(ARTICLE) A Historical Materialist analysis of queer oppression
>The original meaning of the word “family” (familia) is not that compound of sentimentality and domestic strife which forms the ideal of the present-day philistine; among the Romans it did not at first even refer to the married pair and their children, but only to the slaves. Famulus means domestic slave, and familia is the total number of slaves belonging to one man. As late as the time of Gaius, the familia, id est patrimonium (family, that is, the patrimony, the inheritance) was bequeathed by will. The term was invented by the Romans to denote a new social organism, whose head ruled over wife and children and a number of slaves, and was invested under Roman paternal power with rights of life and death over them all...
— Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State[1]
1. Introduction:
Despite being a point of huge contention amongst the reactionaries, Marxists have widely remained silent concerning the “gay question” – meaning the reasons behind the existence of homosexual or gender non-conforming people within society, and the continual politicization of their existence. When modern Marxists attempt to shed light upon this topic, they often think of “queers” too generally as just another of a myriad of oppressed groups at the bottom of capitalist hierarchy, and thus fail to enter into the particular nature of homosexuality and “queer” gender expression, failing to explain the situation adequately on the whole. Barring this error, many other “Marxists” abandon dialectical materialism, contenting themselves with echoing bourgeois science or otherwise skirting around the question in an idealist, non-material way.
With so-called Marxists grasping around in the dark, it’s no surprise that the “leftist” pot generally and even the LGBTQ+ “community” cannot explain gay or queer people as a sociological category, or their constant politicization and historical oppression, besides resorting to reductionist “biological” mystifications like “born this way,” the “gay gene,” or bourgeois ideas of individual “hate” and “personal rights.”
Without a sound dialectical materialist analysis, the gay question, like any other question presented to us by life, cannot be adequately answered. True Marxists study the works of the past and develop their understanding of dialectical and historical materialism so as to apply the Marxist scientific method to solve problems. The Editorial Board of Sparkyl operates within this same Communist tradition. The “gay question” is not so much a question for us, but a problem that is answered by an understanding of the development of the family as a material force within class society. Although homosexual and non-binary gender expression is not specifically mentioned in these works, the explanation of social intercourse around the productive forces in The German Ideology, along with Engel’s sound analysis of the development of class society generally in Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State – including the patriarchal family, the role of women, sexual repression, and marriage – easily accommodate the explanation to the historical oppression and “othering” of what would be considered today to be homosexual or “gender-queer” people.
The development of marriage from a group form under the savage relation into the domination of the man over “his” wife, children, slaves, and property that Engels lays out in Origin of the Family was also accompanied by changes in the sexual and gendered conceptions of people. Engels takes binary and heterosexual conceptions for granted, but before “He created them male and female” as the Bible tells us so, they were simply people, and people, as a historically constituted group, did not wait to define themselves as “boys and girls,” with all the fluctuating stereotypes that go with these terms, before they engaged in sexual activity or presented themselves socially. Heterosexual compulsivity (or the adherence to the idea that sex is properly between two different genitaled people and geared towards procreation) and the gender binary, which dictates one of two gendered roles (male or female) to persons at birth based on the form of one’s genitals and the role they play in procreative intercourse, are not integral to human beings. They are social forms of behavior that developed alongside class society and the people’s relations to the productive forces, albeit very far back in humankind’s history.
Despite how both of these ideas are enshrined by bourgeois science as engrained within the evolutionary path of our species, the actual biological fact is that non-procreative and homosexual activity, as well as manifestations of gender outside the strict male/female binary and not based on genitalia-type, have always existed, continue to exist, and have always challenged the supposed biological “ubiquity” of straight or cis expression.
However, the ruling class’ need to create the family unit results in the dissemination and enforcement of both heterosexual compulsivity and the gender binary throughout society, constituting oppression towards persons who (through conscious choice or unconscious predilection) are not solely heterosexual or who cannot or will not present themselves in a way that corresponds to the binary gendered understandings assigned to their genitals. It is by understanding the family as an oppressive force of bourgeois control that the usage of the “queer” or “homosexual” identifier(s) throughout society, as well as the oppression received by individuals that have had these identifier(s) successfully applied, can be understood.
Once adequately understanding heterosexual compulsivity and the gender binary in a proper dialectical and historical materialist context, the “gay question” is demystified. As materialists, we do not hold that either have their origin in “human nature” or any “natural law,” but rather that they formed from the relations of people to the productive forces, and especially from the domination of the ruling classes over the lower classes throughout history.
2. The Origin of the Gender Binary and Heterosexual Compulsivity
The origin of the gender binary and heterosexual compulsivity is found in the development of class society. The development of class society – the disproportionate control of production by certain classes over and against others – has always been predicated on the control of the lower, toiling classes by the upper, ruling, non-toiling ones. This is as true now under capitalism as it was in the class societies of the past – from the feudal period, through the ancient civilizations, all the way back into the shadowy pre-written histories of powerful tribal family-clans.
Part of this control over the lower classes constitutes the control over breeding. Within all class societies, human labor power is contained and manipulated away from the interest of the class that provides it – the lower classes of serfs, peasants, slaves, or proletarians – and towards the parasitical interest of the ruling class. As commodity production – that is, production in excess in order to produce surplus for sale as profit – came onto the scene during the transition to barbarism, the antagonistic relationship between the servile classes and the ruling ones was increased immensely, and, because the laborers at this period were often slaves with no rights to autonomy apart from their master’s wishes, there became a real class need amongst the rulers to implement social control over the reproduction of this antagonized, incredibly useful, and potentially revolutionary class of laborers. It is in this context that we put the development of the male/female gender binary as well as heterosexual compulsion. Both materially serve to create identities centered on breeding among the people, dividing up the whole population into the role their genitals play in procreative sex, and eschewing non-procreative sexual forms.
Both the gender binary and heterosexual compulsivity have been instructed into the people; first by crisis within savage societies, then, by the ruling class of clan patriarchs under barbarism, who, with the rise of primitive accumulation and commodity production, forced subordination and gendered oppression on women and slaves, and later especially by the lords of the feudal period, who adopted strict gender binary and heterosexual compulsivity themselves as a way to grow their family’s lands through marriage, and continued their propagation among the lower class of the serfs in order to bolster the ranks for wars and to grow cash crops where the market allowed. This oppression towards individuals’ personal manifestations of gender and sexuality carries over into our modern day, where it is used to create patriarchal cells of capitalist production, breed workers for the constant growth of profit that the capitalist mode of production requires, and to pass property down through family inheritance.
It is not reasonable to think of “men” and “women” coupling up for the purpose of producing children within the early tribes of the savage period. Despite the chauvinism displayed by modern scholarship that supplants modern understandings of gender and sexuality – born from the uneven march of class society – into the workings of these communities, the expanded group marriages of the savage relation also imply an expanded form of gender and sexual expression, with the production of children heavily deemphasized compared to modernity. Without commodity production or regimented classes, the production of children would be emphasized only as a result of crisis; for example, during particularly intense blood feuds, wars for resources, famine, or natural disaster, but, devoid of these external pressures, the people within the savage relation engaged in the group-based form of sex via particular cultural norms unrelated to gender as we recognize it today, with the children that may or may not follow from the act not being a primary consideration and certainly not considered the property of the breeding adults. Barring external antagonisms, population growth was not a primary factor in the productive forces possessed by the savage community and there would be no reason for the people of the savage relation to define themselves based on their genital type, or to eschew certain types of sexual activity because of its non-procreative nature.
Still, as the population of early savage societies grew along with the rate of social intercourse between them, so too did the frequency of crisis. In response, children and breeding became more emphasized and were needed to maintain society, replacing those who were lost to drought, disease, raids, or to bolster the war parties, introducing an “economy” of sexual reproduction. Although this breeding incentive was an answer to external pressure, it was also assuredly accompanied with a division of the individual people within the community according to their role in breeding, determined by the appearance of their genitalia – an idea of the male/female gender binary and a “proper,” procreative form of the sexual act (early ideas of heterosexual compulsivity) – which would manifest in a variety of ways throughout society, more or less prominent depending on how dire the need for children was. With this understanding, came also the discouragement of non-procreative forms of sex, and, to the extent that this discouragement “bled through” to the individual aesthetic of persons within the community, gender manifestations that did not fit into the breeding-based categories of expression would be discouraged as well.
Here, within the late savage relation, are the beginnings of the gender binary and ideas of heterosexuality. However, these did not become compulsory or probably even dominant throughout society generally until much later, constituting a relatively “free” idea of gender and sexual expression compared to the modern day. This is not to say that individuals within the savage mode of production had no idea of procreation – how it works mechanically using different types of genitalia belonging to two different people. What it does mean is that the act of procreation was not central to their identity, and they did not express themselves socially within a binary based on their genitalia. Children belonged to the whole of society, and, devoid of a material reason to grow the population outside of occasional crises, the people of the savage period, as a whole, had no real conception of personal gender or sexuality. Unlike class society, since there was no force of production necessitating breeding, there was generally no need to take on an identity that implied their role in the procreative sexual act. Their identity was reflective of their occupation in the community, and they engaged in sex as a normal activity of the community, birthing children as the situation presented itself, while not possessing individual parental ownership over them.
It was increasing levels of interdependence and social intercourse, along with the growth of the productive forces and widespread commodity production – factors present in the early to middle period of barbarism (to use Engels’ stages of prehistoric society) – that truly chained humanity to the gender binary and heterosexual breeding, making what had been a crisis-mode social form into the status quo organization of human beings. Speaking of this period, Engels writes:
>The increase of production in all branches – cattle-raising, agriculture, domestic handicrafts – gave human labor power the capacity to produce a larger product than was necessary for its maintenance. At the same time it increased the daily amount of work to be done by each member of the gens, household community or single family. It was now desirable to bring in new labor forces.[2]
Where Engels refers primarily to slaves as this period’s “new labor forces,” human reproduction also responded to the call for new labor. The gender binary and heterosexual compulsivity were reinforced throughout society as ideological supports for increased breeding, called for by the new economic conditions which required an increase of laborers to work fields and create handicrafts that were no longer just for subsistence, but for profit. Agriculture and commodity production – albeit, at a minuscule level compared to the capitalist mode – brought with it also wealth, famine, and wars of conquest, requiring a growing number of new bodies for both the fields and the military formations.
With the development of commodity production and the resulting consistent markets for surplus within the barbaric period, all the landowners of society had reason to make their land not just produce for themselves, but also for others, in hopes that they could sell the excess and become more affluent, and also so that they could create generational wealth that could be passed down through inheritance. Now children, as property of the family or clan, became also cheap labor in the production of wealth, and they were put to work.
With children being born at increasing rates in order to serve primarily as uncompensated workers in the production of surplus crops, livestock, and handicrafts for profit, or as soldiers for the greater needs of the family-clan, there grew also a change in the breeding adults, who more and more took on the characteristics their relation to the productive forces dictated to them. The outward expression of their lives began to revolve around their sexual capacity for breeding, and they became “man” and “woman” so as to facilitate what was becoming a primary task of production: making humans.
This was further exacerbated by the division of labor called for by the new production. A divide between domestic work and the now much more profitable work of the fields and the ranches began to form, and, as commodity production grew, this divide grew as well, relegating the different genitaled people within society more and more to only one side, and favoring the gender binary as the method of doing so; the long gestation time and bodily taxation of child birthing keeping the “women” relegated indoors while the “man” performed the labor of the fields and the ranches.
At first, this division was less antagonistic, with both sides seeing their “proper” gendered roles in society and coexisting more or less peacefully under the political formation of the tribe or clan, but as a result of the selling of field and ranch surpluses however, wealth began to influence this paradigm. The growing power that came with wealth, and the unevenness of wealth when the labor that produced it was increasingly relegated to the “man,” resulted in the cataclysmic overturning of the old social system of more-or-less gendered equality and its replacement with enshrined patriarchal domination; the man declaring himself “lord” over the “woman.” As a result, women were made solely into incubators within the home, dominated politically by the ranchers and farmers, who now rallied behind the banner of “man” and claimed ownership of the women, their children, and their property through male inheritance rights.
It was the establishment of patriarchy that solidified the full acceptance and propagation of the rigid gender binary. The “world historical defeat of the female sex,”[3] as Engels calls the establishment of patriarchal property – a process that was practically completed by the middle of the barbaric stage – also coincided with the historical defeat of any human expression that sat outside the male/female binary, and its relegation to oppressed status, due to the fact that it stood “outside” the parameters put forward by patriarchy. By the late barbaric stage, women had become the property of men, and monogamous marriage (and thus the beginnings of the modern monogamous family) had replaced group marriage. We hold that the establishment of patriarchal property, itself a motion born from early commodity production and the gendered form that the division of labor took under it, was the nail that pinned the gender binary into the foundations of class society. With the material benefit gained by “men” through patriarchal power, the gender binary was enforced as a way to distinguish between the ruler and the ruled, propping up the supposed “differences” between the two as a justification for male dominance and their continual power over production. With the establishment of patriarchy, the gender binary was given sharp and penetrating teeth, and it has been chomping on the whole of practically every class society since.
While the gender binary became compulsive throughout all classes during middle barbarism into civilization, compulsive heterosexuality was a further development, relegated, first, to the oppressed classes, just as strict monogamy was something for the lower, laboring classes, while the clan patriarch usually had his harem of wives. When we consider that the lower-classes of this period were predominantly the slaves who had no right to life outside of their master, and that, as illustrated previously, there was a material incentive to grow laborers just as commodity production was also growing throughout society, we can see not only the breeding impetus of binary male/female gender as a powerful tool in the production of slaves, but also the repression of non-procreative sexual activities, or heterosexual compulsivity, as existing alongside it and serving the same function.
By the feudal period, we see the gender binary and heterosexual compulsivity saturated through all the classes, now fully informing the creation of patriarchal families via monogamous marriage between a man and a woman, along with the subsequent production of offspring. “Proper” monogamous marriage and the birthing of heirs within wedlock was central to the political management of the lords’ realms, their legitimacy as rulers, as well as most property generally; thus ideas of “correct” sexual and gendered behavior that aligned with the creation of these relations had to be upheld.
Part of this upholding was the established tradition of vilifying and criminalizing “deviant” sexual behavior, with deviancy typically labeled as any act that is not specifically procreative. This trend was already mature by the time that it was helped along by the biggest moral authority of the feudal period: the Catholic Church. As far back as 882, “sodomy” is defined by Hincmar, the Archbishop of Rheims and a prominent theologian at the time, as all non-procreative sexual acts, such as anal sex and masturbation, and even as procreative acts, if they broke monogamous understandings of marriage.[4] Archbishop Hincmar was not an anomaly among his peers, and this single example illustrates the wider trend amongst ruling institutions to apply the term “sodomy” to any sexual act that was not conducive to breeding, enforcing heterosexual compulsivity, as well as the performance of binary gender, through the threat of judicial authority, which, as was stipulated by a 13^(th) century work on French law, often amounted to being burnt at the stake and having your property confiscated by your lord.[5] The last official executions of sodomites happened in France in 1750,[6] England in 1835,[7] North Carolina in 1873,[8] and are still ongoing in many colonial countries, who have inherited the capitalist system, as well as its social relations, through the imperial conquests by Europeans beginning in the 15^(th) century.
3. Current and Historical Examples of Greater Gender/Sexual Expression
When we look at some of the few remaining societies that possess only a rudimentary level of commodity production and lower levels of social intercourse, we see societal forms of personal expression that are outside the male/female binary with greater regularity, as well as freer expressions of sexual activity.
The Muxes (pronounced mu-shay), are a recognized third gender among the Zapotec people in Oaxaca, Mexico, and have been since pre-colonial times.[9] Their inclusion in Zapotec society is not as “queer” people, or a divergence from the “norm,” but as an established and understood gender variant that fits into a wider philosophical worldview; a worldview that denies the absoluteness of a male/female binary and heterosexuality and allows for greater gender expression. Although since being criminalized by the British colonial authorities they are on the decline, the Hijiras of India are another “third-gender,” as are the Sekrata of the Sakalava people of Madagascar, and the Bakla of the Philippines.[10] There is also a “third-gender” present in many North and South American Indigenous communities that is neither male nor female. There are many more examples, mostly coming from communities that are lacking in prominent hierarchal social classes, have a greater attachment to subsistence farming, are relatively isolated, and in some ways are otherwise “outside” the capitalist market and commodity production in some form.
The early European colonists, who interacted with many members of the savage relation, make numerous accounts of the native peoples they met freely practicing “sodomy” and “dressing as women," to use the terms of a Portuguese soldier writing of the native Angolans in 1681.[11] These behaviors were, of course, made illegal under colonial law.
These current and historical examples of greater gender and sexual expression within societies that possess less developed classes and production shows the wider point of this essay: that heterosexual compulsivity and the binary gender are products of class society and commodity production, and are more absent when commodity production and classes are also more absent.
It is here that we wish to reiterate our primary points:
- The gender binary and heterosexual compulsivity are NOT “natural” formations of human sociality, but learned and enforced behaviors that stem from the ruling class’ oppressive control over the productive forces of society.
- The gender binary and heterosexual compulsivity are intrinsically linked with commodity production, which necessitates control over breeding in order to produce a (generally) ever increasing amount of laborers to grow ever increasing amounts of surplus to be sold for ever increasing amounts of profit.
- The gender binary and heterosexual compulsivity ultimately lead to breeding, and are the underlying ideas that group human beings into the patriarchal “family” social form, a social form that is integral to the management of the lower classes towards ruling class aims, and also integral to the form of the productive forces under commodity production.
- The enforcement of the gender binary and heterosexual compulsivity by class society – an enforcement that culminates with the “proper” behavior of patriarchal family-making – constitutes itself dialectically as “queer” or “gay” oppression. It does this by incensing reaction and by delegitimizing any non-breeding worldview as a deviance from the “norm,” and vilifying gay and queer people unless they validate the base and erroneous bourgeois views of gender and sexuality that saturate society.
In the next section we will explore how the gender binary and heterosexual compulsivity were developed by the capitalist class, how the family is utilized under capitalism, and the way that bourgeois society continues the tradition of patriarchy, as well as gay and queer oppression.
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[1] Engels, Friedrich. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1978; repr., Foreign Languages Press, 2020).
[2] Engels, Friedrich. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1978; repr., Foreign Languages Press, 2020). Chap. 9: “Barbarism and Civilization”
[3] Engels, Friedrich. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1978; repr., Foreign Languages Press, 2020), 30.
[4] Boswell, John. Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century. University of Chicago Press. 1980. 203.
[5] “The code of Phillipe de Beaumanoir” drafted in 1283 as mentioned in Boswell, 290-291.
[6] Brossat, Ian. 2014. “Affaire Diot-Lenoir : Briser Le Silence, 250 Ans plus Tard.” L’Humanité (in French). January 10, 2014. https://www.humanite.fr/histoire/histoire/affaire-diot-lenoir-briser-le-silence-250-ans-plus-tard.
[7] Human Dignity Trust. “A History of LGBT Criminalisation.” Human Dignity Trust. February 11, 2025. https://www.humandignitytrust.org/lgbt-the-law/a-history-of-criminalisation/.
[8] Death Penalty Information Center. “Criminalization of Homosexuality in American History.” Accessed June 21, 2025. https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/policy-issues/lgbtq-people/criminalization-of-homosexuality-in-american-history
[9] National History Museum. “Beyond Gender: Indigenous Perspectives, Muxe.” September 15, 2020. https://nhm.org/stories/beyond-gender-indigenous-perspectives-muxe
[10] The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “6 Cultures That Recognize More than Two Genders.” Britannica. June 13, 2025. https://www.britannica.com/list/6-cultures-that-recognize-more-than-two-genders#:\~:text=Two%2Dspirit%20is%20a%20term,acceptance%20in%20some%20Indigenous%20communities.
[11] Mehra, Bharat, Paul A. Lemieux, and Keri Stophel. “An Exploratory Journey of Cultural Visual Literacy of ‘Non-Conforming’ Gender Representations from Pre-Colonial Sub- Saharan Africa.” Open Information Science 3, no. 1 (January 1, 2019): 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1515/opis-2019-0001.