Across the political spectrum, it has become somewhat of a bromide to argue that sexuality is socially constructed. Leftists defend social constructivism in order to undermine essentializing ideas about sexuality, and reactionaries do so in order to wage a war on what they view as gender ideology. Rarely do people take this fact as an opportunity to develop an understanding of sexuality as something shaped by the transformation of economic and social relations.

Before dying tragically at age thirty-two, Christopher Chitty, a PhD student in the History of Consciousness Department at University of California, Santa Cruz, wrote a brilliantly original but unfinished book, Sexual Hegemony. In it he produced an imaginative fusion of the epoch-stretching world systems theory of the historical sociologists Giovanni Arrighi and the French philosopher Michel Foucault’s ideas about sexuality to ask a fundamental question: How has capitalism shaped the emergence of both homophobia and homosexuality? For Jacobin Radio’s The Dig podcast, editor Max Fox and contributor Chris Nealson spoke to Daniel Denvir about these complex issues. You can find the episode here.