Petrus Liu

Value-Form Queer Theory

My current book project, Value-form Queer Theory, explores the relevance of Karl Marx’s reading of the valueform for the study of gender and sexuality in a transnational context. Building on Marx’s insight that capital is not a thing but a social relation, the relation of self-expanding value, I develop a theory of capital’s dependency on the hierarchical differentiation of human beings on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, location, and nationality. I demonstrate that contemporary capitalism needs to be understood as a translocal mode of production fueled by the extraction of resources and the transfer of surplus value from low-wage sites, connecting sexual difference (the production of vulnerability in the social sense) to the production of value (in the capitalist sense) to explain the incorporation of gendered subjects in the global South and how this process impacts the fragility of small-scale village livelihoods through the melding of financial arrangements such as pensions, insurance, credit, and debt.