Political Aconomy of the Sexual Revolution

In this paper, I question widespread views in social sciences and of the liberal intellectual elite, according to which modern sexual relations are characterised by a liberation from heteronormativity, patriarchal relations, premodern traditions, and class exclusivity. I argue that the modern capitalist world-system adapts, in various ways, the sexual potential of the human body, and incorporates sexual relations into its own hierarchical system of action. From this aspect, the most important segment of the social process called sexual revolution is the inclusion of the sexual potential of the human body into the market extended by Fordist production. Moreover, the oppositions of different ideologies of sexuality are not oppositions of premodern residues and modernity, but the expressions of systemic contradictions of the modern world-system.