with femboys.

In addition, earlier discussion pointed out that there are a wide range of genders that actual femboys can have, even if the archetypical figure is that of a cis guy, leaving aside the appropriateness of that description. As a category organized primarily in an aesthetic register, “femboy” cuts across the gender modalities assumed to organize the differential valuation of categories of laborer in Endnotes’ account. We can fully grant that the unity of the category of “woman” is similarly ideal and abstractly regulated rather than essential and genuinely instantiated, but the enforcement of the category coalesces around the assumption that women have particular reproductive capacities that devalue their labor-power, aggregated across the whole category of people similarly classified. The same aggregation cannot be systematically made in the case of a category like femboy: the archetype suggests a highly contentious and complex relation to actual reproductive capabilities, and the archetype is meant to be the general standard around which the price of the category's labor-power is set. The correct way to theorize in general the significance of gender-sexuality categories for the valuation of labor-power is not clear from this single case. However, it is clear that not all cases of the gendered differentiation of the valuation of labor can be explained through group-differentiated assumptions about reproductive capacities. The category's position within aesthetic and erotic hierarchies of desire must play a distinct role in determining this relation.

This conclusion should not hide several crucial points that hold different instantiations of nonnormative gendered embodiment in common. First, femboys are not being employed en masse in wage labor preferentially to trans people. The appearance of highly effeminate men is still deeply unwelcome in most of the market-mediated sectors of the economy, and straightforward disciplining practices ensure that people must keep themselves more normatively gendered in wage labor even if they positively identify as a femboy. The greater and wider judgement of value of femboy labor relative to trans labor is still occurring in a sphere of market-mediated but unwaged, precarious, and necessarily outsourced labor (Panneton 2019: 52–53). Second, just as with any trans or queer labor, femboy labor is inevitably marked as nonnormative and sustains its value only through that marking. Indeed, as an apparent gimmick, being a femboy streamer sustains its salability only to the extent that it has cultivated an audience of “dissenting judges” in Ngai's vocabulary: individuals with the appropriate aesthetic and cultural backgrounds and normative standards such that they make a positive evaluation of an otherwise disparaged or incoherent cultural practice. By its nature, this audience is limited. The market it has therefore generated is still a niche, and femboy creators can still grow in popularity to the extent that the niche grows, but attention from outside those audiences will invoke the same kinds of queer- and transphobic hostility that any other creator marked as gender transgressive will experience. A femboy streamer is, as much as any trans person, someone who may decide, or be compelled, to operationalize their gender for money. The apparent higher valuation of femboy labor in markets where the category's aesthetic attachments are relevant in no way protects femboys from the kind of coercive management that is meted out both away from the market, and particularly in the family and immediate social context, and in the market itself with its compulsion to maximize value.

These qualifications are necessary to suggest that being a femboy streamer is not a tactical decision that is likely to reap rewards, capitalizing on a supportive cultural context at large. Instead, it is a position of relatively higher value under common conditions of abjection. The point of interest here is that impersonal and structural factors enforce these differential relations of value, even as the aesthetic judgements are made by reading the speech, presentation, and imagined and observed embodied features of specific individuals. Relations of value are at once highly individual, reliant on the transparency of individuals in the face of employers or audiences who collectively make decisions about the status of individuals and the liabilities in terms of gender, race, ability, and many besides, that determine how to differentially value their labor. Where Marxist political economy generally concentrates on explicating the totalizing effect of capitalism's power to abstract and demand our labor-power, attention to specific cases of gendered and racialized abjection can inform us of how this power operates personally, through individual judgements about empirical, aesthetic, or idealized properties of both individuals and social categories. Theorizing capitalist value relations requires, in this moment of its analysis, a historical materialist view of how laboring individuals are marked and differentiated—how capitalism “sees” people—in the model of Hennessy's work, much as Floyd's analysis in The Reification of Gender offers a historical materialist view of how laborious performance is initially compelled.

Floyd's own conceptualization of gender as laborious performance may offer exactly this new avenue for Marxist theorizing about the points of contact between political economy and gendered identification. “The Logic of Gender” astutely recognized that the difference between genders within economic relations is not produced in objective differences between individuals but has to reside within features residing in the domain of abstraction and collective figuration. The process by which this abstraction occurs though clearly is insufficiently described through reproductive capacity alone and, as I argued above, depends decisively on how individuals appear on the stage of economic relations in the aesthetic register. Again, following Ngai, this is not merely the domain of visual appearance and art, but as in the wider German idealist tradition, the domain of collective judgement and the linking of right-judgement, or beauty, with freedom. The exercise of transness as self-conscious fashioning of one's self is an example of what Jörg Schaub (2019: 82) describes as aesthetic freedom, which “licenses individuals to interrupt their ordinary involvement in [given interpretations of practices of social freedom] in order to contemplate and play with extant social roles and norms.” Constitutive of that kind of aesthetic experience, and intervention on it, is its constitutively social and communicative character: “being social and being communicative are not optional features of Kant's conception of aesthetic experience, but dimensions lending that experience depth and breadth” (Chaouli 2017: 83; qtd. in Ngai 2020: 21).

Transness, in its demand for a transformation in the processes of judgement in which we are involved, invokes new standards, vocabularies, and imaginations for social interrelation. At the same time, it is an intervention felt in the larger terrain of aesthetic judgement imminent to the entire social world (Hartigan 2022). Explicitly, in a totality of social relations organized by capitalism, a vast array of these judgements are economic ones, occurring at a multitude of scales from the impersonal and planetary through to the interpersonal and micropolitical. The first to be pointed to is the judgement of work as productive or unproductive, that is, whether it is socially validated in exchange. As Beverley Best (2021: 901) remarks, it is not inherent qualitative differences between types of activity that consigns each to different economic spheres but whether they “count” for capital's accounting of the abstraction and extraction of value. Alongside this, just as the process of abstraction marks the general form of capitalism's vision over the objects it marshals, abstraction is the process that takes the determinate capacities of individuals and allows them to be bought, sold, and valorized in the form of labor-power. The capacity to abstract is, in Best's (2010: 79–84) analysis, not only the activity of capital's operation and achievement of domination, but also a distinctly aesthetic one, concerned as it is with the representational and conceptual transformation of commodities into properly communicative objects for capital's functional ends.

The “second skin” of trans and racialized subjects is, in this way, simultaneously evidence for the success and interruption of the process of abstraction. Best identifies that the commensurability of the prices of men and women's labor-power, and therefore the gendered differentiation between gendered groups on the basis of their labor-power's different prices, is only possible when men and women are doing the same work. A precondition for the differentiation of gendered groups appears to be their common abstraction: the “generalized differentiation” depends on the achievement of an economic moment in which the “generalized potential” to extract and exploit the labor of all workers arrives (Best 2021: 905). At the same time, the category of the abject points exactly to where this generalized potential is not realized. While it is clear that there is always a possibility for abject work—that is, what is spat out of productive labor relations—to be reincorporated into waged work, in the moment of abjection the work in question, and the workers tethered to its performance, are eliminated from the process of abstraction.

Abjection carries with it both the potentiality of abstraction into the generalized condition of all workers, as well as the determinate sign of difference that separates these abject individuals from others. As a process fundamentally dependent on the interplay between the signification and representation of people and the economic relations they are thrown into, we see exactly how aesthetic considerations may live at the heart of political economic thinking. An individual's abjection is a process dependent on both the judgement of their position within an array of social hierarchies and the normative implications this has for their “right” participation in the economy, and the objective circumstances of the economy onto which these factors are superimposed. In other words, it is a judgement in the aesthetic register about their contingent ability to be abstracted. The ineliminability of aesthetic judgement is, I believe, a central function linking the characteristic economic and social positions of people gendered in common, and the social processes by which they arrive at these positions. It is a process that individuals actively participate in, constrained and subjectivized as they are by the dominant hierarchical structure of desire, intelligibility, and recognition they are thrown into. The difficult process of uniting the determinate process of gendering and the materialist analysis of gender, and an explanation for the immense heterogeneity and chaos in the interaction of social being and political economy, runs, I argue, through the reciprocal processes of laborious self-fashioning and communal judgement.

One final conclusion returns to the starting point of this analysis, in Kay Gabriel's account of gender as accumulation strategy. Gabriel suggests that the political imperative for trans people is not merely a struggle to reclaim the expropriated value of our labor, but “a demand for the body to be a site of affirmation over and against routine abjection,” where this affirmation is specifically for our autonomous configuration of embodiment and sexuality in pursuit of the satisfaction of our desires and pleasures. The aim for a fully disalienated lifeworld is a promise of attention and care for all the “textures of everyday life,” and those more alien to it besides, that are guarded and hoarded under capitalism, and that trans people, as political agents, “more or less know exactly what we need” (Gabriel 2020: 30–31). Indeed, if Floyd is right that much of the labor of gendering occurs in the stylization of the activity of consumption, and that trans life as it exists is thoroughly enmeshed with, and subordinate to, the capitalist organization of consumption, both by corporations and the state apparatuses administering them (O'Brien 2013), then fighting for autonomous control and enjoyment to the sphere of consumption beyond its subservience to the accumulation of capital is a crucial goal for a left trans politics.

The arguments of this article might suggest at least some caution, however. I fully agree with Gabriel's utopian vision for autonomous self-production and the pleasurable enjoyment of one's embodiment. However, it still appears that at least some of the dimensions of human experience that we seek to indulge and satisfy are not just political in nature, but are shot through with the exact kinds of differential relations of value that mark trans life as abject in the present. This is not a retreat to a left conscience obsessed with reducing sexual difference to value relations, but an observation that value relations appear irreducibly present in the organization of the utopian goods we struggle for: attitudes of bodily enjoyment, recognition, and desire and the aesthetic norms that organize these affective experiences. Prefiguring the endpoint of trans politics through the indulgence of our collective desires right now would certainly provide a vast array of determinate goods, but would also involve the expression and satisfaction of the multitude of desires and aesthetic sensibilities cultivated directly by racial capitalism and its associated hierarchies of value and abjection. Contrary to the suggestion that there is a need to theorize a new category of feminine maleness (Amin 2022: 117), and even disregarding the (marginally more benign) candidate of “twink,” we can point to the femboy: a highly normatively valued, subculturally legible social category that nonetheless finds its historical origin, and the present associations it brings to bear, in the horrors of far-right and white supremacist sexual and racial anxiety. This configuration is the same psychic abyss that animates a present political crisis surrounding gender and sexuality across the West, making targeted attempts to regulate or eliminate trans and gender nonconforming people from public life en masse. A politics of disalienated pleasure is of course a counterpart to a material struggle, however: no pleasurable achievement is possible until we win the means of providing it to ourselves. The point of struggle, a labor itself of worldly transformation and self-transformation, is to open up this potentially liberated future and, no doubt, our desires for our futures will similarly be transformed with it.

The imperative to look beyond the fetishistic character of gender relations ensures we do not read social categories off our flesh as an empirical given; a Marxist dialectic then prompts us to look for the determinate meaning of both the category at hand and the fetish that obfuscates its social nature in the flows of capital and labor. As Floyd (2009: 114) notes, the labor of gendered performance is “labor differently mediated by capital, if anything more mystifyingly mediated by capital and thereby more rigorously subject to it,” a mediation clarified by its shifts in and out of the sphere of exchange. Making sense of that labor requires not only the well-worn tools of Marxist theorizing of labor-power and the wage, but also an attention to the “broader social horizon of capital”: starting from the conditions of production, moving through the accumulation strategies at work, and aspiring, in Floyd's deployment of Lukács, toward thinking totality. Following Kay Gabriel's invitation, the specific case of femboys offers a vantage on one narrow piece of this totality, contoured by the wider transformations of capitalism and its kindred forces of desire and abjection, through which we glimpse the mechanisms through which identity, avowal, and embodiment enter and suffuse the labor process.

Notes

References