Profit and Pleasure ─ Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism

When Profit and Pleasure was first released in 2001, Rosemary Hennessy made the daring case for a marxist feminist analysis of sexual identity and argued for the power of revolutionary love. This 2nd edition includes a new introductory essay highlighting the key developments in intersecting scholarship that have arisen since the book’s original publication. Reorienting queer theory away from its preoccupation with psychoanalysis, language, and performance, the text insists upon close analysis of the structures of late capitalism, labor, and commodification. Profit and Pleasure, leads the discussion of sexuality to a consideration of material reality and the substance of everyday lives.

Rosemary Hennessy is the L. H. Favrot Professor of Humanities and Professor of English at Rice University, USA. She is the author of Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse and of Fires on the Border: The Passionate Politics of Labor Organizing on the Mexican Frontera. She is also Co-Editor of Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference, and Women’s Lives and of Nafta from Below.