The Sexuality That Does Not Produce: Desire, Power, and Economy in Homosexuality

1. Introduction: Desire Outside the Factory

Since the rise of industrial societies, sexuality has been organized as part of the productive system. In capitalism, heterosexual marriage fulfilled an economic function: it generated children (future workers), secured inheritance, and reinforced values of discipline and consumption. Homosexual desire, by not producing offspring or reinforcing the traditional family structure, escaped that utility. It was pleasure 'without function' — and therefore a symbolic threat to the system.

2. Homosexuality as Symbolic Unproductivity

Michel Foucault observed that, from the nineteenth century onward, modern power became biopolitical — it began to manage life, birth, and reproduction. Fertile bodies are 'useful'; those that desire outside that logic are 'dangerous'. Homosexuality was framed as unproductive, a 'biological error' that fails to generate human capital. Thus, the bourgeois state — medical, juridical, or religious — controlled non-reproductive pleasure to preserve social and economic order.

3. Pleasure Without Function: A Threat to Discipline

Pleasure that is not oriented toward work is anarchic. Capitalism requires regular, predictable, productive bodies; free eroticism is unpredictable, playful, and idle. Homosexuality, founded on affection and affinity rather than procreation, breaks with the moral economy of labor and duty. It creates meaning, intimacy, and aesthetic experience — values the system cannot measure.

4. The Disobedience of Love

Between two men or two women, there is no reproductive hierarchy — no 'productive' and 'receptive' role that sustains patriarchy. Homosexual desire is horizontal, not pyramidal. It dismantles the binary that structures all power relations: active/passive, ruler/ruled, man/woman. Love between equals is, in essence, a micro-revolution.

5. Capitalism and Assimilation: The Risk of Normalization

Late capitalism discovered that it could profit from what it once marginalized. The 'gay market' turned resistance into consumption. The same system that repressed now sells identity — provided it is clean, apolitical, and profitable. The accepted homosexuality today is that which marries, consumes, and pays taxes. The dissident body was reintegrated as a productive consumer; desire became a market niche.

6. Communism and the Collective Body

Repression did not disappear under socialism — it merely changed its language. In communist regimes, sexuality remained a political and productive function. The state was no longer the guardian of private property but the manager of collective life. Yet citizens were still expected to live for production and reproduction. The body had to serve the revolutionary ideal; pleasure was subordinated to social function.

In early Soviet Russia, homosexuality was decriminalized after 1917 in the name of personal freedom. But under Stalin, the tide turned: it was re-criminalized in 1934 and defined as a 'bourgeois degeneracy'. Gay men were imprisoned or sent to labor camps. In Maoist China, homosexual relations were punished as 'hooliganism' until the late twentieth century, and seen as a disease of capitalist decadence. Even revolutionary states demanded useful, fertile, disciplined bodies.

Cuba’s revolution also reproduced this contradiction. During the 1960s and 70s, gay men were sent to forced-labor camps — the UMAP — for 're-education'. Fidel Castro later admitted that the revolution had inherited the same patriarchal morality it sought to destroy. The body, whether under capital or socialism, was expected to serve — not to enjoy.

7. Capitalism, Communism, and the Disciplined Body

Both capitalism and communism disciplined the body, though in opposite directions:

• Capitalism valued private production: the body as consumer and reproducer.
• Communism valued collective production: the body as worker and instrument.
• Homosexuality represented nonproductive love: the body as end in itself.

In both systems, free desire did not fit the machine — neither the market nor the state. The body that loves without producing interrupts the assembly line.

8. The Political Power of the Useless

And therein lies homosexuality’s subversive power: it affirms the right to exist without utility, to love without purpose. The homosexual body says: 'I do not produce, I do not reproduce, but I exist — and that is enough.' Marcuse foresaw this as the seed of a new civilization, one in which Eros triumphs over productivity — where happiness no longer needs justification.

9. Conclusion: Desire Against All Systems

Homosexuality was persecuted under both capitalism and communism because both systems require useful, disciplined, productive bodies. Homosexual desire, by refusing that utility, is revolutionary in itself. It is not subversive because it loves the same sex, but because it loves outside the logics of production and power. As long as societies demand that the body 'serve something', those who love simply for love will remain the most human — and the most dangerous — reminder of freedom.

References

Foucault, M. (1976). The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Paris: Gallimard.
Marcuse, H. (1955). Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. Boston: Beacon Press.
Engels, F. (1884). The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Zurich: Hottingen.
Bataille, G. (1957). Erotism: Death and Sensuality. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
Healey, D. (2001). Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Chou, W. S. (2001). Tongzhi: Politics of Same-Sex Eroticism in Chinese Societies. New York: Haworth Press.
Lumsden, I. (1996). Machos, Maricones, and Gays: Cuba and Homosexuality. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.