Introduction

Reports of rape and domestic abuse towards women rarely lead to convictions. The police and the courts, which are male-dominated institutions, often fail to pay heed to the voice of women (Farris and Holeman, 2015). They either deny that the statements made by women are true or that the matter they report is of public significance. In fact, police officers often treat domestic violence as a private matter, unwilling to accept that what happens in the home should be of public concern (Farris and Holeman, 2015). A hierarchy of significance is therefore built around the private/ public split, which, as will be further explored next, also operates as basis for patriarchal domination.

But the split's implications are visible beyond relations between men and women. Take, for example, the Lawrence and Garner vs. Texas ruling in the US. While it made history by ruling that consensual sodomy does not constitute a crime, this sexual act had to take place behind closed doors, in the private sphere. Decriminalization of same-sex adult sodomy was predicated upon its privatization. Here the treatment of an act as something private appears to constitute progress for queer people. But as Jasbir Puar (2007) noted, it effectively marked an attempt to remove queerness from public sight and, consequently, to regulate it. Because the legal case involved a Black American (Tyron Garner), the ruling also contributed to the homonormativization of black male subjects and their inclusion within the ‘national body politic’ (Puar, 2007: 136). By homonormativizing queer Black subjects, then, the ruling does not so much liberate them as impose a (homo)normativity on them. In short, it further universalizes heteronormative domesticity. What such an analysis of the ruling helps shed light on, then, is not only the co-constitution of heteronormativity, capitalism, and white supremacy but the central role of the capitalist sexual division in supporting capitalist domination. It follows that in addition to imagining an alternative economic life, an intersectional utopia must also envision a world beyond the capitalist sexual division of labour.

The task of this chapter consists in envisioning the operations of radical interdependence within what Honneth (2017) called the ‘sphere of love, marriage and the family’.