Book launch: The sexual economy of capitalism
Institute of Advanced Studies London, 1 May
Speakers: Noam Yuran, Anat Rosenberg, Amin Samman
Sponsors: FSN/UCL CCS
Register to attend here
Join us at the UCL Centre for Capitalism Studies to launch Noam Yuran’s new book, The Sexual Economy of Capitalism. Anat Rosenberg and Amin Samman will act as discussants.
Economics has long modeled its theories on bakers and butchers rather than husbands, wives, lovers, and prostitutes. This book argues that exchanges involving sex and intimacy, far from being external or exceptional in relation to the workings of the economy, come closest to the reality of capitalist money. Undertaking an inquiry into the sexual economy of capitalism, Noam Yuran analyzes the erotic and gendered meanings that suffuse basic economic concepts, from money to the commodity. It is not entirely true, Yuran shows, that in capitalism everything has its price. In fact, the category of things money cannot buy, including love, forms a central axis around which capitalist economic life is organized. It is inscribed on goods and economic motivations and conduct, and distinguishes capitalism from precapitalist economies in which marriage was an exchange and wives were owned. In conversation with psychoanalysis, feminist theory, and the heterodox tradition of economic thought, this book maps the erotic dimension of capitalism onto concrete economic questions around money, goods, private property, and capital. Yuran offers readers a powerful understanding of capitalism in its unique articulation of love, sex, and money.
The event is free and open to all. Please register to attend here: https://ccs-sexualeconomy.eventbrite.co.uk.
Noam Yuran is Senior Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Studies at Bar Ilan University, Israel. Dr Yuran studies the history and philosophy of economic thought, the history of capitalism, and media theory, using these to develop alternative accounts of the relations between economy and society. He is author of What Money Wants (Stanford University Press 2014) and The Sexual Economy of Capitalism (Stanford University Press, 2024).
Anat Rosenberg is Professor of Law and the Humanities at Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London. Professor Rosenberg studies the history of modern capitalism, liberalism, and media, drawing on multidisciplinary methods including law and visuality, law and materiality, and law and literature. She is author of Liberalizing Contracts (Routledge 2018), The Rise of Mass Advertising (Oxford University Press 2022).
Amin Samman is Reader in International Political Economy at at City St Georges, University of London. Dr Samman is a Visiting Research Fellow at the UCL Centre for Capitalism Studies. He studies the temporal, historical, and existential aspects of contemporary capitalism, with an emphasis on how these relate to the workings of money, debt, and finance. He is author of History in Financial Times (2019) and editor of Clickbait Capitalism (2025). His forthcoming book is titled Currency of Nihilism.