Toward a Vulgar Transgender Marxism

Abstract

A reading of Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues as a class both of “vulgar” Marxism and vulgar transgender writing. The novel is a learning text for the reader in both transmasculine life and militant working-class life. It takes the form of an autofiction, given that both militant workers and trans people need their life stories (auto) to be something other than confessional (fiction) as a matter of survival. The essay concludes by calling for a vulgar Marxist studies that attends to both the form and content of common, everyday, earthy, “vulgar” proletarian life.