In Sexual Hegemony Christopher Chitty traces the five-hundred year history of capitalist sexual relations by excavating the class dynamics of the bourgeoisie's attempts to regulate homosexuality. Tracking the politicization of male homosexuality in Renaissance Florence, Amsterdam, Paris, and London between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as twentieth-century New York City, Chitty shows how sexuality became a crucial dimension of the accumulation of capital and a technique of bourgeois rule. Whether policing male sodomy during the Medici rule in Florence or accusing the French aristocracy of monstrous sexuality in the wake of the French Revolution, the bourgeoisie weaponized both sexual constraint and sexual freedom in order to produce and control a reliable and regimented labor class and subordinate it to civil society and the state. Only by grasping sexuality as a field of social contention and the site of class conflict, Chitty contends, can we embark on a politics that destroys sexuality as a tool and an effect of power and open a front against the forces that keep us unfree.

Foreword / Max Fox  vii
Introduction / Christopher Nealon  1
Part I: Sexual Hegemonies of Historical Capitalism
1. Homosexuality and Capitalism  21
2. Sodomy and the Government of Cities  42
3. Sexual Hegemony and the Capitalist World System  73
4. Homosexuality and Bourgeois Hegemony  106
Part II. Homosexuality and the Desire for History
5. Historicizing the History of Sexuality  141
6. Homosexuality as a Category of Bourgeois Society  167
Notes  193
Index  217