What is value-form queer theory? In recent years the debate about “queer value” in literary and cultural studies has resurfaced with intensified vigor, despite the lack of consensus on what is meant by the concept and what might serve as its proper analytic. In this talk, Petrus Liu discusses how Marx’s concepts of the value-form and surplus populations can help us develop a framework for comprehending queerness as a form of social mediation on which capital depends for its expansion. The study of queerness through the prism of value does not mean we are subjecting it to empirical analysis or quantitative formalism. Rather, Liu argues, value-form theory has radical implications for an analysis of nonnormative bodies’ social placement and participation in categorial subjection. Conversely, queer theory’s account of the constitutive sociality of the self provides an indispensable perspective on the category of value for Marxist historical scholarship.

Petrus Liu is Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature, and of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Boston University. He is the author of Stateless Subjects: Chinese Martial Arts Literature and Postcolonial History (2011); Queer Marxism in Two Chinas (2015); and The Specter of Materialism: Queer Theory and Marxism in the Age of the Beijing Consensus (2023).