Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Breaking the Waves
2. Uses and Abuses of “Choice” Feminism
3. Gender Commodity in an Age of Financial Ruin and Environmental Disaster
4. Trans-Commodity
Conclusion

Bibliography
Index

Promotional Information

An interdisciplinary study that brings together gender studies, media studies, Marxist thought, and literary theory to explore contemporary issues of precarity and the symbolic production of gender as a commodity.

About the Author

Robin Truth Goodman is Professor of English at Florida State University, USA. Her many previous publications include Understanding Adorno, Understanding Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2020), The Bloomsbury Handbook of 21st Century Feminist Theory (Bloomsbury, 2019); Promissory Notes: On the Literary Conditions of Debt (2018); Gender for the Warfare State: Literature of Women in Combat (2017); and Literature and the Development of Feminist Theory (2016).

Reviews

In the age of gender diversity, with fluidity and positivity often tied to identity “security,” gendering becomes a logistical matter, part and parcel of capitalist productions on scales both private and planetary. Now, wholly catastrophic, sweetly vampiric “commodification” is the code Robin Truth Goodman cracks here with a retro-futural vision, where a good old Marx meets a “choice” feminist meets a transgender YouTube star meets a Rosa (Luxemburg) 2.0., where hope remains radically relevant.
*Kyoo Lee, Professor of Philosophy, Gender Studies and Justice Studies, City University of New York, USA*

Robin Truth Goodman here offers a smart, provocative analysis of how gender—similar to commodities—confronts us as something alien despite its inherent sociality. Circulating on the market and within certain feminist circles as a compensation for social lack, gender is, she argues, a fetish offering security in insecure, anti-social neoliberal times. In her fascinating rethinking of this elusive yet pervasive concept, Goodman shows how feminism can engage with and build upon the radical potential of trans theory and politics, and why it should.
*Susan Ferguson, Associate Professor Emerita, Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada*