General Economy and Productive Dualisms

Abstract

Through an investigation of the organizing potential of productive dualisms and ontological hierarchies that move toward epistemic and ontological closures, this essay theorizes the bounded potential of fluidity, and points to the possibility of waste, excess and sacrifice within a general economy of gender. We emphasize the apparently paradoxical role that dualisms — especially dualisms understood semiotically — have played in the foundational work to which many theorists look for clues about how to proceed in confounding limits and boundaries. Moreover, closures around the interrelated subordination of femininity and blackness emerge as a crucial reminder of the interlocking projects of gender and race theory. Drawing upon gender and critical race theory, philosophical phenomenology, and the work of Georges Bataille, we suggest that a general economy of gender can be explored by perceiving the closures, and other limits, enacted by dualism in organizational settings.

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